How Kenta Maeda's Cy Young-worthy year ranks in Twins lore (2024)

If Shane Bieber didn’t exist, perhaps we would spend Tuesday night celebrating how Kenta Maeda had become the fifth American League Cy Young Award winner in Twins history. Instead, Maeda will have to settle for the best season of his Major League Baseball career merely producing the highest finish among Twins pitchers in the Cy Young vote since 2006.

There is little doubt Bieber — who went 8-1 with a 1.63 ERA and 122 strikeouts in 77 1/3 innings for Cleveland — will run away with the 2020 AL Cy Young Award. All that’s left to determine is whether or not he’ll win unanimously by receiving all 30 first-place votes, and honestly, even that isn’t really in question.

But Bieber’s greatness doesn’t devalue what Maeda accomplished for the Twins in 2020. Acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers in a February trade to bolster the rotation, Maeda went 6-1 with a 2.70 ERA and struck out 80 batters in 66 2/3 innings while walking only 10. The right-hander was extremely consistent throughout the 60-game season, leading the AL in WHIP and exit velocity against while finishing second in batting average against, x-FIP and strikeout-to-walk ratio among starters.

Maeda, 32, also tied for second in f-WAR, Fangraphs’ measure of Wins of Replacement, while also finishing third in walks per nine, fourth in strikeout-percentage and fifth in strikeouts per nine and ERA among AL pitchers with at least 60 innings pitched.

In short, Maeda was outstanding.

But where does it rate compared with the greatest seasons in Twins history? How does Maeda stack up against Johan Santana in the mid-2000s, Frank Viola in 1988, Scott Erickson in 1991 or Jim Perry in 1969 and 1970?

Unfortunately, we’ll never have a true comparison to make. COVID-19 wiped out that possibility entirely. Instead of having a full 162-game schedule to prove his value, Maeda was limited to 11 starts over 60 games, roughly one-third of a full season.

“It’s a tough one,” said Santana, who won the AL Cy Young Award in 2004 and 2006. “Because I always said this in the regular season, ‘It’s not about how you start, it’s about how you finish.’ I think that’s the key when you play a long season. This particular one was the other way around. It’s about how you start and you set the tone. … Just to start from the beginning and keep that momentum all the way, that’s pretty good. That’s impressive. The question here is, ‘Was everybody at the same level or able to keep that going for 30-32 starts?’ That’s the big question mark that nobody will know. We’ll just have to wait into the future to see if they can do that again.”

Maeda was announced last week as a finalist for AL Cy Young alongside Bieber and former Dodgers teammate and current Toronto pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu. Maeda is the 27th pitcher in Twins history to receive at least one Cy Young vote since the award was separated between the AL and the National League in 1967. Those totals don’t include the four combined top-15 AL Most Valuable Player award finishes for Camino Pascual (1962, 1963), Jim Mudcat Grant (1965) and Jim Kaat (1966) in the years prior to the award being divided into AL and NL winners.

No matter how Maeda finishes (The Athletic Minnesota predicts Maeda will receive the second-most votes) in 2020, he’s guaranteed to be only the ninth Twins pitcher to ever finish among the top three vote-getters in a single season.

The others: Perry, who finished third in 1969 before winning in 1970; Viola, who won it in 1988; Erickson, the runner-up to Roger Clemens in 1991; Brad Radke, who finished third in 1997; and Santana, who sandwiched first-place finishes around a third-place finish in 2005 (yes, he was robbed). Bert Blyleven also finished third in 1985 but played the majority of that season with Cleveland before a mid-season trade to the Twins.

Since Santana’s five-year run of dominance from 2003-07 earned him a vote in each of those seasons, the Twins have only had three other pitchers receiving votes. Maeda is the first Twins pitcher to receive an AL Cy Young vote since Ervin Santana, who finished seventh in 2017. Prior to Santana, Phil Hughes earned a seventh-place finish in 2014 thanks to an ungodly 186 t0 16 strikeout-to-walk ratio and Francisco Liriano finished 11th overall in 2010.

So what must occur for a pitcher to have a Cy Young-type season?

“There’s got to be some luck involved, and that’s a weird way to put it,” Erickson said. “But things have to fall your way. You have to pitch on the right day, the team has to score runs. I remember I lost my first two starts that year (in 1991). We got shutout both games and then I ended up going on a nice streak.”

Erickson received 56 voting points in 1991, second to Clemens’ 119. He earned his 20th victory in the final start of a campaign that featured a 13-start stretch in which Erickson went 12-0 with a 1.24 ERA.

Erickson earned three first-place votes to match the total of teammate Jack Morris, who went 18-12 with a 3.43 ERA and finished fourth overall in voting. Teammate Kevin Tapani finished seventh overall in voting after he went 16-9 with a 2.99 ERA.

“Everybody fed off each other,” Erickson said. “Jack said, ‘You better keep winning because I’m going to catch you.’ That was the kind of mentality — a fun competition, always cheering on your teammates to win. There should be no other way. We all just kept winning, which was great.”

It’s too bad we won’t get a true comparison between Maeda and his Twins brethren. Because statistically, Maeda’s production was at the top of the charts in some of the easiest categories to compare.

No other Twins starter has ever produced as many as Maeda’s 10.8 strikeouts per nine innings, with Santana coming the closest in 2004 at 10.46. Santana’s 0.92 WHIP in 2004 is the closest in franchise history to Maeda’s 0.75 from this past season. Maeda’s .168 batting average against also is tops in Twins history with ’04 Santana (.192) again the closest finisher. The same two pitchers are tops in strikeout-percentage, Maeda (32.3 percent) besting Santana (30.1).

Blyleven’s 2.52 ERA in 1973 is the lowest among all Twins pitchers receiving Cy Young votes while only Hughes bested Maeda in strikeout to walk ratio (11.63 to 8) and in fewer walks per nine (0.69 to 1.35).

Would Maeda or Bieber or Ryu have been able to maintain their paces over a full 162-game season? Nobody really knows.

But Santana is impressed with what Maeda accomplished anyway. He spent time around Maeda in Twins camp this spring before the shutdown in mid-March and knows what went into the pitcher’s 2020 performance. And he also appreciates how Maeda started the season strong and never slowed down.

“I saw (Maeda) in spring training doing his stuff, the way he works and everything,” Santana said. “The way he handles himself and commands the ball, it’s not just something that happens. There’s a lot of work there, and that work pays off. You can see it out there. That’s the reason why he’s sitting right now where he’s at.”

(Photo: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)