June is off and running around Major League Baseball and the best pitchers in the game are still hurtling along at a breakneck pace. The 2024 season has been a particularly excellent one for pitching, as run scoring and OPS's are down across the league and there's been a refreshing mix of expected stars and fresh faces setting the pace in the Cy Young races.
And as always, we're here to document those races with our Cy Young power rankings. As usual, we'll be trying to not only document the leaders in the clubhouse right now, but project where the competition is heading based on the surrounding circumstances. And yes, it helps to have a track record of Cy Young contention in the past, but you'll see that some newcomers seem to be proving their candidacy is no joke at all.
Now that we're over a third of the way into the season, run prevention begins to matter more than it did before, though volume is still king. As the year moves along, some mix of ERA and innings pitched usually ends up tipping the scales for the winners, so we're doing our best to weigh them against each other in cases where two or more pitchers are neck-and-neck. It's a loaded field, so let's see who made the cut!
National League
Ranger Suarez continues to lead the way in the NL, but he's followed by a number of star pitchers.
1. Ranger Suárez, Phillies
No injury concern is welcome when a pitcher is having a lights-out season, and Ranger Suárez leaving Saturday's start after three innings after taking a 106.1-mph line drive to the pitching hand was the scariest moment of the Philadelphia Phillies' season thus far. That said, Suárez appears to be trending towards making his scheduled start in this weekend's London Series against the New York Mets, so until there's further cause for concern, there's no place for him to be but the top.
Suárez has at least a share of the MLB lead in ERA, WHIP, wins and hits allowed. He does so, as do many of his Phillies teammates, without a fastball that lights up the radar gun, but an outstanding pitch mix combined with great induced vertical break, making that fastball that only says 91 mph on the screen look closer to 100. Suárez's breakout has been one of the pitching stories of the year to this point and barring worse injury news, there's nothing that points to that success being unsustainable.
2. Zack Wheeler, Phillies
Zack Wheeler was number one in these Cy Young power rankings a month ago, and it took a continued heater from a close friend to move him back even a single slot. You know you're getting consistency with Wheeler at this stage in his career, and it's why the Phillies didn't hesitate to sign him to the most lucrative annual salary ever for a starting pitcher, even though he just turned 34 last week.
The stats Wheeler leads MLB in are the stats that make a manager happiest: games started (13) and innings pitched (80.1). Just going out there every fifth day and eating innings will get you paid handsomely in this league. But doing it while posting an elite 2.32 ERA with 91 strikeouts will get you very serious consideration for a Cy Young award, something Wheeler has still yet to win in his decorated career. He's also gone 7-0 since starting the season 0-3 and his FIP has somehow gone up in that timespan, yet another testament to his consistency no matter how much run support he's getting on a given day.
3. Tyler Glasnow, Dodgers
Knock on every piece of wood you can find in your neighborhood, but it does look like we're finally getting that healthy Tyler Glasnow season we've always dreamed about. He's made all 12 of his starts, he leads the world in strikeouts and even if he hasn't been dominant every time out, he's battled through tough outings to post over six innings per start.
And if Glasnow merely maintains his 3.04 ERA, which isn't near the top of the league rankings this early in the season, then he's still got a great chance to win the Cy Young, thanks to his 95 strikeouts through 74 innings. That puts him on pace to punch roughly 250 tickets, which hasn't been done by a Dodger since Clayton Kershaw struck out 301 in 2015.
4. Shota Imanaga, Cubs
Yes, Shota Imanaga finally got roughed up in a big-league start, a seven-run thumping in 4.1 innings against bitter division rival Milwaukee. But if you can give up seven runs and still carry a season ERA of 1.86, you're doing a lot of things right as a starting pitcher at the game's highest level.
To think the Cubs stole this guy for $52 million over four years is downright laughable. There should be at least a dozen fan bases crying themselves to sleep every night over the fact that their front office didn't think he was worth what the Memphis Grizzlies are paying Brandon Clarke. Imanaga has been the best thing about watching Chicago Cubs baseball so far this season and his team will need continued excellence from him to get out of the rut they've been in since mid-May.
5. Chris Sale, Braves
Chris Sale's month of May ranked high among the most dominant stretches of pitching he's ever had, and this is a potential Hall of Famer we're talking about here. His stock took a bit of a hit when he gave up eight runs to the Oakland Athletics on June 1, sure, but plenty of Cy Young winners have had a clunker or two on their ledger.
