Last season marked the ascendance of Tarik Skubal, as the southpaw opened the 2024 season as an extremely solid pitcher and Cy Young Award contender but not quite an outright star. His splendid summer put that conversation solidly in the rear-view mirror, and he raced to the honor unanimously, leading the American League in wins (18), Earned Run Average (2.39), and strikeouts (228).
The Detroit Tigers star turned 28 on the day that he won the award, so there’s no reason not to believe he can repeat his feat in 2025. Unsurprisingly, then, he enters the season as the +380 favorite to go back-to-back, followed by Garrett Crochet (+450) and Cole Ragans (+1000).
But winning baseball’s most prestigious pitching award is incredibly difficult, and there’s a reason only 11 men in the award’s 68-year history have won it in consecutive seasons. It wouldn’t necessarily be a shock to see Skubal win the award again, but here are three others who have a chance at pipping him to the silverware.
2025 NL Cy Young Award Odds
Jacob deGrom (+1400)
The Texas Rangers ace has a lengthy injury history and has not pitched a full workload in any of the past four seasons because of a series of ailments. First, it was a forearm issue that cut his 2021 season short after a first half in which he recorded a ridiculous 1.08 ERA and 146 strikeouts in just 92.0 innings. Then, it was a shoulder injury that cost him the first half of the 2022 season. Finally, he underwent a second Tommy John surgery after experiencing elbow discomfort midway through the 2023 campaign, which limited him to just three (elite) starts in September 2024.
A 36-year-old coming off of his second elbow surgery wouldn’t ordinarily be in the running for a Cy Young Award, but deGrom is no ordinary pitcher. He’s a two-time winner of the award, has the highest career strikeout-to-walk ratio in MLB history, threw 97-plus regularly even in his few starts in 2024, and he’s been more or less unstoppable every time he’s taken the mound, even in the injury-affected second half of his career. Prior to being shut down in April 2023, he had posted a 0.61 WHIP in that month, the third-best among starting pitchers.
The question for deGrom this season will be whether or not he can stay healthy, and to that end, he will reportedly make an effort to manage his velocity in addition to the Rangers somewhat limiting his workload. He finished seventh in his sophomore season while pitching just 191.0 innings, so as long as he comes close to that number, pitches effectively, and Texas has a bounce-back season, he could easily win the award for a third time. One of his contemporaries, Justin Verlander, won the Cy Young Award in 2019 at age 36, had Tommy John and missed most of the next two seasons, then won it again in 2022 at age 39. Could a late-career revival be in play for deGrom as well?
Logan Gilbert (+1400)
Gilbert has improved every season of his career in virtually every conceivable metric, so it would hardly be surprising if the next step for him is the first piece of major silverware in his career. For instance, his WHIP has gone from 1.18 in each of his first two seasons to 1.08 in 2023 to a league-leading 0.89 last season. Consider, also, the fact that his ground ball-to-fly ball ratio — an important stat given that fly balls are more likely to produce extra-base hits and therefore runs — has improved from 0.49 to 0.58 to 0.72 to 0.80. Sure, he benefited somewhat from posting the league’s third-lowest batting average on balls in play, and his FIP figure was slightly higher than his ERA, but still, holding opposing batters to a .196 batting average — the second-lowest among qualified AL pitchers — is impressive.
He’s helped somewhat by pitching in the AL West, where four of the five teams in the division ranked in the bottom half of the league in terms of runs scored. But if Gilbert continues his steady improvement and posts a few signature games against higher-powered offenses, I’m sure voters will focus on the gaudy workload, a low opposing batting average figure, and a strikeout number that ranks near the top of the league, which could be enough to win him his first award.
It’s not hard to see why a six-foot-six pitcher who has a true five-pitch arsenal, throws a 96.6-mile-per-hour fastball and a 9-3 curve with up to 18 inches of movement, and ranks in the 95th percentile at avoiding walks has the potential to be a major figure in the most prestigious pitching award race. If his Seattle Mariners usurp the Houston Astros at the top of the division, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him walk away with it.
Max Fried (+2500)
The newest New York Yankees star is in need of a little bit of a revival after a difficult final season with the Atlanta Braves in which his ERA ballooned to 3.25, his highest figure since 2019. It was also his worst season since 2020 in both walk avoidance and strikeout-to-walk ratio. That said, Fried has done it before, finishing in the top five of Cy Young Award voting twice, so unlike several of the other long-shot contenders for the 2025 award, he’s proven that he can pitch at a Cy Young level.
Plus, his 2024 season really wasn’t as bad as some of the numbers make it out to be. He had four truly awful starts: in his first two games of the season, an outing against the Philadelphia Phillies on July 5, and one against the Miami Marlins on August 4 that came in his first start back from a stint on the 15-day IL with a forearm injury. Take those 14.1 innings and 20 earned runs away, and his ERA drops to a very respectable 2.42. Of course, you can’t entirely discount a full tenth of his workload, but there’s always an element of randomness to a blowup game, and it shows that he’s still elite outside of those. Most of his figures were similar — or, in the case of ground ball ratio, even better — to those he posted in 2022, when he was the runner up for the NL Cy Young.
The Yankees provided their pitchers with more defensive support in 2024 than the Braves did, so Fried’s stats should look somewhat better in 2025. Plus, he’ll get significant national media attention pitching under the bright lights of New York City. Fried still has one of the best off-speed packages in the game, including a 12-6 curveball with as much as two feet of movement. If the Bronx Bombers can post the best record in the AL one year after losing the World Series and Fried avoids blow-up games, he will get much of the credit. It just feels like he’s due.
