For the second year in a row, the top spot in the Cy Young voting in every league was more or less a foregone conclusion. Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers and Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates took home the AL and NL Cy Young Awards, respectively.
For Skenes, this is a coronation of sorts. There was a solid argument last season that he was the NL’s best pitcher, but he didn’t debut until the second week of May and made just 23 starts (plus: Chris Sale’s season fully deserved the accolade it received). He had to settle for third place in the Cy Young voting and a Rookie of the Year win. But in the majors, Skenes had enough volume from day one in 2025 to take home this award, his first, and he did so unanimously. Skenes dominated, pitching to a 1.97 ERA (217 ERA+) and 2.36 FIP, all numbers that led baseball, and he allowed the fewest home runs per nine innings among starters and led the NL in WHIP and fWAR.
The Pirates, who had the worst offense in baseball, did Skenes no favors and despite his mastery, he only pitched to a 10-10 record. That might have been important a few decades ago, but in 2025 it was no barrier. At just 23 years old, Skenes looks poised for a legendary career; he is the fifth-youngest player to win a Cy Young Award, and the youngest since 21-year-old Bret Saberhagen and 20-year-old Dwight Gooden both won in 1985. (The other two who were younger: 20-year-old Fernando Valenzuela in 1981 and 22-year-old Vida Blue in 1971. An interesting aside: no of these four players are in the Hall of Fame [though Valenzuela is on the Veterans Committee ballot this year] even though all four have interesting cases.)
All 30 of the NL second-place votes went to Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez, who even beat Skenes in the Baseball Reference version of WAR (8.0 to 7.7), based largely on the fact that he threw about 15 more innings. Most would certainly disagree with that assessment, but Sánchez had an excellent year: he was 13-5 with a 2.50 ERA (176 ERA+) and 2.55 FIP in 202 innings, while striking out nearly five times as many batters as he walked.
After the top two it was a little more exciting. Yoshinobu Yamamoto finished third in the NL, with 16 of the 30 third-place votes. Logan Webb finished fourth, with 10 of the remaining votes, and Milwaukee’s Freddy Peralta received the final four. Peralta had never received a Cy Young vote before, and the top-five finish is a real feather in his cap after an excellent season in which he led the NL in wins while pitching to a 2.70 ERA (154 ERA+).
For Skubal, it was his second straight win, making him the first person to win straight Cy Youngs since Pedro Martinez in 1999-2000. For the second straight season, Skubal led the AL in ERA (2.21), ERA+ (187), FIP (2.45), bWAR (6.5) and fWAR (6.6). But the 28-year-old southpaw improved noticeably in several areas, even during his unanimous Cy Young season last year: He led the majors in WHIP (0.891), walks per nine (1.5) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (7.30), all of which were better than last season.
Unlike last year, when he received all 30 first-place votes, Skubal was not entirely a unanimous decision; Boston’s Garrett Crochet, who was 18-5 with a 2.59 ERA (159 ERA+), 2.89 FIP and league-leading marks in innings (205 1/3) and strikeouts (255), finished with four of the 30 first-place votes and all 26 of the remaining second-place votes (the other four, predictably, went to Skubal). Houston’s Hunter Brown, who pitched a sparkling 2.43 ERA in more than 185 innings (but didn’t have the peripherals that Skubal and Crochet had) finished third.
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