{"id":1555,"date":"2024-11-24T20:11:04","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T03:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1555"},"modified":"2024-11-24T20:17:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T03:17:02","slug":"skubal-claims-cy-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1555","title":{"rendered":"Skubal Claims Cy Young"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a id='vvohCAYbQRZYfaW0pCZHjg' class='gie-single' href='http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/2177317331' target='_blank' style='color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;'>Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'vvohCAYbQRZYfaW0pCZHjg',sig:'gTW77INDF2tpFpFQEltrv1o7i5tNemR_LmZtxtb2_Ao=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2177317331',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><\/p>\n<p>As mentioned in the Rookie of the Year article, the 2024 DTBL Draft class was not particularly loaded with can&#8217;t miss rookies and prospects.\u00a0 But Elly De La Cruz wasn&#8217;t the only near certain superstar taken in the first round.\u00a0 The Moonshiners went down a somewhat unconventional path by using the third overall pick on a non-DTBL rookie.\u00a0 Tarik Skubal debuted for the Kings in 2022 and was having a solid first season in the league before an elbow injury led him to Tommy John surgery, missing the final two months of that season.\u00a0 Since he was likely to miss most of 2023 as well, he was then removed from the league roster for that campaign.\u00a0 An impressive return late in &#8217;23 made him a highly coveted player entering this season.\u00a0 The Moonshiners decision to grab him early paid off in a big way.\u00a0 Tarik Skubal is the unanimous choice as the 2024 DTBL Cy Young award winner.<\/p>\n<p>While Skubal had significant prospect pedigree leading up to his MLB debut with the Tigers in 2020, his first couple seasons in the big leagues were fairly pedestrian.\u00a0 It wasn&#8217;t until the fateful 2022 campaign that he really started to put things together.\u00a0 With a hat tip to modern medical advancements, he has returned from Tommy John surgery as an even better pitcher than he was pre-surgery.\u00a0 He was the most dominant pitcher in baseball in 2024, by a comfortable margin.\u00a0 The Moonshiners southpaw led all pitchers with 228 strikeouts, 18 wins and 14.8 Pitching PAR.\u00a0 His 2.39 ERA ranked second, just .01 point behind Chris Sale.\u00a0 His 0.92 WHIP was also second in the league, trailing only Logan Gilbert among qualified pitchers.\u00a0 Few pitchers in recent years have combined such impressive strikeout and walk rates.\u00a0 Skubal struck out over 30% of the batters he faced while walking fewer than 5%, for a very impressive 6.5 K\/BB ratio.<\/p>\n<p>Skubal was drafted by the Kings in the eighth round\u00a0 of the 2022 draft.\u00a0 While not initially expected to be a core piece of that Kings rotation, he did wind up throwing 95 very quality innings for them before succumbing to an elbow injury.\u00a0 Despite his very successful debut season, the Kings did not seriously consider keeping him since he was expected to miss most of the 2023 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery.\u00a0 Perhaps a questionable decision in retrospect, but he was completely dropped from the league roster for that &#8217;23 campaign anyway.\u00a0 What is not questionable was the Moonshiners decision to pick him in this year&#8217;s draft.\u00a0 He immediately revitalized a pitching staff that struggled to defend their league championship the year prior.\u00a0 The Moonshiners finished with 37.5 pitching points, their most since 2020.\u00a0 That figure ranked second in the league this year,\u00a0with Skubal leading the team in all relevant categories and having more than double the Pitching PAR total of all his teammates.<\/p>\n<p>Not that he was undeserving of the honor, but it was a tad surprising that Skubal won this award unanimously since there were several other pitchers who had elite seasons.\u00a0 The top two competitors were a pair of National League pitchers who fought for that league&#8217;s Cy Young honor.\u00a0 We had a slightly different voting result in this league though.\u00a0 Kings veteran Zack Wheeler had the best season of his impressive career.\u00a0 He had nearly identical numbers to Skubal in every category except with a slightly worse ERA and WHIP and two fewer wins.\u00a0 While Skubal received all ten of the first place votes, Wheeler got six of the second place nods and the other four were for third place, totaling 62 points.\u00a0 Just behind him is Mavericks southpaw Chris Sale, who edged out Wheeler for the NL Cy Young award.\u00a0 This season, Sale reestablished himself as one of the best pitchers in the league, leading the league with a 2.38 ERA.\u00a0 While the Mavericks offense stole all the headlines, it was Sale who led the pitching staff to a convincing league championship.\u00a0 Sale received four second place votes and a total of 56 points, six behind Wheeler.\u00a0 It is his highest Cy Young finish since placing second in 2017.\u00a0 As usual, starting pitchers were the favorites among Cy Young voters, but this was truly the year of the reliever.\u00a0 Choppers closer Emmanuel Clase had one of the best seasons for a reliever in league history.\u00a0 His 47 saves with an 0.61 ERA and 0.66 WHIP were truly dominant numbers.\u00a0 His 10.8 Pitching PAR was the best for a reliever in years that have been calculated to date (since 2005).\u00a0 If a relief pitcher was ever to win the Cy Young award again, this probably would have been the year.\u00a0 Instead, Clase did not receive any first or second place votes.\u00a0 His 21 total points comfortably ranked fourth though.\u00a0 Rounding out the top five is another Choppers pitcher, righty Logan Gibert.\u00a0 Gilbert led the DTBL with 208 innings pitched and an 0.89 WHIP.\u00a0 While not really his fault, the fact that he only recorded nine wins probably sabotaged his chances of winning this award.\u00a0 He has had three straight seasons of elite pitching for the Choppers.\u00a0 He received 14 points in the Cy Young vote.  Interestingly, there were nine players who received Cy Young votes, the same as last year.  But not one player on that list was among the group from last year.  Complete turnaround among the top pitchers in the league.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/CY24.txt\">Click here<\/a> to view the full voting results.<\/p>\n<p>Two unanimous decisions for the DTBL awards so far.\u00a0 For MVP, there is a clear favorite as well except there were a couple guys who had historically strong seasons, so we&#8217;ll see who comes out on top.\u00a0 Look for the MVP announcement sometime in the next couple days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Embed from Getty Images As mentioned in the Rookie of the Year article, the 2024 DTBL Draft class was not particularly loaded with can&#8217;t miss rookies and prospects.\u00a0 But Elly De La Cruz wasn&#8217;t the only near certain superstar taken in the first round.\u00a0 The Moonshiners went down a somewhat unconventional path by using the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-moonshiners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1555"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1562,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions\/1562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}