It’s easy to dismiss a dark-horse candidate as a serious contender for one of baseball’s individual awards until you realize that three of the past four Cy Young Award winners could reasonably fit under that umbrella.
Nobody saw the Cleveland Indians’ Corey Kluber coming when he won the American League Cy Young Award in 2014, and while both the Chicago Cubs’ Jake Arrieta and the Houston Astros’ Dallas Keuchel headed into 2015 with high expectations, few believed they’d be dominant enough to walk away with the award at year’s end.
Yet that’s exactly what they did.
So while the six pitchers who follow—three in each league—may be overshadowed, overlooked and without much of the fanfare that surrounds past winners and usual suspects (Felix Hernandez, Clayton Kershaw, David Price), we can’t write them off as contenders for the Cy Young Award.
If we’ve learned anything over the past few seasons, it’s that anything can—and usually does—happen.