5 Legendary Pitchers Who Deserved a Cy Young… But Never Won

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Nolan Ryan is the patron saint of the uncrowned. Seven no-hitters, 5,714 strikeouts, and a fastball that turned hitters into rumors—and somehow no Cy Young. The best case for him is 1987: he led the NL in ERA and strikeouts and still finished with an 8–16 record because run support treated him like a prank call. In 1973 he struck out 383 batters—an Everest no one else has climbed—and lost to Jim Palmer because voters still worshiped at the altar of wins. If the award measured terror and inevitability, Ryan would need a separate shelf. Curt Schilling’s curse is that the guy standing next to him was often named Randy Johnson or Johan Santana. He finished runner-up three times (2001, 2002, 2004), each season the kind that would win in most eras: video-game strikeout-to-walk ratios, 250+ innings, whipcord WHIPs, and an efficiency that made innings look shorter. In 2001 and 2002 he was essentially co-ace of a two-man baseball apocalypse in Arizona, and in 2004 he shouldered Boston’s regular-season engine. The timing was cruel; the performance was worthy. Mike Mussina was the thinking fan’s ace, the metronome of excellence buried under AL East neon. He never won a Cy Young, but he kept posting seasons that had the bones of one: 1992’s 18–5 with a 2.54 ERA, or 2001’s surgical command and league-best peripherals overshadowed by a teammate’s shinier record. He did it in bandboxes against murderers’ rows, with the kind of consistency that only becomes obvious in hindsight. If the award had a category for degree of difficulty plus elegance, Moose walks away with hardware. Juan Marichal threw like a statue come to life—high kick, higher standards—and ran into a pantheon bottleneck. In 1963 he went 25–8 with a 2.41 ERA; in 1966 he went 25–6 with a 2.23—all in the same zip code as Koufax, Gibson, and Seaver. Voters couldn’t give everyone a trophy, so they gave him none. But in any other timeline, those seasons are crowned; in this one, they remain masterpieces without a label. Mariano Rivera is the paradox: the greatest ever at his job, never awarded the game’s top pitching prize. The cutter alone deserved an acceptance speech. He had Cy-worthy years—1996’s 130 innings of doom as a setup man, 2005’s 1.38 ERA serenity, 2008’s near-perfection—wedged into a role the award treated like an optional appendix. When the moment was biggest, he was inevitable; the Cy Young wasn’t built to see that clearly. If dominance per inning counted like dominance per narrative, Rivera would have at least one—and probably a gold-plated one.