Tonight, when Jacob deGrom wins the National League Cy Young Award, it will unofficially mark the end of the starting pitching win as a meaningful statistic.
To be sure, the stat has been on life support for some time. Its decline began when Felix Hernandez won the AL Cy Young Award in 2010, despite a 13-12 won-loss record. That marked a turning point in how we evaluate starters, with the understanding that a starting pitcher has little say in whether he gets a win out of a start. That's far more connected with the offense, whose job it is to score runs, which his teammates failed to do on a consistent basis, averaging just 3.5 runs in his outings.
Instead,
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