As a finesse left-hander whose average fastball doesn't even crack 90 miles per hour, Dallas Keuchel has no business winning a Cy Young in this day and age.
But while we're on the topic, you'll never guess what Keuchel won Wednesday.
Yup, the American League Cy Young. The Houston Astros' ace lefty was a finalist for the award alongside Oakland Athletics right-hander Sonny Gray and free-agent left-hander David Price, and he won it handily, claiming 22 of 30 first-place votes in the balloting.
This is the second major award Keuchel has taken home this winter, as he won his second Gold Glove this week. But it's obviously his first Cy Young, and it's coming on the heels of his first All-Star selection and first trip to the postseason in 2015.
Said Astros skipper A.J. Hinch, via Brian McTaggart of MLB.com: "He's earned every bit of these awards that he's getting and none more so than the Cy Young."
Some Gray aficionados might argue that second point. Certainly many Price aficionados would.
But the rest of us? Not as much.
All sorts of statistics can highlight that the AL Cy Young has fallen into the right hands, including these heavy hitters cited by ESPN Stats and Information:
The one guy to top Keuchel in ERA was, of course, Price, who racked up a 2.45 ERA across 220.1 innings with the Detroit Tigers and Toronto Blue Jays.
But stats that are designed to see through the imperfections of ERA—such as xFIP, SIERA and DRA—posit that Keuchel actually deserved a better ERA than Price. Combine that with his advantages in other key categories, and you get a man whose Cy Young candidacy is as strong as his beard.
None of this, however, is the interesting part of Keuchel's triumph. What's far more interesting is how Keuchel won his Cy Young, as he took a road to dominance few pitchers are traveling these days.
Those who profess to know pitching will say there's more to life than velocity, but the majority of today's pitchers beg to differ. We live in times of very high velocity, and it's arguably the key reason why the modern game is characterized by strikeouts and low offensive numbers.
If you care to look, you'll see this trend is very much reflected in the average fastball velocities of this year's six Cy Young finalists...save for one of them. Guess who:
There's a lot of velocity pictured above. Heck, even Zack Greinke, who is widely thought of as a finesse pitcher, threw a tick harder than the MLB-starter average of 91.7 mph in 2015.
With his 89.6 mph heater, Keuchel might as well have been Jamie Moyer in the company of this lot. He doesn't light up the radar gun. He doesn't even mildly amuse the radar gun.
Yet he doesn't let that stop him from reveling in assorted forms of dominance.
Keuchel's soft-tossing style didn't keep him from being an above-average strikeout pitcher in 2015, as he finished with a rock-solid 8.4 K/9 rate. He was also quite good at limiting walks, posting a 2.0 BB/9.
But where Keuchel excelled the most was in contact management. He was the best ground-ball pitcher in the American League with a 61.7 GB%, and those ground balls were a big reason why contact off him tended to be very, very quiet.
Cue Daren Willman of Baseball Savant with the exit velocity figures!
Dominance to this degree might look out of place on a guy who struggles to crack 90. But for that group of folks who insist velocity isn't everything, Keuchel is basically exhibit A.
He's living proof velocity and nastiness aren't necessarily synonymous. Keuchel's slider doesn't even crack 80 mph, but Baseball Prospectus can show that it has glove-side run similar to Chris Sale's slider. Also, the fact that Keuchel got ground balls on 72 percent of his sinkers put in play is a testament to how much late movement it has. Right before it reaches the hitting zone, it drops off the table.
But there's more to Keuchel's attack than just the subtle nastiness of his stuff.
Apart from the late movement of his stuff, another reason Keuchel specializes in weak contact is because he doesn't give hitters anything good to hit.
In 2015, he threw fewer pitches in the strike zone than any other American League pitcher and, per Baseball Savant, a higher percentage of pitches off the corners than any other pitcher in either league. This is to say, he basically led baseball in making "pitcher's pitches."
If you're wondering why batters don't just go up to the plate and take, take, take against Keuchel, he makes that more difficult than it sounds. His pinpoint command allows him to make the most of his late movement, as the majority of the pitches he throws outside the zone look like strikes until, suddenly, they're not. Also, his robot-like efficiency with his mechanics blocks hitters from getting the jump on him.
"I've had hitters on the other side tell me that every pitch looks the same coming out of his hand," Hinch told MLB.com's Richard Justice earlier this year. "He doesn't tip anything. And every pitch has movement that's late."
Now that Keuchel has shown a pitching style like his can lead to a Cy Young, the question is whether we'll see more teams roll the dice on pitchers with comparable tools. As Alex Speier of the Boston Globe wondered aloud, teams are probably going to allow themselves to daydream about it:
Daydream about, yes. But actually find?
Most likely not. To borrow/steal Speier's follow-up thought, Keuchel is an "incredible outlier." In a day and age when having a big arm is pretty much a prerequisite for a job as a major league pitcher, you better be something truly special if you don't have one of those.
That's Keuchel in a nutshell. He's not like the others. But as his Cy Young can vouch, he's as good as any of them.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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