Passan: How Astros’ Hunter Brown became the calendar year AL Cy Young
Of the 460,000-plus outings by a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball history, among the ugliest came a little more than a year ago. Hunter Brown, a right-hander for the Houston Astros with a high-octane fastball and an array of off-speed pitches, allowed nine runs to the Kansas City Royals and mustered only two outs. He yielded 11 hits, the most ever for a start of less than one inning.
In the weeks following the thrashing, Brown journeyed to find the version of himself who had gone from unheralded high schooler to standout at Division II Wayne State to major league rotation piece. He asked hard questions — of his teammates and himself. He weathered a few more middling outings and was on the cusp of a demotion. And he realized that in order to secure his future, he needed to look into his past and reacquaint himself with a long-abandoned pitch.
“He embraced that ass whooping,” Astros closer Josh Hader said, “and just became who he is now.”
Today, the 26-year-old Brown is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Since a transformative relief appearance last May, in which he unleashed a two-seam fastball he had stopped throwing five years earlier, Brown owns the best earned run average among American League starters at 2.20, nearly a quarter-point better than reigning AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. Only Paul Skenes, arguably the game’s finest starter, has a lower ERA in that time frame than Brown. In six starts this season, Brown sports a 1.22 ERA, has struck out nearly six times as many hitters as he has walked and resembles the archetypal modern pitcher, marrying velocity with a six-pitch arsenal that consistently flummoxes hitters.
It all started May 11, 2024, in Detroit, where Brown grew up rooting for the Tigers and trying to emulate Justin Verlander. He had fiddled with seemingly everything since the Kansas City nightmare, changing his stride and hand placement during his delivery to no avail. He had sought counsel from teammates — Verlander, Hader and veteran reliever Ryan Pressly. His best advice came from hitters, though, when Brown presented them with a question: If you were facing me, what would you be looking for?
“Oh, Brown, that’s easy,” nine-time All-Star second baseman Jose Altuve told him. “Hard and away.”
Brown asked Astros shortstop Jeremy Peña the same question and was greeted with the identical answer. Ditto for longtime Astros third baseman Alex Bregman. Each said Brown’s arsenal, with his four-seamer, cutter, slider and curveball breaking to his glove side, needed a complementary offering inside to right-handed hitters particularly. His two-seamer re-debuted May 5 against the Mariners but found its footing six days later at Comerica Park.
“It’s no secret. At the time I was pitching terribly,” Brown said. “I knew I was running out of time. Something had to give. I just switched my mentality. Like, all right, this is going awful. I got to see all my family and friends, and I was like, ‘You know what, if this is my last major league game for a while, I’m gonna go out there and let it all loose.'”
Brown entered the game in the third inning determined to embrace a pitch he had ditched when the Astros chose him in the fifth round of the 2019 draft. While others, including Statcast, call it a sinker, it doesn’t have the standard boring action of the pitch. Brown says it is a “flat, running” fastball thrown with a two-seam grip — and he is convinced it helped salvage his career. He limited the Tigers to one run on five hits over five innings with seven strikeouts that day.
He picked up the pitch almost immediately because of his familiarity with it. During his three seasons at Wayne State, Brown threw almost exclusively a two-seamer and slider. When he entered the Astros organization, their philosophy was simple: Pair a hard breaking ball with a top-of-the-zone four-seam fastball and find success. He did and shot through Houston’s system after COVID, joining the Astros for the stretch run of their eventual World Series victory in 2022.
Brown’s ability to add pitches had already endeared him to Houston’s development staff. During his draft year, he filled out a survey for the Astros on his pitch mix and said he threw a curveball even though he had scrapped it in college. Early in his time with the Astros, coaches asked him to throw the curveball just to see what they had. After the first curve Brown tried, a coach chimed in: “Yeah, you’re gonna keep throwing that.”
Considering he had added a changeup and cutter during his time with the Astros, too, Brown didn’t fret about the rebirth of his two-seamer. The pitch didn’t need to move like his teammate Framber Valdez‘s. It simply served as a reminder to hitters that Brown wasn’t afraid to throw inside and that they couldn’t hunt the rest of his arsenal on the outer half of the plate.
