Bold prediction: Royals' Danny Duffy wins the AL Cy Young
As the 2017 Major League Baseball season begins, USA TODAY Sports' baseball staff lays out its bold predictions for the six months ahead:
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In our haste to anoint the next big thing in baseball, we often miss the more familiar narrative that usually plays out in the big leagues: A young player methodically establishing himself, taking some lumps on the way to eventual stardom.
That’s the path Danny Duffy followed, one we think will end in a 2017 AL Cy Young Award.
It has been a decade since the Kansas City Royals drafted Duffy out of a California high school, his name soon synonymous with the franchise’s other rising young stars expected to dig them out of three decades of futility.
It took Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Alex Gordon and others awhile to elevate the Royals to World Series champions. And it took Duffy even longer to arrive as a potential star, but arrive he has.
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He was a bit player on the Royals’ back-to-back pennant winners in 2014 and ’15. Tommy John surgery on his left elbow in June 2012 waylaid his career just as it began, though he was able to pitch his way into the fringes of the rotation two years later.
Still, as recently as last season, he was relegated to reliever. It wasn’t until May 15 that he made his first start, taking two weeks to get stretched out to complete even six innings.
From then on out, however, Duffy looked the part of emerging star.
He went 12-3 from June 1 until the end of the season, striking out 156 batters in 149 innings while posting a 3.56 ERA. His peripheral stats, however, show even greater cause for optimism.
Duffy’s strikeout-walk ratio zoomed from 1.92 in 2015 to a career-best 4.48; likewise, his strikeouts per nine innings increased from 2015 to a career-best 9.4, all while trimming his walks and hits per inning (WHIP) to 1.14.
He faded a bit in September as his odometer hit a career-high 179 2/3 innings. This year, he’ll get the ball on opening day, and a standard 20% increase in innings would put him easily over the 200-inning mark, a key plateau for Cy Young voters.
Duffy also will have a freshly signed five-year, $65 million deal in hand, the guaranteed money buying him certainty rather than waiting for free agent riches in November. So he’s a Royal guaranteed to stay, entering a season in which they might trade off their not-so-young stars before they hit the market.
By 2018, he might be their most recognizable figure.
By October, we foresee a lot more people outside of Kansas City knowing his name.
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