With an 8-1 record, 10.9 K/9 and a 0.95 WHIP, Sale is making some of the game's best hitters look silly this season. He's dialed in his fastball-slider combo to produce more consistent results than he saw his last few seasons with the Boston Red Sox, though he was still highly effective whenever he managed to stay on the field. It's clear Sale has found some magic–which he'll need to retain to hold off a pair of challengers from his own team in Max Fried and Reynaldo Lopez.
American League
The American League features some surprise names atop the rankings.
1. Tarik Skubal, Tigers
Everyone's “darkhorse” Cy Young candidate at the start of the season sure shed that label quickly. The Detroit Tigers' Tarik Skubal has been among the frontrunners to win the award in the AL since the very beginning, posting a 7-1 record with a 1.97 ERA to this point while leading the Junior Circuit with a 0.88 WHIP.
The most impressive part of Skubal's success is the fact that he's actually improved on a lot of his peripherals from that excellent 2023 campaign that was shortened at the beginning by injury. His hard-hit rate and average exit velocity have both seen sizeable dips and his four-seam fastball, which was already his bread and butter, has added a mile per hour of velocity and ticked downward in BAA. The Tigers sure do look smart for drafting Skubal with the 255th overall pick in 2018.
2. Seth Lugo, Royals
Two years ago, Seth Lugo was a journeyman 32-year-old reliever with 36 career starts to his name, putting up a respectable 3.60 ERA out of the bullpen for the 100-win New York Mets. Now, he's got a great shot to start the All-Star Game in the American League and has an AL-best 1.72 ERA as a starter for the Kansas City Royals. Sometimes, baseball is awesome in unexpected ways.
Not only is Lugo a great pitcher at this moment, but there are so many other reasons to love him if you're a baseball fan. He pitched at a Division III school in Louisiana and was drafted in the 34th round, a round that no longer exists in the modern MLB Draft. It's impossible to say which pitch is his best because he throws eight of them and any could be the X-factor on any start day. His career is a testament to determination and resilience and all of the behind-the-scenes work is paying off in a big way in 2024.
3. Tanner Houck, Red Sox
Last month, Tanner Houck and his teammate Kutter Crawford tied for the final spot on the Cy Young power rankings, because both were pitching so well it was hard to separate the two. In the month since, Crawford has come back to earth while Houck has only gotten better. He's top five among all qualified starters in ERA, innings pitched, bWAR and home runs allowed.
Houck has always had nasty stuff, but it was always a struggle for him to harness it, particularly against left-handed batters and the third trip through the batting order. This year, he's virtually eliminated both of those problems. His revamped splitter has helped him to neutralize lefties to a .501 OPS while he's pitched into the seventh inning in eight of his last nine starts. The Boston Red Sox might not be having the season their weary fans had hoped for, but they do seem to have found an unexpected ace.
4. Luis Gil, Yankees
When the New York Yankees chose Luis Gil as the replacement starter in their rotation after Gerrit Cole's elbow injury, there couldn't have been a soul in the organization who thought they'd be getting a performance as good as anything Cole has ever done. But here we are in the first week of June and Gil is 7-1 with a 1.99 ERA in 63.1 innings. By any measure, he's been the best pitcher on the best team in the American League.
With an expected ERA of 2.75 and xwOBA over 30 points higher than the .248 he's currently allowing, it's fair to expect Gil to regress just a little as the season wears along. But any reasonable amount of regression still puts him among the best at his craft, and doing what he's done for the first time at the MLB level after nearly two years out of commission is ludicrous. We'll have to see just how much the league is able to adjust to the Yankees' latest pitching phenom.
5. Corbin Burnes, Orioles
There were tons of outside-the-box picks available for the fifth and final AL slot. Tyler Anderson is tied for the bWAR lead among pitchers, Garrett Crochet is striking out the world in his first year as a starter and Emmanuel Clase could be having one of the greatest closer seasons of the 21st century. But when a former Cy Young winner like Corbin Burnes is posting a 2.35 ERA for one of the best teams in baseball, it forces our hand just a little.
Burnes has been everything the Baltimore Orioles hoped they were getting when they acquired him and that goes far beyond the stat sheet. He's a tone-setter at the top of the rotation. He's working deep into games. And he's been a stabilizing force in a season where every other starter has missed at least one trip through the rotation. The O's may have won 101 games in 2023, but they're a far more legitimate playoff threat in 2024 with Burnes steering the ship.
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