When David Appelman announced on Monday that we were adding college stats to our player pages and leaderboards, more than one person reached out to congratulate me personally. I had nothing to do with the conception or implementation of this blessed happening, but it is true: FanGraphs having college stats could not be more up my alley.

I wanted to play around with the new leaderboard, but this early in the season, there’s little to be gleaned. No pitcher has made more than four starts; no team has played more than 14 games. And most of the action we’ve seen so far has been nonconference throat-clearing, mismatches between blue bloods and mid-majors. The numbers will tell, but not for another few weeks.

So I decided to go back to the roots of the sabermetrics movement. Our college leaderboards might not have all the latest fancy Statcast stuff, but we’ve got FIP and K% and all sorts of things you wouldn’t take for granted if you’ve ever had to calculate a pitcher’s WHIP by hand on the back of a box score in a MAC press box. When we got all that stuff in the pro game, what did we do with it?

That’s right, relitigate award voting.

So that’s what I’m going to do here. Just as in football, college baseball has awards for the best player in the country at various positions. The Buster Posey Award for the best catcher, the Brooks Wallace Award for best shortstop, the John Olerud Award for the best two-way player. That’s in addition to the Golden Spikes Award, the Dick Howser Trophy, and various other overall player of the year awards, all-conference, and All-America teams.

The best pitcher in college baseball doesn’t get a trophy with a snazzy name; it’s just the National Pitcher of the Year Award. The winner is determined by the College Baseball Foundation, an organization that, among other things, runs the College Baseball Hall of Fame.

The College Baseball Foundation has given this award out since 2009, and its history is… uneven. Our data only goes back to 2021, so I’m only going to go back that far. (Much as I’d like to kick and stomp about Michael Roth posting a 1.06 ERA in 145 innings and winning a national championship in 2011, but somehow not being the best pitcher in college baseball that year, I can’t.)

Not to spoil things, but over the past four years, I think the CBF has gotten the right answer every time. There have been some bumps in the road, however, like how the press release announcing the 2022 finalists spelled two of the five players’ names wrong. But that’s all part of the folksy charm of college baseball.

What I’m interested in is who made the cut as a finalist. Specifically, whether those decisions were based on what you might call 20th century Cy Young criteria (like wins, innings pitched, and ERA), and whether they’d have been different had FIP and K-BB% been widely accessible.

To find out, I lined up some basic and advanced stats for each year’s finalists (the winner is highlighted in red), along with where they stood among all qualified college starters. The finalists are chosen before the season is over, and unlike in MLB, college regular and postseason stats are all amalgamated. Those considerations make looking back on these finalist lists a bit of an inexact science, so even though I’m nitpicking here, I do so with the greatest possible charity and understanding:

This is the only year of the four where I’d advance the case for a different winner (I would’ve picked Burns over Smith), but it’s close. And at any rate, this was a case where there were five correct names to put on the list of finalists, and the committee got all of them. Nevertheless, this was a pretty easy year in which to pick five finalists.

The five best pitchers in terms of both K-BB% and FIP were all starting pitchers, eliminating the starter-versus-reliever debate that complicated years past. Three of the five pitchers came from power conference programs, and the other two where from mid-major teams that are serial regional participants and even hosts.

You know who else liked this set of five pitchers? Pro scouts. Burns, Smith, and Yesavage were the first, second, and fourth college pitchers off the board in last year’s draft, and the only pitcher who broke up that group, Mississippi State’s Jurrangelo Cijntje, can pitch with both hands. Johnson went in the second round; Arnold, not draft-eligible last season, is a strong contender to go no. 1 overall in this year’s draft.

A strong start. Let’s go a year further into the past:

To some extent, nothing on this page matters apart from Skenes, who dominated the rest of the country to a degree seldom seen in college baseball. The best illustration I can think of is that Skenes led the country with a 1.54 FIP; the second-best FIP in the country belonged to Isaac Stebens of Oklahoma State, with a 2.78.

Unlike in 2024, this year had a runaway winner; also unlike in 2024, I do take issue with one or two of the finalists. In addition to Skenes, Lowder was the clear second-best starting pitcher in the country. Neighbors — my buddy from the Draft Combine — earned his spot despite being a reliever, on account of his being the only pitcher to come close to matching Skenes on a per-inning basis.

The other two I could take or leave. Put Rogers in as a high-volume guy with a sub-2.00 ERA? I guess I don’t hate it, despite a lackluster K-BB%. There wasn’t really another starter I felt strongly about, and two of the best options were Josh Hartle and Seth Keener, both teammates of Lowder’s at Wake Forest. Why not throw a bone to the smaller conferences instead of loading up on the no. 1 team in the country?

