On Saturday, Jacob deGrom further improved his Cy Young candidacy by pitching a complete game and allowing no earned runs. It lowered his season ERA to 1.71 and his ERA+ is now 217 (117 percent better than the league average).

The common narrative has been Jacob deGrom is only beating Max Scherzer in ERA but in reality, it is more than that.

Between the two, deGrom has Max beat in ERA, ERA+, FIP, HR/9, wOBA, BB/9, fWAR, OPS against, and they are tied for bWAR (in terms of pitching). The stats that Scherzer leads in are H/9, wins, innings and WHIP.

For what it is worth, even if deGrom was “only winning the ERA battle,” then he would still be better than Scherzer because run prevention is the biggest thing for a pitcher. Max Scherzer could go his next 41 innings without giving up an earned run and he would still have a worse ERA than deGrom, which speaks to deGrom’s dominance.

The difference in deGrom and Scherzer’s innings are quite minimal, especially since the quality of innings that deGrom provides are greater than the quality of innings that Scherzer supplies. Pitching wins tell us virtually nothing. Jason Vargas and Clayton Kershaw both had the same number of wins in 2017. Rick Porcello has 15 wins this year even though he’s only been slightly above league average. Felix Hernandez and Lucas Giolito both have the same number of wins as deGrom. Need I go on?

As John Edwards of MMO and The Athletic points out on Twitter, deGrom has 11 starts this year where he has gone seven innings or more and given up one runs or less. Scherzer has seven such starts. deGrom puts his team in a better position to win, it is not his fault that he gets no offensive support from his teammates or his bullpen has blown the lead for him four times (all in starts where deGrom has gone at least seven).

The WHIP and H/9 argument is an interesting one and Doubl made a comment addressing it.

The summary of his argument is that deGrom gives up more hits than Scherzer but most of those hits are singles. DeGrom gives up fewer extra base hits as evidenced by the lower wOBA and OPS against him than Scherzer.

Not all hits are created equally which seems intuitive but judging by how many people cite deGrom’s WHIP as a reason why he shouldn’t win the Cy Young, it isn’t. Also, the defensive runs saved between deGrom’s shortstop and Scherzer’s shortstop is 21 runs in favor of Max.

Another common argument against deGrom is that Scherzer has more strikeouts.

That said, deGrom is still striking out nearly 11 guys per nine innings and he should reach the 250 strikeout plateau. It is not like he is striking out guys as frequently as Jason Vargas has been. Scherzer’s strikeouts are very impressive but deGrom has been striking out a lot of guys in his own right.

When digging into the numbers such as OPS/wOBA against him and the poor defense behind him, it seems quite clear why Jacob deGrom should be the favorite for the NL Cy Young award. Fact of the matter is, he might be the best pitcher in baseball this season since Chris Sale and Trevor Bauer are injured. We might need to start talking about his candidacy for the NL MVP award soon if he keeps this up.