Like snowflakes, they’re all a little different.
For a franchise with as much history as the Detroit Tigers have, there have been surprisingly few Cy Young award winners: Tarik Skubal’s win this year was just the fifth in team history.
At the award’s inception in 1956, in honour of legendary pitcher Cy Young (who had died the previous year), there was only one Cy Young award given in Major League Baseball for both the American and the National Leagues combined. After Ford Frick, the Commissioner who instituted the award, retired in 1967, it was decided that there should be one award for each league.
So, here’s a look at the four other Tiger pitchers over the years that have won this award. It’s hard to compare the numbers across eras sometimes, but keep in mind that each winner was judged to be the best against his peers of that year, so that’s worth something. We’ll go in reverse chronological order — and we’ll skip Skubal, who you can read about here .
Max Scherzer, 2013
Photo by Christopher Pasatieri/Getty Images
- 21-3 record, 2.90 ERA (144 ERA+)
- 32 starts, 214 ⅓ IP
- 0.970 WHIP, 2.74 FIP
- 10.1 K/9 innings, 2.4 BB/9, 6.4 H/9, 0.8 HR/9
Scherzer was, and is, an interesting case — and not just because of his heterochromia . He was drafted by the Diamondbacks in the first round in 2006 after a stellar collegiate career at Missouri, and got a cup of coffee in the National League in 2008 before spending the majority of 2009 with Arizona. He was still battling some control issues then, and that offseason he was involved in a three-team trade between the Diamondbacks, Tigers and Yankees which involved such luminaries as Scherzer, Austin Jackson, Curtis Granderson, Edwin Jackson, and the inimitable Phil Coke.
He started the 2010 season with the Tigers, but by mid-May he’d been lit up in four straight starts, wasn’t striking out anybody, and had given up nine home runs in 42 innings. He was sent to Toledo, and something in the water there fixed him up but-good; he struck out 14 Oakland A’s in his return. (Who am I kidding, it was probably the Tony Packo’s hot dogs.) In his 23 starts that season after the Toledo tune-up his ERA was 2.46, his OPS-against was .621, and Mad Max was officially born.
His Cy Young award winning season in Detroit was 2013, the ultimate “what-if” season for the Tigers. (Don’t get me started on the rotation that year. My goodness.) At the end of April his ERA was a middling 4.02, but since his FIP was a sparkling 1.71 — evidenced by three double-digit strikeout games in the month — the best was yet to come. While he’d rarely have a scoreless outing, he’d reliably get about a strikeout an inning, pitch reasonably deep into games, limit the home runs (18 all year in 214 ⅓ IP), and generally gave the Tigers and their high-powered offence an excellent chance to win.
Scherzer put together another stellar season in 2014 in which he was fifth in American League Cy Young voting, and then he was off to Washington to rack up five top-5 National League Cy Young finishes (including two wins), a 2019 World Series ring, and a very likely lock on a Hall of Fame induction after he hangs ‘em up. You could make an argument that he was the best pitcher of the ‘10s, with a 3.12 ERA (134 ERA+), 1.068 WHIP, and a 4.59 K/BB ratio over 319 starts.
Justin Verlander, 2011
- 24-5 record, 2.40 ERA (172 ERA+)
- 34 starts, 251 IP
- 0.920 WHIP, 2.99 FIP
- 9.0 K/9 innings, 2.0 BB/9, 6.2 H/9, 0.9 HR/9
Good ol’ Must-See JV. Another first-round pick, this one out of Old Dominion in 2004, Justin Verlander made a couple of starts in 2005 before spending the entire 2006 season with the Tigers, winning the Rookie of the Year award in that all-around magical year in Detroit. He followed that up with a solid sophomore season, but then he led the American League in losses in 2008 as his strikeouts plummeted, walks crept up, and his ERA crept up to the high-4s.
