Kansas City Royals: Appreciating Kevin Appier’s amazing 1993 season

Let’s review former KC Royals pitcher Kevin Appier’s amazing 1993 season.

Things were looking up for the Kansas City Royals in 1993. After winning the World Series in 1985, the team had missed the postseason for seven straight years but had still posted four winning records. The Royals dropped to 72-90 in 1992, and yet had some inspiring seasons from several players, including a fourth-year starting pitcher.

In 1992, Kevin Appier–the former No. 9 overall pick out of Antelope Valley College in 1987–anchored the Royals’ rotation. Then only 24-years-old, Appier led the Royals in wins (15), ERA (2.46), ERA+ (164), innings pitched (208.1), strikeouts (150), FIP (2.98), WHIP (1.128), home runs allowed per nine innings (0.4), strikeouts per nine innings (6.5), and WAR (8.0), among other categories.

Crazily, he didn’t receive a single vote for that year’s American League Cy Young Award.

Even crazier, he topped it all the next season.

With the Kansas City Royals now playing Spring Training games in preparation of the 2021 season, let’s step back and rewind 28 years to 1993 so that we can fully appreciate the best season of Kevin Appier’s career.

A season that should’ve netted him not only the Cy Young Award but also the American League Most Valuable Player Award.

Instead, he didn’t win either, and it wasn’t even close.

Alright, time to compare some pitchers without names attached:

• Pitcher A: 3.37 ERA, .314 opponents’ OBP (Opp. OBP) 14.8 strikeout percentage (K%), 256.2 innings pitched (IP), .298 opponents’ batting average on balls in play (BABIP), 3.61 FIP
• Pitcher B: 3.24 ERA, .290 Opp. OBP, 29.5 K%, 255.1 IP, .276 BABIP, 3.05 FIP
• Pitcher C: 2.56 ERA, .279 Opp. OBP, 19.5 K%, 238.1 IP, .260 BABIP, 2.90 FIP
• Pitcher D: 3.00 ERA, .279 Opp. OBP, 18.3 K%, 236.1 IP, .276 BABIP, 3.51 FIP

How would you rank those four when it came time to voting for the Cy Young Award?

Using those numbers, I posited that very question on Twitter, asked my Facebook friends, and reached out to three others: David Scharff, the site expert at Kings of Kauffman; Leigh Oleszczak, KC Kingdom’s site expert; and one of the nation’s premiere gooseologists.

In total, my super scientific polling garnered 18 responses. (Hey, that’s close to 20!)  Some results:

• CBDA was the most common order with 10 votes followed by CDBA with 6 votes
• Pitcher A finished with 0 first-place votes, 1 second-place vote, 1 third-place vote, and 16 fourth-place votes
• Pitcher B finished with 0 first-place votes, 10 second-place votes, 7 third-place votes, and 1 fourth-place vote
• Pitcher C finished with 17 first-place votes, 0 second-and third-place votes, and 1 fourth-place vote
• Pitcher D finished with 1 first-place vote, 7 second-place votes, 10 third-place votes, and 0 fourth-place votes.

These stats were all posted in the 1993 season. The actual American League Cy Young Award voting results ended in this order: A, B, C, D.

Pitcher A is Jack McDowell; Pitcher B is Hall of Famer Randy Johnson; Pitcher C is Appier; and Pitcher D is Jimmy Key.

Of course, I left out some things regarding this blind test. Most notably, the pitchers’ records. Wins and losses today are viewed as pretty useless by a lot of fans and most of those who cover the sport. But back in 1993, wins were key. And getting to 20 wins was considered the holy grail of pitching achievements.

That’s why Jack McDowell won the Cy Young Award in 1993. Sure, he had a fine season, but it paled in comparison to Johnson’s, Appier’s, and Key’s. However, Black Jack McDowell led the American League in wins, finishing 22-10 for the 94-68 Chicago White Sox. Of the four pitchers listed, he’s also the only one whose team reached the playoffs.

Johnson finished 19-8 for the 82-80 Mariners who finished 12 games back of Chicago in the old American League West. Appier finished 18-8 for the 84-78 Royals, who finished 10 games back of Chicago. And in the American League East, Key finished 18-6 for the 88-74 Yankees who finished seven games back of the Toronto Blue Jays.

In the end, McDowell led the league in wins while Johnson led the Majors in strikeouts with 308. (The next guy only had 227!)

