Aaron Doster/Associated Press
2021 Age: 30
Though he didn’t receive as much praise as Cleveland ace Shane Bieber, Trevor Bauer was arguably the best pitcher in baseball this season.
Boosted by a league-high spin rate on his pitches, the righty allowed only 41 hits and 17 walks while whiffing 100 batters in 73 innings for the Cincinnati Reds. He finished with an NL-best 1.73 ERA, as well as the lowest expected ERA of any starting pitcher.
This isn’t the first time Bauer has pitched at a Cy Young-caliber level. He also made a case for the award with Cleveland in 2018, wherein he pitched to a 2.21 ERA with 221 strikeouts in 175.1 innings.
But while these two campaigns accurately reflect Bauer’s upside, they’re also outliers. He’s been somewhere between average and below-average in his other seven seasons, and one need only go back to the latter half of 2019in which he had a 6.39 ERA in 10 starts with Cincinnatito find the last time he was outright bad.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant
