Cy Young Award Winners by Year: The Complete List 

Baseball names its best pitcher award after a man who won 511 games — a number so far beyond anything possible in the modern era that it functions less as a benchmark and more as a monument. Cy Young pitched until he was 44 years old, threw complete games the way today’s starters throw four-inning outings, and retired in 1911 having done things to the record book that no pitcher will ever approach again.

The award bearing his name has been given out since 1956. For the first eleven years, one winner was named across both leagues. Starting in 1967, the American League and National League each crowned their own. That means two pitchers have shared the honor every season for more than half a century, and the names on that list read like a catalog of the sport’s most dominant arms across seven decades.

Seven times, one man has won it. Three times, a pitcher has won unanimously three years running. The award has gone to relievers, knuckleballers, a guy who had never won more than six games the year before, and a 21-year-old rookie who made every other pitcher in baseball look amateur by comparison. It has been given to pitchers who later had their reputations complicated, and to some of the cleanest and most beloved figures the sport has ever produced.

Every winner since 1956 is in the chart below.

The eras that shaped the award

The 1990s and early 2000s belonged to a small group of pitchers who turned the Cy Young into something close to a personal trophy. Greg Maddux won four straight from 1992 to 1995. Randy Johnson won four straight in the NL from 1999 to 2002 while also winning the AL in 1995. Roger Clemens collected seven across four different decades. Pedro Martinez had two of the most statistically dominant seasons in the award’s history back to back in 1999 and 2000.

The analytics era brought new names and more competition. Max Scherzer won three times across two leagues. Clayton Kershaw won three in a four-year stretch and remains the last pitcher to win the award and the MVP in the same season. Jacob deGrom won back to back while pitching for a Mets team that routinely scored one or two runs behind him — perhaps the most impressive two-year stretch for a pitcher who didn’t win 20 games either year.

The 2025 award went to Tarik Skubal in the AL, who repeated from 2024, and Paul Skenes in the NL, making him just the third pitcher in history to win both the Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award in consecutive seasons, joining Fernando Valenzuela and Dwight Gooden.

The bottom line

The Cy Young Award is 70 years old. In that time it has been won by Hall of Famers, one-time wonders, relievers, starters who went 20 innings in October and starters who barely got through April. The one thing every winner has in common is that for at least one season, no pitcher in their league was better. That’s the whole standard, and it’s the right one.

— Legion Report