The Minnesota Twins pitchers over the years have had brought home four Cy Young trophies since their move to Minnesota in 1961. Three different pitchers (Johan Santana twice) have captured the most prestigious pitching honor in baseball. But it’s been a hot minute since we’ve brought home some pitching hardware.
Could 2023 be the first time since 2006 that a Twins pitcher wins the coveted award? Right now, they have TWO guys in the mix to get the job done. I know, it’s only May, but I can’t help but get excited about how well Twins pitching has been performing so far this year!
Joe Ryan
Joe Ryan Day is one of my favorite holidays of the summer and it comes nearly every five days. What a treat! Ryan has been a total STUD in 2023. Ryan is currently 6-1 with a 2.16 ERA heading into his start on Thursday against Anaheim. The Joe Ryan Experience has fanned 57 batters in 50 innings pitched so far this year, so you could say he has a pretty good fan base.
Sonny Gray
Sonny may be 33 years old, but he is still dicing up hitters on the regular! At his age, do we start to call him Daddy Gray? The 10K crew is pretty confident Sonny can hang with the best of the other candidates so, logically, we decided to drop a Sunny Cy’d Up shirt for Twins Territory to show their support! That’s an elite breakfast pun that you can wear on your chest. Gray is currently +2200 to win the award, which is great value for being one of the top 5 pitchers in the American League at the moment. Sonny Gray has yet to be handed a loss in 2023 and has an ERA under two. What more could you want? Oh and one more thing, Sonny also has SIXTY strikeouts in 49.1 innings pitched this year.
Final Thoughts
Don’t get me wrong, baseball is a big market sport. People don’t care about small market teams like the Twins compared to the Yankees (ew), Dodgers and Red Sox. But, it is undeniable that the Twins have a good crop of pitching this year and its up to us Minnesotans to make some noise and support our guys the rest of the way to bring the Cy Young back to Minny. Let’s speak it into existence!
Note to Rocco: Let these guys pitch! I don’t care what the analytics say.
Parlay engineer with Twitter fingers.