Stat Chat: What’s In A Cold Start? Can You Lose An Award in April?

We’re approximately 15% of the way through the season and have no idea who the Cy Young winners are going to be, but as crazy as it sounds we have a pretty good idea of which pitchers it won’t be, and if you don’t believe me, you’re gonna wanna read to the end of this post. The old saying goes, “You can’t win a division in April, but you can definitely lose it.” Meaning, a hot start doesn’t guarantee season long victory, but a cold start is something really hard to dig out of. Similarly, you may see some good pitchers struggling and think, “It’s only April, they can still turn things around, and maybe end up winning the Cy Young award!”

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To study this possibility, I took data from the first 5 starts from every Cy Young winner in the last 20 years (Note: There hasn’t been a reliever to win the award since Eric Gagne in 2003, which in fact is over 20 years ago), and averaged the start of these Cy Young winning season:

Average: 5 GS 32 IP 3 Wins 1 Loss 2.78 ERA 3.13 FIP

Obviously, these are pretty elite numbers. Now let’s look at the distribution of ERA among Cy Young winners for these first 5 starts:

So in 80% of these Cy Young winning seasons, the pitcher through their first 5 starts had at least an ERA below 4.00, so bad news for Gavin Williams (4.15), Carlos Rodon (4.34), Framber Valdez (4.50). Even worse, if you have an ERA over 5.00 like Dylan Cease, Tanner Bibee, and Zac Gallen, there is only one example you can look to – Blake Snell’s second Cy Young season in 2023:

Digging further into how Blake Snell won the award with such a terrible start, here are the season splits:

• First 5 Games: 23 IP 0-4 W-L record 5.48 ERA
• Next 27 Games: 157 IP 14-5 W-L record 1.78 ERA

Just to show how rare and incredible this run was. Here’s the list of every season in the last 20 years where the pitcher finished the year by throwing 27 games with +150 innings and ERA below 1.80:

In every one of these cases, the pitcher either was the Cy Young winner or the runner-up, so basically Blake Snell performed the pitcher version of the “draw the rest of the owl” meme.

Finally, here is the data showing the ERA through 5 starts for every Cy Young winner through the first 5 starts:

What stood out to me in this table were the dates under the “First Start Date”. Almost every pitcher’s first start was late March/early April (other than the pandemic season), meaning almost every pitcher didn’t miss their first time through the order. The only counter example of this was Robbie Ray in 2021, who missed the first start of the season due to falling down some stairs while carrying his child. Basically, it is incredibly tough for someone to win the award if they do not begin the season healthy, so even before injuring his hamstring and landing on the injured list, there was a very small chance Spencer Strider could’ve meteorically captured the award in his comeback season.