Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Robbie Ray was nominated as one of the three finalists for the American League Cy Young Award. Ray had an incredible season finishing 13-7. He was also able to help his ball club win over 90 games. He’s going to be going up against New York Yankees Gerrit Cole, and Chicago White Sox Lance Lynn.

Robbie Ray probably has Lance Lynn beat by a large margin, but it’s going to be tough to surpass the Yankees Ace. If anybody was as good as Gerrit Cole in the American League, it was definitely Robbie Ray.

Ray led the AL in ERA, games started, innings pitched, strikeouts, ERA+, and WHIP.

It’s going to be tough for Ray to beat Gerrit Cole, and the voting should certainly be extremely close. Let’s take a look at some reasons why Robbie Ray can win this award over Gerrit Cole and Lance Lynn.

Reasons Why Robbie Ray is The Cy Young

2. He had the best ERA in the AL

ERA isn’t always the best stat to compare pitchers but it’s certainly an important one. Robbie Ray was able to finish the season with the highest ERA in all of the American League. He finished with a 2.84 ERA. This was about .5 lower than Gerrit Cole. This is certainly going to help out Rays’ case as it wasn’t really close between him and Cole in the ERA side of things. A lot of the voters are older and many of the older baseball group still values ERA as the most important pitching metric in baseball.

1. Although he had a meltdown, it wasn’t as bad as Coles

There’s no denying that Robbie Ray had a bad meltdown towards the end of the season. This could have been for many reasons but the most likely one is that he had the most innings pitched in baseball and that he was just tired at that point of the season. This is a valid reason why Ray might’ve not had his best stuff towards the end of the year.

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Luckily for him, he was still able to be better than Gerrit Cole was. Gerrit Cole was pitching like one of the worst pitchers in baseball for the better half of about the last two months of the season. Many voters want to see somebody who is going to be strong all season long and while Ray wasn’t strong, he was still much better than Cole.

If Ray didn’t have a disappointing last few starts to the season, he would probably be walking away with this award. Even with how bad he was towards the end of the season he was still able to lead the AL in many major pitching categories.

The Voting is almost certainly going to come between Gerrit Cole and Robbie Ray. There’s really no wrong answer here but in terms of advanced numbers, Cole might’ve had the better season. In terms of numbers that many voters are going to use, Robbie Ray did have the better season. This should be a close race between the two and there’s really no wrong answer on who the pick is. Robbie Ray is going to be a free agent this offseason and he’s going to get a lot of money from a few different ball clubs.