For the second year in a row, the top of each league’s Cy Young ballot was more-or-less a foregone conclusion. Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers and Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates have taken home
the AL and NL Cy Young Awards, respectively.
For Skenes, this is a coronation of sorts. Last season, there was a solid argument that he was the best pitcher in the NL, but he didn’t debut until the second week of May and made only 23 starts (plus, Chris Sale’s season was fully deserving of the award it received). He had to settle for third in Cy Young voting and a Rookie of the Year win. But in the majors from day one in 2025, Skenes had plenty of volume to run away with 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 homers 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 he pitched to just a 10-10 record despite his mastery. That might have mattered a couple decades ago, but it was no barrier in 2025. At just 23 years of age, Skenes seems 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. In an interesting aside, none 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 second-place votes in the NL went to Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez, who actually edged Skenes in Baseball Reference’s version of WAR (8.0 to 7.7), based largely on the fact that he threw about 15 more innings. Most would disagree with that assessment, certainly, 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 almost five times as many batters as he walked.
Things were a bit tighter after the top two. Yoshinobu Yamamoto finished third in the NL, with 16 of 30 third-place votes. Logan Webb finished fourth, with 10 of those remaining votes, and Milwaukee’s Freddy Peralta received the last 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 consecutive win, making him the first person to win back-to-back 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 lefty noticeably improved in several areas even over 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 wasn’t quite 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 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 to a sparkling 2.43 ERA in over 185 innings (but didn’t have the peripherals that Skubal and Crochet had) finished third.
