Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Chris Martin Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports

Unlikely Red Sox pitcher gets surprise Cy Young Award vote

Originally posted on Larry Brown Sports
By Darryn Albert | Last updated 11/16/23

Major League Baseball officially has its new Ryan Tepera.

New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole ran away with this year’s American League Cy Young Award. Cole was revealed on Wednesday to have received 30 out of 30 first-place votes for the award, making him the 12th unanimous Cy Young winner in AL history (as well as the first Yankees pitcher to win it since Roger Clemens in 2001).

For the 12th time, the AL Cy Young winner is decided unanimously pic.twitter.com/2GOMyiKCOZ

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) November 16, 2023

Going under the hood of the voting results revealed something extremely interesting though. Boston Red Sox reliever Chris Martin stunningly got a fifth-place vote for Cy Young. It was just one writer who voted for Martin, and Martin was also the only pitcher in either league to get one lone vote.

Gerrit Cole is the unanimous AL Cy Young! pic.twitter.com/HKr6rPSl6L

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) November 15, 2023

Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune was later revealed to have cast the vote in question. As a result, Martin got an official 12th-place finish on the Cy Young ballot.

The 37-year-old Martin did admittedly have a lights-out season for the Red Sox. He was 4-1 with a microscopic 1.05 ERA in 55 total relief appearances, but Martin did not really strike many guys out (8.1 per nine innings) and was probably far from one of the five best overall pitchers, starters or relievers, in the AL.

Martin did pitch part of the 2022 season with the Chicago Cubs, so perhaps Sullivan developed an affinity for him then. At least it wasn’t as strange as the first-place vote that we saw handed out for Cy Young some years ago.

This article first appeared on Larry Brown Sports and was syndicated with permission.

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