No Dissent in Either League: Misiorowski and Schlittler Sweep the Cy Young Vote

The least suspenseful reveal of awards week turned out to be its rarest. Jacob Misiorowski of the Milwaukee Brewers and Cam Schlittler of the New York Yankees were named the National League and American League Cy Young Award winners on Wednesday night, and the Baseball Writers’ Association of America did not record a single dissenting ballot in either league. Thirty writers vote in each league. All sixty first-place votes went to the two winners.

That has happened twice before in the history of the award: Denny McLain and Bob Gibson in 1968, and Justin Verlander and Sandy Alcantara in 2022, according to Reuters. And at 24 and 25, Misiorowski and Schlittler are the youngest pair of Cy Young winners since 1985, when 20-year-old Dwight Gooden and 21-year-old Bret Saberhagen took the honors, USA Today reported. Neither man has pitched two full major league seasons. The future of pitching was supposed to arrive eventually. It arrived on the same night, in both leagues, without an argument.

The Miz, by acclamation

Misiorowski’s case was never really a case. He went 16-5 with a 1.80 ERA that led the major leagues and 252 strikeouts that also led the major leagues, across 174⅔ innings and 30 starts. He struck out 13 batters per nine innings and allowed 4.9 hits per nine, both the best marks in baseball, and hitters managed a .157 average against him. The velocity that built all of it was just as lopsided: he threw 28 of the 35 hardest pitches in the majors this season, ranging from 104 to 105.5 mph, and in September he became the first pitcher in major league history to throw 1,000 pitches at 100 mph or faster in a single season.

He is the youngest Cy Young honoree since Clayton Kershaw won the first of his three trophies in 2011, and the fourth Brewer to win the award, after Rollie Fingers in 1981, Pete Vuckovich in 1982 and Corbin Burnes in 2021 — just the second since Milwaukee moved to the National League. The award is voted on regular-season performance alone, but October is why nobody in Milwaukee will remember it as a regular-season story. Misiorowski started Games 1 and 5 of the World Series against Tampa Bay and won both, allowing one run in 10⅔ innings. His 5⅔ scoreless innings in Game 5 closed out the first championship in franchise history, and made him the first pitcher since Sandy Koufax in 1963 to win a World Series clincher in a season of 250 strikeouts and a sub-2.00 ERA.

“He deserves everything that’s coming his way,” Brewers catcher and World Series MVP William Contreras told MLB.com earlier this month. “He deserves the Cy Young that’s coming his way and all the success he had this year.”

The seventh-rounder who outran the nine-figure rotation

Schlittler heard his name from Roger Clemens, who announced the American League result on MLB Network — a neat bit of symmetry, since Clemens in 2001 and Gerrit Cole in 2023 were the only Yankees to win the award this century before Wednesday. Schlittler is the seventh winner in franchise history, the third since 1977, and the first homegrown Yankee to win it since Ron Guidry in 1978.

The numbers explain the sweep. Schlittler went 14-6 with an AL-best 1.95 ERA in 33 starts, striking out 239 in 193⅔ innings, and his 7.0 pitching WAR also led the league. That 1.95 is the lowest ERA posted in the American League since 2022 and the third-lowest ever by a qualified Yankee, behind only Spud Chandler’s 1.64 in 1943 and Guidry’s 1.74 in 1978. The Yankees won 21 of his 33 starts. Four years ago he was a seventh-round pick out of Northeastern whose fastball barely touched 88 mph. The rotation around him — Cole, Max Fried and Carlos Rodón — arrived on nine-figure free-agent contracts. Schlittler is still two seasons from arbitration and under team control through 2031.

“Cam had as dominant a season as a starting pitcher can have from start to finish,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said in a statement. “He’s shown an astonishing amount of growth since we drafted him, and his success is no accident. This Cy Young is richly deserved.”

How the ballots fell

In the American League, Toronto’s Dylan Cease finished second with 110 points — his second career runner-up finish — and Cleveland rookie Parker Messick was third with 84. Messick has now spent awards week collecting near-misses: he was second to Detroit’s Kevin McGonigle in Monday’s Rookie of the Year vote and third here, with a 2.56 ERA and 193 strikeouts behind both. Tampa Bay’s Drew Rasmussen (72) and Boston’s Sonny Gray (21) rounded out the top five. The full leaderboards behind every race this week are on the Stats Hub.

The National League count behind Misiorowski was a photo finish for second: Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez took it with 99 points, one ahead of Atlanta’s Chris Sale at 98. It was the eighth top-five Cy Young finish of Sale’s career. The Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto was fourth with 63 and Philadelphia’s Jesús Luzardo fifth with 34.

The rest of the Las Vegas haul

The Cy Youngs were announced on the same night Major League Baseball handed out its broader honors at a ceremony in Las Vegas, and no one collected like Houston’s Yordan Alvarez. Alvarez won the AL Hank Aaron Award as the league’s top offensive player, the AL Comeback Player of the Year award and the Edgar Martinez Outstanding Designated Hitter Award in a single evening, after leading the majors in batting average (.316), on-base percentage (.432) and slugging (.601) while hitting 42 home runs with 106 RBIs and 109 walks.

The NL Hank Aaron Award went to the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong, whose 45 home runs topped the majors and came with 41 stolen bases and an NL-best .570 slugging percentage. Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler took NL Comeback Player of the Year. The first BBWAA Reliever of the Year awards went to Toronto’s Louis Varland in the American League and San Diego’s Mason Miller in the National League; Miller also collected the Trevor Hoffman Award as the NL’s top reliever, while Tampa Bay’s Bryan Baker won the Mariano Rivera Award in the AL. Tampa Bay’s Erik Neander was named Executive of the Year, and both Cy Young winners landed on the All-MLB First Team alongside Cease, Sale and Sánchez in the starting rotation.

Across town, a phone rings at the Boras press conference

Las Vegas was doing double duty on Wednesday. While the awards were handed out, the General Managers’ Meetings were under way at the Aria, and agent Scott Boras’s annual press conference produced the week’s most quoted moment without a single contract being signed. Fifteen minutes in, Boras’s cellphone rang. “Just another owner,” he quipped, “begging to meet with Skubal.”

The market behind the joke is real. Tarik Skubal, the two-time Cy Young winner who headlines this winter’s free-agent class, is scheduled to meet with six teams next week at the Boras Corporation’s California headquarters, with the Dodgers, Mets, Padres and Blue Jays among them, the New York Post reported. Hanging over all of it is December 1, when the collective bargaining agreement expires and an expected lockout would freeze transactions; Boras intimated that Skubal is likely to sign before then. The state of that race coming into the week is in our Nov. 10 hot stove roundup.

Awards week finishes on Thursday night with the MVP announcements — Alvarez, Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero and Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr. are the AL finalists; Crow-Armstrong, the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and Milwaukee’s Brice Turang are the NL finalists. The Sports Desk’s read on Wednesday: the two best pitching seasons in baseball just went, unanimously, to a 24-year-old and a 25-year-old who are both still years from arbitration. The prime years of the sport’s two best arms have not started yet. That is the scary part, and it is also the whole story.