He righted the ship in 2009, leading the league in wins, ERA, strikeouts, starts, innings pitched, and strikeouts per nine innings. He finished third in the Cy Young voting that year (behind Zack Greinke and Félix Hernández), and even finished 20th in the MVP voting behind Joe Mauer, who had a career season with an OPS over 1.000 as a catcher. In retrospect that was the year JV really became JV, and the first of several seasons in which Verlander probably deserved the Cy Young.
After a solid-but-unspectacular 2010, the next season would see Verlander earn his first of three Cy Young awards (so far; don’t bet against the ol’ fella). He also scooped up the Pitching Triple Crown en route to the MVP award over second-place finisher Jacoby Ellsbury. On May 7 he threw his first no-hitter, a stellar effort in Toronto (which I was lucky enough to witness in person); it may have been this particular outing in which he perfected his strategy of saving his high-heat offerings and only ramping up to triple digits as the game developed, or when he needed to escape a jam.
Verlander should’ve gotten his second Cy Young in 2016, if not 2012, but two writers completely whiffed on their ballots, and one Kate Upton waxed sorely pissed on social media. The superstar pitcher tried to hold a waning era together in Detroit until the Tigers dealt him away in August of 2017, and we all know what happened next: Houston, a pair of World Series rings, two more Cy Youngs, and a sure-fire Hall of Fame resumé. Should he come back to finish his career where it started? I’ll let you ponder that one for yourself.
Guillermo “Willie” Hernández, 1984
- 9-3 record, 1.92 ERA (204 ERA+)
- 80 relief appearances, 32 saves, 140 ⅓ IP
- 0.941 WHIP, 2.58 FIP
- 7.2 K/9 innings, 2.3 BB/9, 6.2 H/9, 0.4 HR/9
Here’s where we start to run into the “well, it was a different era” argument. If you’re not shy about math, divide 140 ⅓ by 80 and you’ll get about 1.75 — that is to say, here’s a dominant reliever who regularly locks it down, and on average, every four outings, he’ll pitch one inning once and two innings three times. In the 1984 season, by my count, he had four appearances of 3 ⅔ innings or more.
That’s totally bananas by modern standards. We’ve been stunned to see Tyler Holton average around 90 innings the past two seasons. But also, consider this: Hernandez finished 60 of the 80 games in which he appeared. He was one half of a back-end relief tandem, with Aurelio “Señor Smoke” López… who appeared in 71 games, finishing 41 of them (saving 14 of them to boot, in 137 ⅔ innings). So, out of 162 games, either López or Hernández finished 101 of them; if you saw a Tiger game that season, there was about a 2-in-3 chance you’d watch one of those two guys on the mound at the end.
Anyway, a little about Hernández — who was from Aguada, Puerto Rico and primarily went by his given name, Guillermo, despite being known as Willie in his playing days — is in order. He spent six seasons (and part of a seventh) with the Chicago Cubs , mostly relieving but occasionally getting a start here and there. His numbers weren’t terrible, but weren’t great either, so the Phillies acquired him for bullpen help during their National League pennant-winning season of 1983. (Incidentally, the Cubs had picked Hernández up as a Rule 5 pick before the 1977 season from, you guessed it, the Phillies.) He was also 6-for-15 at the plate that year, and yes, I really do miss pitchers hitting, and I am not joking about that.
At the end of Spring Training in 1984, the Tigers traded fan-favourites John Wockenfuss and Glenn Wilson to the Phillies in exchange for Hernández and Dave Bergman. I mean no disrespect to Wilson and Wockenfuss on this one but, holy mackerel, what a trade for the Tigers. That’s one heck of a haul.
