Dodgers News: Kershaw Favorite for 2016 Cy Young

For the foreseeable future, we can pretty much pencil in Clayton Kershaw as one of the finalist for NL Cy Young. That’s pretty much a rule of thumb at this point.

A popular equation that figures out a pitcher’s likelihood of winning the Cy Young agrees.

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Tangotiger.com put together the BBWAA Cy Young Tracker, which uses statistical analysis to understand a pitcher’s worth. Here is the equation:

The equation in bold at the bottom is the updated version, and called that year’s (2013) Cy Young race basically pitcher by pitcher in both leagues. There’s obviously no such thing as a perfect stat, but this one is pretty close.

Neil Greenberg of the Washington Post analyzed what next year might look like, based on what pitchers did this season, and found that Kershaw and Maz Scherzer are likely to contend for the award. Makes sense.

Kershaw is the first pitcher in the history of the voting to be nominated as a Cy Young finalist five seasons in a row — a record he’ll almost definitely improve on.