If I were going to take a reliever from a smaller league, I would’ve gone for Cade Denton of Oral Roberts over Miller. Denton was sixth in the country in K-BB% and 11th in FIP; Miller was outside the top 50 in the former and outside the top 300 in the latter. I suspect that the real draw for Miller was the fact that he earned eight wins and 11 saves in just 27 appearances. That’s an impressive enough ratio on its own, but consider that he got either the win or the save in exactly half of the 38 games UTSA won. Remind me to come back to this when we get historical win probability data for college baseball. On to 2022:

Hell yeah, this is the stuff. The 2023 and 2024 lists were stat-savvy and nuanced; this is a list of guys with a lot of wins, if ever I saw one. It looks like a Cy Young results page from the 1990s.

Hjerpe won the actual award, and he pretty clearly should have. Maybe not as clearly as Skenes, but he had a great combination of volume, quality, results, and peripherals. Dollander lagged a little on quantity but put up monster peripherals; Thorpe, the opposite.

The other two finalists I disagree with. Lowder was fine as a sophomore, but nowhere near the monster who deserved his spot as a finalist in 2023. As for Hansen, well, I will say that his inclusion is not as ridiculous as the final stats make it look. At the end of the Big 12 Tournament, his ERA stood at 3.01, but in three starts in the NCAA Tournament, Hansen allowed 24 hits and 15 runs in 15 innings pitched. (In the best of those starts, he actually outpitched Skenes and Air Force in regional action.)

But even if Hansen hadn’t gotten crushed in the NCAA Tournament, there were still better finalists. Southern Mississippi’s Tanner Hall was in the top 10 in the country in both K-BB% and FIP. Florida State’s Parker Messick finished third in the country in K-BB% in nearly 100 innings, but had his case undermined by a 3.38 ERA. Messick’s FIP, however was seven-tenths of a run better than Lowder’s and 1.2 runs better than Hansen’s. And that’s before you get into the relievers, like Kentucky’s Tyler Guilfoil and Charleston’s William Privette. We could’ve done better, in short. Let’s look at 2021:

History will remember this as the Leiter-Rocker year, but if you weren’t into college baseball back then, you probably don’t remember how absurd Kopps was. Great college relievers fall into two categories: One- or two-inning closers, like you’ll see in the pros, and pitchers who take advantage of the spread-out schedule to throw basically all the time. Kopps made 33 appearances in 2021, 32 of them out of the ‘pen, and because he averaged almost three innings a stint, put together a starter-type workload.

And despite throwing such a massive volume of innings out of the ‘pen, he put up one-inning closer rate stats: a 39.5% strikeout rate, a 0.90 ERA, and an opponent batting average of .160. Kopps finished third in the country in ERA on a fluke; one of the two pitchers ahead of him was Penn’s Brendan Bean, who didn’t allow an earned run in seven appearances. But because Penn only played 14 games in the entire COVID-shortened season, those seven appearances allowed Bean to qualify for the leaderboard.

Kopps’ Arkansas team was the no. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, but failed to make the College World Series. In fact, after 12 wins and 11 saves in his first 32 appearances, Kopps took his only loss of the season in the decisive Super Regional game. Making his first start of the year, he pitched into the ninth inning, where he allowed the series-winning home run on his 118th pitch of the game.

Arkansas ended up losing a home super regional despite outscoring NC State 28-11 on aggregate. And since I mentioned COVID earlier, NC State forfeited its way out of the College World Series when so many players got sick the Wolfpack couldn’t field a full lineup. Which isn’t quite adding insult to injury; it’s more adding illness to insult. Anyway, that’s college baseball for you. You couldn’t make this up.

Back to the other award finalists. Rocker and Leiter were shoo-ins, even though Leiter got a little homer-prone and ended up with a relatively ugly FIP. Nikhazy is unobjectionable. But the two mid-major starters with big win totals and tiny ERAs — Delaite and Guerrero — don’t stand up to tougher scrutiny. Especially Delaite, who finished outside the top 300 in K-BB%, and outperformed his FIP by more than two runs.

If I were going to have a token pitcher from a smaller program, I would’ve been more inclined to choose Villanova’s Gordon Graceffo, who only won seven games to Delaite’s 12. But Graceffo backed up his 1.54 ERA with a 2.24 FIP. More likely, I’d have gone with Mississippi State closer Landon Sims, whose workload was only a little more than half of Kopps’ (56 1/3 innings), but he led the country in both K-BB% and FIP. In the latter case, it was a blowout; Sims had a FIP of just 1.39, with Kopps more than half a run behind him in second place at 2.07.

What did we learn from this exercise? Well, apart from remembering some college baseball heroes of times gone by, and airing a minor grievance against the College Baseball Foundation, there’s one big takeaway: I love our new toy, and I am going to use it to become an absolute terror going forward. I hope you’re all ready.