Should Zach Britton Win The Cy Young?

Zach Britton has had a dominant year for the Orioles. Does he have a legitimate case for a Cy Young?

In the past 25 years, a relief pitcher has won the Cy Young award once. That was Eric Gagne in 2003, when he had perhaps the greatest season in the history of relief pitchers, pitching a 1.20 ERA with 55 saves (and those saves were all consecutive) and a K/9 of 14.98. Honestly, it was about as amazing of a season as a reliever would need to win the Cy Young, but Britton might be having a season amazing enough to warrant the first Cy Young win for a reliever in 13 years.

There are a few ways we can analyze Britton’s season this year, and some stats make a better case than others. The most obvious one is his ERA, which sits at an absurdly-low 0.68 (he’s given up four earned runs all year). If the season ended today, that would be the third-lowest ERA in history (min. 60 IP) behind Dennis Eckersley in 1990 and Fernando Rodney in 2012.

You could also look at Britton’s 10.36 K/9, which is 8th among all relievers right now, or you could look at the fact that Britton is 38 for 38 in save situations, not blowing a single one so far this year, but the stat I like the most for Britton is his Win Probability Added (WPA).

WPA isn’t a perfect stat (no stat is) but it’s an interesting one, and a useful one for analyzing a player’s season. Essentially, WPA states how a player potentially affects the change in win expectancy with each plate appearance, giving the player credit or debit depending on how their actions affected the win expectancy.

For example, say the Dodgers have a 40% chance of winning a game when Corey Seager comes up to bat. Then, Seager hits a home run that boosts their win expectancy to 80%. The WPA for that would be expressed as +.40 for Seager and -.40 for the pitcher. As a whole, WPA is additive, so when you see a player’s WPA on the season, that’s cumulative of all the actions they’ve made all year, positive and negative.

Britton currently has a +4.71 WPA, which sounds good, and it is. To put it in context, he leads all pitchers (starters and relievers) in WPA, and the only players in all of baseball that have higher WPAs than him are Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson.

So what does this all mean? It means that when Britton comes into a game, he typically increases your chances of winning a game more than any other pitcher in all of baseball, and more than all but two players in all of baseball. That’s a pretty convincing statistic.

Considering all those stats, let’s compare Britton’s season so far to Gagne’s Cy Young-winning season in 2003:

Comparing the two seasons, it’s obvious that Gagne had the more dominant season, but Britton’s season isn’t insanely far off, and when you’re even remotely close to the greatest season in the history of relievers, you’re worthy of consideration for the Cy Young. Plus, is there really a pitcher in the AL who stands out its most dominant pitcher? Corey Kluber lacks the ERA for it, Jose Quintana lacks the strikeouts, but I think those two have the best cases among starters, and I think Britton should be tossed in there with them.