The NL Cy Young race: An eight-way contest
By Bill Felber
Innings pitched
If one performance category is more important than any other in Cy Young voting, it’s probably this one. After all, a pitcher only has value to the extent that he pitches. With rare exceptions, a pitcher who excels over 150 innings simply cannot be judged as valuable as one who has slightly lower performance ratings but works 20 or 30 more innings.
By this standard, Wheeler and Wainwright are clearly the two front-runners. Wheeler is already approaching 190 innings.
Barring injury, he is likely to make five more starts, and since he is averaging nearly seven innings per start that puts him close to 225 innings. He could be the first pitcher to work that many since David Price pitched 230 innings in 2016.
Wainwright isn’t far off that pace, a workload made more intriguing by the fact that he is now 40 years old.
The category hurts Burnes and Scherzer, both of whom have been relatively lightly worked. As dominant as Burnes has been, he has made only 24 starts and worked just 144 innings, about 40 fewer than Wheeler.
Scherzer is at 26 starts, but he is averaging less than six innings per start.
Pitcher IP
1 Wheeler 188.2
2 Wainwright 184.1
3 Buehler 179.0
4 Gausman 164.0
5 Woodruff 163.1
6 Miley 155.2
7 Scherzer 154.0
8 Burnes 144.0