Every year, each MLB league awards their best pitcher with the fabled Cy Young award. Over the past 20 years, the award has been given out only 40 times to 28 different players from 23 different teams. Despite many great seasons, no relief pitcher has won the award since 2003. This season, the debate over a potential winner of the Cy Young Award has sparked once again.

Cleveland Guardian’s closer, Emmanuel Clase, put up an incredible year, pitching 74 ⅓ innings, giving up only 5 runs, and posting an outstanding 0.61 earned run average per game (ERA). Despite all this, when the Cy Young award was decided, Emmanuel Clase could only manage a 3rd place finish, not getting a singular 1st place vote. While some fans will be quick to argue that Clase is the most deserving pitcher, the MLB verdict is unsurprising to many baseball fans, as this marks a continuous trend within the league.

While comparing great relief pitchers to their starting counterparts is difficult, the best comparison is to Eric Gagne, the last relief pitcher to win a Cy Young award. In 2003, Gange pitched 82 ⅓ innings and gave up 11 earned runs, putting up a 1.20 ERA. This season would win Gagne the 2003 National League Cy Young Award and become a milestone for future relievers to look up to. Eric Gagne was the ninth pitcher to win the Cy Young Award and the first since Oakland Athletics reliever Dennis Eckersley, who won it in 1992. However, he was not the only reliever in the 11 years to make a good run for the award. Every year except 2001, a relief pitcher placed in the top 5, including Trevor Hoffman and Jose Mesa, who placed 2nd in award voting. Still, when there was finally a pitcher who surpassed Eric Gange, the reaction from the Cy Young voters was very different.

The first pitcher to pass Gagne’s mark would be Craig Kimbrel in 2012. That year, Kimbrel pitched a 1.01 ERA for the Atlanta Braves. While Kimbrel’s season passed Gange’s ERA mark, Kimbrel only managed to place 5th in award voting. This took the MLB world by storm. Just 9 years after Gagne’s award-winning season, a better season in almost every category was suddenly valued exceptionally less by the voters, and just 2 years later, that point would be furthered. In 2014, Kansas City Royals closer Wade Davis pitched an even better season than Craig Kimbrel. Davis pitched a 1.00 ERA season, getting a better average than Kimbrel in 10 more innings pitched. However, Davis would not even get close to the Cy Young award. He fell all the way to 8th place in the voting. Davis passed his mark in only a year, pitching a 0.94 ERA season in 2015, but he would only move up to 6th place in the voting that year. While these were both shocking picks, the voting that happened the next year would show that the fall of relief pitchers in voting would become a normality.

In the 2016 season, Zack Britton, pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, was untouchable. In 67 innings Britton gave up just 4 runs, giving him an unfathomable 0.54 ERA for the season. This blew previous Cy Young contender seasons out of the water. This seemed like the best chance for a relief pitcher to potentially win the Cy Young award. However, when the votes were cast, Britton was not even on the podium, placing 4th. While the previous decisions could be justifiable, the fact that a pitcher who was as unhittable as Zack Britton only managed 4th place in the award voting was a huge sign that the days of bullpen Cy Youngs were over.

8 years after Britton’s season, not much has changed. Emmanuel Clase made his case for the Cy Young, but once again, an outstanding relief season was unrewarded by Cy Young voters. The 3rd place finish by Clase this year is a mark that has not been matched since 2008, but a 0.61 ERA is an extremely rare stat line, and the fact that no first-place votes for a season that cut a previous award winner’s ERA stat in half shows how the place of relief pitchers has changed, and how doubtful it is that we will see another bullpen Cy Young award. Will there be a future reliever that will finally take home the 10th bullpen Cy Young? While it is obviously possible, considering how the voters have treated Craig Kimbrel, Wade Davis, Zack Britton, and now Emmanuel Clase, there is definitely reason to believe that Eric Gagne’s Cy Young Award is the last of its kind.