Major League Baseball began doling out Cy Young Awards in 1956. At the time, only one pitcher was honored, period.
Then someone got the idea: why not split the Award, like an amoeba, into two parts? One part National League, one part American League.
So beginning in 1967, two Cy Young Awards were handed out. Since then, it's been a tale of two leagues when it comes to one-hit Cy Young wonders.
The American League has been full of Carl Douglas/"Kung Fu Fighting" and Rupert Holmes/"Pina Colada Song" types. The National League has mostly been Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and The Beatles.
A casual look at winners in each league brings this phenomenon to first blush.
Remember LaMarr Hoyt? How about Pete Vuckovich? Or Steve Stone, before he started to make a living blabbing into a microphone?
These are some of the American League winners in the early-1980s who made capturing the Cy Young akin to catching typhoid fever. Meanwhile, after the award became league-specific, Cy Youngs in the N.L. were being won by the likes of Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, and Bob Gibson.
A veritable "Who's Who" of 1960s and '70s pitching. The 2008 winners, Cleveland's Cliff Lee and San Francisco's Tim Lincecum, each embarked on rugged starts to the 2009 season.
But they'll have a long ways to go before they are anywhere near Hoyt or Vuckovich or Stone-ish.
In 1980, Stone won 25 games, had a fine ERA of 3.23, and authored, by far, his career year. He was 33 years old. Still plenty of good years left.
Wrong.
In '81, Stone had arm trouble, made just 12 starts, and won four games. The next year, he was off the mound and in the broadcast booth.
Vuckovich, pitching for the pennant-winning Milwaukee Brewers, went 18-6 with a 3.34 ERA. In the heat of the September race, Vuckovich pitched an 11-inning, complete-game win over Boston.
Then arm trouble got him, too.
Vuckovich made three starts in 1983. Three. In 1984, he didn't pitch at all. In '85, he returned, but with a 5.51 ERA in 22 starts. He was finished in 1986.
The one-hit wonders continued in the A.L.
A year after Vuckovich's Cy Young performance, Hoyt led the Chicago White Sox to the West Division crown in '83 with a 24-win season. He pitched 11 complete games, and 260.2 innings. He walked just 31 batters.
Then a year after leading the majors in wins, Hoyt flipped and led the way in losses, with 18. He bounced back in 1985 to win 16 games with the Padres, but not before the A.L. Cy Young jinx of the early-'80s claimed him.
The 1990s began with Bob Welch winning Cy behind 27 wins, still the most in the majors since Denny McLain won 31 in 1968. In '91, Welch's wins dipped to 12 and his ERA jumped by more than 1.5 runs, to. 4.58.
More recently, the Angels' Bartolo Colon, 2005's winner, was another felled by injuries. Colon won 21 games in '05, then only started 10 games in 2006, winning just once.
The National League has only churned out two flat-out busts since the award was handed out in each league beginning in 1967.
Randy Jones of the Padres, also known as the man who started opposite Mark Fidrych in the 1976 All-Star Game, pitched a Herculean 315 innings in '76, including 25 complete games. He won 22 games, and the Cy Young.
And in 1977?
How about 147 innings, six wins, and an ERA nearly two runs per game worse than in '76.
Mark Davis, 13 years later, again showed why being a Padre Cy Young winner was a bittersweet sort of thing. Davis saved 44 games in 1989, then signed a fat free agent contract with the Royals.
The big time free agent pitcher is one of the most volatile investments you can make in sports. It seems you either roll snake eyes or crap out.
The Royals crapped out.
Davis didn't come close to replicating his Cy Young performance in 1990 with the Royals. He saved all of six games and had a gruesome 5.11 ERA. In fact, his six saves would represent Davis's season high for the rest of his career, which ended in 1997.
Despite Padres pitchers soiling the award, the A.L. far and away leads in Cy Young busts. OK, but why?
In their Cy Young years, Hoyt and Stone set career season highs in innings pitched. Vuckovich only pitched 149 innings the year before his Cy Young season, then jumped to 223 in 1982. Only once in his career did he pitch more (233 in 1979).
Welch won the award in 1990, when he was finishing a five-year stretch in which he tossed nearly 1,200 innings. So there's the matter of fatigue.
But the Seavers, Jenkinses, Gibsons and Carltons pitched a lot of innings, too. Doesn't that blow that theory out of the water?
No.
Those guys, the Rolls Royces of pitchers, were used to throwing a lot of innings almost from the moment they broke into the majors. The five-man rotation was unheard of in their heyday.
The A.L. one-hit wonders weren't as accustomed to putting up "big inning" seasons. Plus, the designated hitter loomed; no "easy outs" batting ninth, as in the N.L.
The other explanation is simpler. Maybe we're making this more complicated than it really is.
The National League winners were, for the most part, better pitchers with more impressive resumes than their A.L. counterparts. You could probably do a lot worse than to run with that postulate.
Does all this mean that Cliff Lee is in more peril than Tim Lincecum in terms of being a potential Cy Young Award bust, simply because he plays for an American League team?
Not necessarily. It's a different era, with better medicine to treat better physical specimens—who are on pitch counts.
Check back in October.
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