Jacob deGrom finished the 2018 season with a win-loss record of 10-9. By the heuristics that governed pitcher evaluation in broadcasts and award ballots for generations, that is the record of a decent mid-rotation starter, not an ace. DeGrom’s actual ERA that year was 1.70, the best in the National League. He struck out 269 batters in 217 innings, and according to FanGraphs his FIP was 1.99 and his season was worth about nine wins above replacement. At the end of the year, voters gave him the NL Cy Young Award with 29 of 30 first-place votes, over Max Scherzer, who had won 18 games.
That gap between deGrom’s win total and his Cy Young is not a quirk. It is the sabermetric argument made visible in a single, highly public vote. Win-loss record depends heavily on run support and bullpen luck, because a pitcher can throw a near-perfect game and lose 1-0, or allow five runs and win 10-9. CBS New York, citing the Elias Sports Bureau, noted that deGrom’s ERA in games the Mets lost was 2.13, the lowest such figure since earned runs became an official statistic in 1913. Metrics like Fielding Independent Pitching, which strips out what happens to balls in play and focuses on strikeouts, walks, hit batters, and home runs allowed, were built specifically to correct for that noise. CBS New York also noted at the time that his 1.70 ERA was lower than all but a handful of seasons in the preceding 50 years, with only Bob Gibson, Dwight Gooden, Greg Maddux (twice), Zack Greinke, and Nolan Ryan posting lower marks.
The reason this matters beyond one Mets season is that the pitcher win has long functioned as a shorthand for quality, in ballots and in broadcast booths. The vote did not come out of nowhere, though. Before deGrom, the fewest wins by a Cy Young winner was 13, by Fernando Valenzuela in 1981 and Félix Hernández in 2010. DeGrom’s 10 wins were three fewer than either. Hernández’s win had already shown that members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America were willing to look past the win column, and deGrom’s 2018 showed it again. One voter still put Scherzer first, so it was not unanimous, and deGrom won again in 2019 with an 11-8 record and a 2.43 ERA.
Traditional evaluation was never wrong about everything it valued. Pitch movement, velocity, command, and durability are real skills that scouts have assessed for generations, and sabermetrics did not invent the idea that a good fastball matters. What the award ballots and broadcast shorthand got wrong was treating team-dependent outcomes like wins, and to a lesser extent runs batted in on the hitting side, as proxies for individual skill. Those numbers are shaped by factors a player does not control: bullpen quality, offensive support, sequencing, and plain luck. DeGrom’s 2018 is one of the clearest publicly adjudicated examples of that gap, because it forced an entire voting body to go on record, and nearly all of them chose the metric that isolates individual performance over the one that doesn’t.
The lesson generalizes past pitching. Any time a broadcast or a scouting report leans on a counting stat that depends heavily on what nine other players did, that stat is measuring the team wearing the uniform as much as the player inside it. DeGrom’s Cy Young, won with eight fewer victories than the runner-up and 29 of 30 first-place votes, is some of the cleanest evidence that the people who vote on these awards had already learned the difference.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.
