National League Cy Young Award odds and best bet at All-Star break (New king in the National League)
By Josh Yourish
Last year’s National League Cy Young Award winner, Sandy Alcantara, has completely fallen off the map after a great 2022 campaign.
Heading into the All-Star break, Alcantara is 3-7 with a 4.72 ERA. Instead, we have two new faces at the top of the Cy Young Award odds and two former Cy Young Award winners.
Will the old guard hold on to the crown or will the next generation grab the throne?
Let’s get into the odds.
NL Cy Young Award odds
NL Cy Young Award best bet
Zac Gallen is the current Cy Young favorite in the NL at 11-3 with a 3.04 ERA. At 27 years old he’s a bit of a fresh face, but he did finish fifth in Cy Young voting last season.
Blake Snell is a former winner that is hanging around the race at 6-7 with a 2.85 ERA. Snell is 30 and a part of the same generation as Gallen.
However, the other two realistic candidates are 35-year-old three-time Cy Young Award winner, Clayton Kershaw, a veteran lefty known for his looping 12-6 curveball, and 24-year-old right handed flamethrower, Spencer Strider.
Those two could not be more different and could be the two most likely candidates.
Gallen is going to hang around in this race and could certainly win it, but he has an xERA that is 69th percentile at 3.62 that says his second half might not be as good as the first. I still like Gallen, but I see no value at +250. That’s especially the case when a tie is going to go to the legacy of Kershaw or the excitement around Strider.
Kershaw has a 3.53 FIP with his 2.55 ERA and that says he could regress, but his final two starts before an injury sent him early into the break were phenomenal.
In June, he made five starts and pitched 33.0 innings allowing just four earned runs all month with a hand in three shutouts. He was as good as ever and for the season he has 105 strikeouts in 95.1 innings of work to just 24 walks. The FIP and xERA of 3.47 scares me.
They are both about a run higher than his ERA and that’s usually a sure sign that a pitcher is going to have a worse second half.
Strider is the complete opposite. He has a 3.44 ERA across his 18 starts with an 11-2 record, but his FIP is 2.84 and his xERA is 3.08. To me that screams to back Strider in the Cy Young race because dominance is coming in the second half, and he was pretty dominant already in the first.
Strider leads baseball with 166 strikeouts which is 13 more than Kevin Gausman who is second and Strider has pitched 11 less innings than Gausman. Strider has a 99th percentile strikeout rate of 38.9%, a 98th percentile whiff rate of 39.8% and a 95th percentile chase rate of 34.9%.
He is untouchable and will win the first of many Cy Young Awards in his career this season.
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