MVP & Cy Young Awards: A Mariners’ History

Last week, both the Cy Young Award and the MVP Award winners were announced for the 2014 season. A few Mariner players received a decent amount of votes but, tragically, none of them took home one of these coveted awards. I don't need to recap what happened in the Cy Young Award voting but three Mariners earned MVP votes, Robinson Cano (124 pts.), Felix Hernandez (48), and Kyle Seager (1). Seeing those votes for multiple Mariner players got me thinking, which year did the Mariners as a team earn the most Cy Young and MVP votes?

Thankfully, Baseball Reference maintains a complete database of all of the MVP and Cy Young award voting totals. I tabulated all of the results for Mariner players all the way back to the inaugural season, 1977. Here are the results in a single table:

* Indicates winner

It comes as no surprise that 2001 and 1995 are the top two years by total MVP and Cy Young award votes. Both years were pretty historic and both had unforgettable performances by Mariner players, including a Cy Young award for Randy Johnson in 1995. The next highest total was 1997, the height of the mid-90's Mariners and the year that Ken Griffey Jr. unanimously won the MVP award. Rounding out the top five years are 1996 and 2014. Yes, in 2014, Mariner players earned the fifth highest amount of MVP and Cy Young votes. Here's a look at the same data in graphical form:

You could have guessed that the peaks and valleys in that graph follow the peaks and valleys of the organization as a whole. Three of the top five years were playoff years and the only other year the Mariners made the playoffs (2000) comes in sixth. The valleys are just as easy to predict. The early years of the franchise were pretty dreary, the same as the mid-2000's. The most recent year with zero total MVP and Cy Young votes was 2011.

Mariner players have won two MVP awards and two Cy Young awards. Three of the those awards came in years that are placed in the top five years while the fourth -- Felix's Cy Young in 2010 -- appears all the way back in tenth.

It's also interesting to see which Mariner players have received votes over the years. My favorites are the players like Richie Sexson (7 pts, 2005) and J.J. Putz (12 pts, 2007), who were good enough to earn more than a just a few 10^th place votes but weren't good enough to earn much more than that. Then there are the names that show up all over that table -- the icons of the franchise. Here are the top five earners by total MVP votes or Cy Young votes:

With his second place finish this year, Felix Hernandez moved ahead of Randy Johnson as the top, Cy Young vote-getter as a Mariner. Robinson Cano quickly established himself as a threat to jump up this leaderboard in his first year as a Mariner. As someone like Bret Boone shows us, it could take just a few huge years to see a jump into the upper echelons of Mariner stardom.

What does this tell us about next year? Practically nothing. This was simply a frivolous exercise in the midst of the long offseason. I would like to point out that the years with the most similar point totals to 2014 were followed by playoff appearances the next year. Also, the closest year in total points to 2014 was followed by the historic 2001 Mariners. It's probably nothing, right?