Hernández started off the season solidly, but through May 2 only had two saves. Part of this was because the Tigers were winning games pretty handily during their historic 35-5 run, but at that point the “tell” was in the difference between his ERA (a mediocre 4.58) and his FIP (a stellar 2.23): look out, American League batters. In the next month and a half, Hernández went on a sensational run: 21 games, 47 ⅓ innings, 11 saves, 0.95 ERA, and a miniscule OPS-against of .482. If that wasn’t enough, from mid-August through season’s-end, he was arguably even better, holding opposing batters to a .170 average and a .392 OPS. Like Verlander, Hernandez earned MVP honours that year
However, after that season, things started to slide for him. He’d still get an All-Star nod in ‘85 and ‘86, but by 1989 his left arm, and all those screwballs he threw, was pretty much finished at age 34. So, no Cooperstown hardware is in the cards for Hernández in the future, but at the very least he will long be remembered by the fans in Detroit for a truly dominant season and one final pitch in 1984 which Tony Gwynn lofted to Larry Herndon in left field before Tiger Stadium jubilantly celebrated a championship.
Denny McLain, 1968
Set Number: X13145 TK1
- 31-6 record, 1.96 ERA (154 ERA+)
- 41 starts, 336 IP
- 0.905 WHIP, 2.53 FIP
- 7.5 K/9 innings, 1.7 BB/9, 6.5 H/9, 0.8 HR/9
People are complicated, and few have led as complicated a life as McLain.
As a kid growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I’d occasionally see him on TV, but not for the reason he’d probably want: constant brushes with the law, stints in prison for drug trafficking and embezzlement, and various stretches spent in drug rehab. But, by all accounts, he’s straightened-up in recent years and has worked here and there in sports media.
McLain grew up in Chicago, and learned how to play the organ as a youngster; he’d later have music gigs and release albums, which is more than you or I ever did musically. He started in the White Sox system in 1962 but was left unprotected and was claimed by the Tigers, in whose system he had great success; he even had three starts in Detroit in ‘63. He won 20 games in 1966, and was arguably better than that in 1967 despite a 17-16 record: he lowered his walks by about one per nine innings, which was a harbinger of things to come the next season.
The 1968 season is often called the “Year of the Pitcher,” and rightly so: the American League batted .230 with a .637 OPS, and seven of the 10 teams in the league had an ERA under 3.00. But if everyone’s pitching great and hitting terribly, well, they’re all the same, right? Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12, but his record was “only” 22-9 on the season. (Seriously, go look at his game log . It’ll make your head pop clean off.)
McLain, like Hernández in 1984, had a fantastic team behind him. But, of course, McLain had to do his part, and wow, did he ever: he completed 28 of his 41 starts, which put him in line for a lot of wins. He completed six consecutive games from the end of August through mid-September, often pitched on three days’ rest (and occasionally two days’ rest), and while he occasionally had rough games in which he’d give up four or five runs, those were few and far-between. The season kept rolling, McLain kept winning, and he scooped up his 30th of the season on September 14 at home against Oakland, becoming the first 30-game winner since Dizzy Dean in 1934. Like Verlander and Hernández before him, he also won the 1968 American League MVP award.
He had a great 1969 season as well, sharing the Cy Young award with the Orioles’ Mike Cuellar, but shortly afterwards, rumours started to fly about McLain’s association with gamblers. These days, with sports betting everywhere, would that even cause us to blink twice? Anyway, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended McLain for half the 1970 season, and it was all downhill from there.
Always brash and outspoken, McLain wore out his Motown welcome and was traded after the season to the Washington Senators, with the Tigers getting three key players in return who would propel them back to the playoffs in 1972: Ed Brinkman, Aurelio Rodríguez and Joe Coleman. Following stops in Oakland and Atlanta, his last major-league season was 1973, well before his 30th birthday.
Sixty-seven years of Cy Young awards, with only five won by Detroit Tigers pitchers. Again, that seems low, right? Then again, the award is only 68 years old. Curiously though, out of those five awards, three were accompanied by a Most Valuable Player selection, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
Does Skubal have another one in him? Might another Tigers pitcher, or prospect, have this hardware in his future? Speculation is often wrong, but at least it’s free and (occasionally) fun.