Appier, meanwhile, led the Major Leagues in ERA+ and home runs per nine innings while leading American League in ERA and FIP and finishing second in both WHIP (1.106) and hits per nine innings.

He had an incredible season that deserved much more than finishing third in the AL Cy Young Award voting. He deserved to win it.

And also the MVP.

The Most Valuable Player Award and the Cy Young Award have an interesting relationship. Despite what some may think, the Cy Young Award was not created to be the “Pitchers’ MVP.” No, pitchers can still win the MVP Award. It just rarely happens.

The Cy Young Award wasn’t introduced until 1956, right after the death of Denton True “Cyclone” Young–Cy Young for short. For the first 11 years of its existence, only one Cy Young Award was awarded between the two leagues despite that never having been the case for the MVP Award since its inception in 1911.

In 1956, the Major League Cy Young Award winner was Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He also won the National League Most Valuable Player Award.

Since then, only 10 pitchers have won an MVP Award. But it still happens and happened as recently as 2014 when Clayton Kershaw won the NL MVP with the Dodgers. Before that, it happened in 2011 when Justin Verlander of the Tigers won the AL MVP.

Before Verlander, the last time a pitcher in either league had won an MVP was in 1992.

So it’s not out of the realm of possibility to state that not only was Kevin Appier robbed of the 1993 American Cy Young Award, but also he was robbed of the 1993 American League MVP Award.

In 1993, Frank Thomas of the White Sox captured his first of back-to-back American League MVP Awards. And he had a pretty good season, no doubt about it.

The Big Hurt didn’t lead the league in any offensive categories but slashed a healthy .317/.426/.607 for an OPS of 1.033, which was 77% above league average. He bashed 41 homers to go with 36 doubles, scored 106 runs, and drove in 128 runs. He also walked dang near twice as much as he struck out.

For some reason, he won the MVP Award with ease, receiving all 28 first-place votes. He was worth 6.2 wins above replacement, which is excellent, but was also 10th among the 26 players who received some recognition for the MVP that year, and 15th among all Major League hitters.

His win probability added came out to 6.3, tops in the AL.

Appier’s numbers, when looked at together, top Thomas’. But Appier finished tied for 24th in MVP voting that year with two other Royals finishing ahead of him. Overall, Appier finished with 9.3 WAR, which led the American League and was over 3 WAR more than Thomas; and he finished with 6.2 WPA, right behind Thomas.

Why was Appier hardly considered for the American League MVP Award, then?

Well, one, he was a pitcher, and it seems that a pitcher can only win the MVP Award if he has a historic season. And I mean historic, like one look at it and it’s a no-brainer. When you have to dig, when you have to analyze, that doesn’t get the job done. Not meaning that’s right, but that’s the way it is.

Two other reasons, and they’re both reasons why he finished third in the Cy Young voting: pitcher wins, and team wins. He didn’t reach 20 wins and his team finished well back of division champion.

In hindsight, we can much better appreciate Appier’s outstanding 1993. But it’s still a shame that those who voted upon the awards in 1993 didn’t give him his due credit.

Before the 1994 season, Major League Baseball split each league into three divisions and introduced the Wild Card, meaning four teams from each league would make the playoffs. 115 games into the season, the Royals were 64-51, third in the American League Central, but only four games back of the leading White Sox and three back of the Wild Card leading Indians.

But you know what happens next.

The Strike hits and wipes out the rest of the season, including the playoffs and World Series.

The Strike hits small-market teams particularly hard. The Royals were playing dang fine baseball in 1994, building off another winning season in 1993. In a shortened 1995 season, the Royals hung tough but finished 70-74.

But for a minor aberration in 2003, that would be as good as things got for 17 years. And those were some very long, lean years.

Kevin Appier stuck with the Royals through the middle of 1999, and even though he made his lone All-Star Game in 1995 and led the league in FIP again in 1996, he never matched his 1993 season.

Ultimately, the Royals dealt Appier to the Oakland Athletics. He joined the Mets in 2001 and then won the World Series with Anaheim Angels in 2002. The following season, he re-joined the Royals in August of 2003 and last pitched in the Majors the following year.

Fittingly, he was still with the Royals and on the mound inside Kauffman Stadium.

In 2011, Appier was inducted into the Kansas City Royals Hall of Fame.