{"id":228,"date":"2011-11-18T17:49:16","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T00:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2011-11-18T19:55:49","modified_gmt":"2011-11-19T02:55:49","slug":"everyone-agrees-verlander-takes-cy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=228","title":{"rendered":"Full Agreement: Verlander Wins Cy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Kings pitcher Justin Verlander<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was a great year for pitchers as a whole, but one hurler was head and shoulders above the rest.\u00a0 In the least surprising news of the off-season, Kevin’s Kings ace Justin Verlander has unanimously won the 2011 DTBL Cy Young Award, to go along with the American League Cy Young Award which he unanimously won earlier this week.<\/p>\n

2011 was an amazing, record-setting year for Verlander.\u00a0 He got off to a hot start, highlighted by his second career no-hitter against Toronto in May.\u00a0 He continued to win games start after start and finished the season with 24 victories, tying the DTBL single season record.\u00a0 John Smoltz won 24 games for the Cougars back in 1996 and Randy Johnson equaled that mark for the Kings in 2002.\u00a0 Since that ’02 season, no pitcher had won more than 22 games in a season.\u00a0 In addition to wins, Verlander also led the league in WHIP at 0.920 and 250 strike outs.\u00a0 That WHIP ratio comes in as the sixth lowest single season value in DTBL history.\u00a0 His 2.40 ERA was pretty good too.<\/p>\n

Verlander was almost solely responsible for the Kings tying for the second most pitching points in the league.\u00a0 Only one other King won more than 10 games (Max Scherzer), yet the team wound up leading the league in that category.\u00a0 Verlander accounted for almost 20% of the team’s strike outs as well.\u00a0 The Kings picked Verlander in the third round of the 2009 draft after he had spent two seasons with the Demigods.\u00a0 The Demigods let him go after a very disappointing season in 2008.\u00a0 In his three seasons with the Kings, he has won at least 18 games in each campaign.\u00a0 In fact, he has reached that 18 win mark in four of his five DTBL seasons.\u00a0 He’ll need just 13 wins next year to reach 100 for his career.\u00a0 It has been an impressive early career for Verlander, but 2011 was by far his best year yet.<\/p>\n

The Cy Young voting results were not surprising, but very interesting none-the-less.\u00a0 Unanimous decisions for awards are fairly common, but rarely do you see complete agreement in both of the top two spots.\u00a0 Verlander received all ten of the first place votes for the maximum 100 points, while the young Mavericks lefty Clayton Kershaw received all ten of the second place votes for 70 total points.\u00a0 Kershaw, the National League Cy Young winner, won 21 games and was right with Verlander in the other categories.\u00a0 Kershaw had the league’s best ERA at 2.28 and finished second to Verlander in wins, WHIP (0.977) and strike outs (248).\u00a0 These two were clearly the best two pitchers in the league in 2011.\u00a0 Although not quite unanimous, Roy Halladay was the clear choice for third place.\u00a0 He earned eight third place votes with the other two going to his Jackalope and Phillies teammate Cliff Lee.\u00a0 Halladay earned 46 points.\u00a0 Lee finished fourth in the vote with 26 points.\u00a0 There was a bit of a gap following the pair of Jackalope.\u00a0 Former Jackalope, current Moonshiner Jered Weaver finished fifth with eight points.\u00a0 Halladay, Lee and Weaver had numbers which would have made them likely Cy\u00a0 Young winners in many seasons, but not this one.<\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> to view the full 2011 DTBL Cy Young voting results.<\/p>\n

I’m going to take this time to mention that I never got around to writing that third piece of my season recap, which was supposed to be a statistical look at how much pitchers dominated the 2011 season.\u00a0 Hopefully, I’ll take the time at some point this winter to delve into this, because after glancing at some of the numbers, it is quite apparent that pitching has never been better than it was this year (in the DTBL, that is).\u00a0 All of the players mentioned above played a huge part in this.<\/p>\n

The final award, the Most Valuable Player, will be named next Tuesday.\u00a0 There are plenty of strong candidates for that award as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a great year for pitchers as a whole, but one hurler was head and shoulders above the rest.\u00a0 In the least surprising news of the off-season, Kevin’s Kings ace Justin Verlander has unanimously won the 2011 DTBL Cy Young Award, to go along with the American League Cy Young Award which he unanimously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-kings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}