40 years ago, this Brewer would have been a Cy Young favorite

In 1982, the Milwaukee Brewers finished 95-67, good for the best record in the league. They were led by the 26-year-old Robin Yount, who had one of the best seasons ever by a shortstop and won the American League MVP award. But that wasn’t the only hardware for the club lovingly known as the Harvey’s Wallbangers. The AL Cy Young also went to a Brewer, a guy who is now likely more known for playing the bad guy in the 1989 film Major League than he is for winning a Cy Young: Pete Vuckovich.

Fast forward 43 years and the Brewers are again the owners of the league’s best record. No, this iteration of the Brewers doesn’t have anyone who is going to win MVP. They aren’t going to get any love in Cy Young voting. And there probably isn’t a future movie star, either (though it might not be a stretch to imagine Christian Yelich making a guest appearance on a soap opera).

But one Brewer is having a year that bears a strong resemblance to Vuckovich’s 1982 season. If awards voters today held the same mindset that they did in the not-so-distant past, Freddy Peralta would be a leading contender for the National League Cy Young.

The Cy Young Award and the W

For most of the history of Cy Young voting, a pitcher’s worth was determined first and foremost not by WAR or strikeout-to-walk ratio or even ERA or strikeouts; it was determined by wins.

From the first year that the Cy Young was awarded in 1956 until the end of the 20th century, 77 awards were handed out (there was only a single, league-wide winner from 1956-66, hence the odd number). Eight went to relief pitchers, but if we look just at starting pitchers who won the Cy Young between 1956 and 1999, 50 of them, or 72%, led the league in wins. Compare that to the new millennium: 50 Cy Youngs have been awarded, one of which went to a reliever. The winner led the league in wins in 26 of those seasons, or 53%.

Félix Hernández’s 2010 Cy Young is often viewed as an inflection point: he went just 13-12 that season and had eight fewer wins than the league leader, by far the largest gap between a starting pitcher who won the Cy Young and a wins leader in the history of the award at the time.

There’s a bit of irony in the fact that, including the NL winner in 2010, 12 of the next 15 Cy Youngs went to the league leader in wins. We don’t truly see a major shift that builds on what Hernández did until 2018, when the NL winner was Jacob deGrom, who went 10-9 and also finished eight wins behind the leader. Since 2018, the league leader in wins has won only five of 12 awards, and four pitchers have won with six or more wins fewer than the league leader; with Hernández’s as the first, all six of the seasons in which there was a gap of six wins or more between the Cy Young winner and the league leader have happened since 2010.

The evidence is clear: by the end of the 2010s, the sabermetric movement to “kill the win” had succeeded among Cy Young voters.

Vuckovich and Peralta

In 1982, Vuckovich did not lead the league in wins but was second with 18 to LaMarr Hoyt’s 19. But Hoyt was on a mediocre team and had a pedestrian 3.53 ERA, so voters ignored him. Vuckovich’s 18-6 record gave him the league lead in winning percentage, a wins-adjacent stat that was another harbinger of award success for many years.

The environment was ripe for Vuckovich, too. Even with modern tools at our disposal, there’s not an obvious choice for AL Cy Young. Dave Stieb was probably the AL’s best starting pitcher that season, but his Blue Jays finished tied for last in the AL East. The other AL playoff team, the Angels, did not have a good candidate. One could make a case that Yankee reliever Goose Gossage was the league’s best pitcher that year, but he was in the process of revolutionizing the closer role, and contemporary voters were likely put off by his low innings total and the fact that he did not lead the league in saves.

Vuckovich played for the best team, and he was within one win of Hoyt, and that was enough for half of the voters in 1982. He won the award, even with a merely “pretty good” 3.34 ERA (114 ERA+), just 105 strikeouts, and an unsightly 1.502 WHIP and 1.03 K:BB ratio.

Today, Vuckovich would never win this award. It’s not even necessarily the 114 ERA+, which isn’t good, but it’s the walks. These days, if you’re going to walk a ton of batters, you must make up for it by doing everything else extremely well, like Blake Snell did in 2023 when he walked 5.0 batters per nine but struck out 11.7 batters and allowed only 5.8 hits per nine innings. Vuckovich, by contrast, walked 4.1, struck out 4.2, and allowed 9.4 hits per nine.

This “new” way of looking at a pitcher’s results, beyond mere wins, is why Peralta will not win this year’s Cy Young Award. Paul Skenes is the favorite—he leads the majors in ERA, ERA+, hits per nine, and home runs per nine, and he’s first in the NL in FIP. He’s first in the majors in Fangraphs’ version of WAR and second in the NL in Baseball Reference’s.

But Skenes is just 6-8 thanks to a bad Pirates team, and as we’ve seen, that’s not going to do it with the voters of yesteryear. They might look at Cristopher Sánchez (10-3, third among qualified pitchers in the NL in ERA) or Zack Wheeler (fifth in ERA, first in strikeouts, first in innings pitched), who both play for the NL East-leading Phillies. But they lag far behind Peralta’s 13 wins, which is two better than any other pitcher in the NL.

Viewing Peralta’s season through a modern lens reveals some red flags: he’s walking too many guys, he’s inefficient, his FIP (3.85) lags behind his ERA (3.03). But a 3.03 ERA (133 ERA+) is solid, and he’s got that all-important wins category, and in the past his proclivity for working out of trouble may have been viewed more as an intangible in his favor that outweighed the frustration of the trouble he caused in the first place. Given the Brewers’ unexpected success this season, there are serious parallels to Vuckovich in 1982, and it’s entirely reasonable to think that if the voters of 1982 swapped places with those in 2025, Peralta would be the legitimate front-runner for NL Cy Young.

Peralta may not even finish in the top 10 in Cy Young voting—he ranks 16th in the NL in fWAR as of Wednesday, and we’ve learned a lot about pitching in the last 43 years. But it’s a fun exercise to consider, and it’s also worth remembering that baseball experts of a different era might have looked at this season and decided that Peralta was the best pitcher in the NL.