“I wanted to go back to just athletic throwing,” Brown said. “I don’t want to be a robot. I think people get so locked in and dialed into repeating the exact same delivery every single time, which, yes, in a vacuum, if you can do that, that’s awesome. There’s not a lot of guys that can actually do that over the course of the season. I kind of just like taking — I don’t wanna say a whiffle ball-in-the-backyard approach, but realistically, that’s what you’re trying to do. It’s just against the best players in the world.”
Over time, as the two-seamer paid dividends and was further incorporated into his pitch mix, Brown regained his confidence and began to understand the advice Verlander was giving him. Mindset isn’t just important, Verlander said. It’s everything. If a hitter gets jammed and flares a ball into the outfield, that’s not bad luck worth lamenting; it’s a reminder that process trumps outcome, and any sort of pitch that induces a weakly hit ball is a good one — and one that can be replicated to greater effect going forward.
Slowly, Brown cobbled together strong starts and began to live up to the nickname given to him a few years earlier, when he was at Triple-A. The team had gathered at the airport at 3:30 a.m. to return home, and Brown was pounding a drink loaded with caffeine. Why, his teammate Pete Solomon asked, would he do that in the middle of the night when their flight wasn’t scheduled to land until 8 a.m.?
“Hey, man,” Brown said. “You put diesel in, you get diesel out. I’ve got stuff to do today.”
On that day, Diesel was born — and Brown’s velocity numbers support the sobriquet. Only Hunter Greene, Skenes, Skubal and Jose Soriano throw an average fastball harder than Brown’s 97.4 mph. It’s almost a tick and a half higher than last season, a function, Brown said, of a more mature routine. In addition to offseason work on mobility and strength gained through Bulgarian split squats, the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Brown relaxed his off-day weightlifting habit and ramped back his velocity in between-starts bullpen sessions from 92-to-94 mph to 86-to-88.
“His whole demeanor when he steps out there is different,” Pena said. “He shows up ready to dominate every time he’s about to take the mound. Every time he’s up there, you see him strutting around.”
It’s reminiscent of Verlander, whose cocksure mound presence is a defining feature. During Brown’s struggles, Verlander tried to remind him that his raw stuff was good enough to stop trying to execute perfect pitches and instead challenge hitters to hit his stuff in the strike zone. Brown’s walk rate this year is among the game’s best, and on pitches in the zone, hitters are batting .191/.200/.258 against him, good for the third-lowest OPS in the game.
“It goes one way or the other,” Hader said. “You feel sorry for yourself and play the victim or you figure out, ‘Hey, I got to do this to be where I want to be, and I want to stay here. I’ve got to be better.’ And that’s just the type of dude he is. I mean, go and look at the numbers over the last year.”
They remained sparkling Sunday during his first outing in Kansas City since the disasterpiece of 2024. Brown blitzed through six innings against the Royals, yielding one run and striking out seven, and solidified his case for AL Pitcher of the Month. Awards don’t really matter to Brown, though. This time last year, he worried about simply keeping his rotation spot.
No longer is that a concern. Diesel has arrived, carving lineups, snatching hitters’ dignity, writing one more chapter in the story of a naysayer-slaying, doubt-squashing triumph. Now, he’s learning to embrace something far more palatable than an ass whooping: success.
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Greg Wyshynski
The Winnipeg Jets defended star goaltender Connor Hellebuyck after another disastrous performance on the road, a 5-2 loss Friday night in which the St. Louis Blues forced Game 7 in their Stanley Cup Playoff opening-round series.
Hellebuyck was pulled after the second period in favor of backup Eric Comrie, the third straight game in St. Louis that he failed to finish. Hellebuyck surrendered five goals on 23 shots, including four goals on eight shots during a 5-minute, 23-second stretch in the second period that cost the Jets the game.
As has become tradition in this series, Blues fans mockingly chanted, “We want Connor!” after Hellebuyck left the game and the Jets’ bench.
“This isn’t about Connor,” Winnipeg coach Scott Arniel said. “Tonight was not about Connor. Tonight, we imploded in front of him. Now, it’s a one-game showdown. It’s our goalie against their goalie, our best players against their best, our grinders against theirs. I have a lot of confidence in our [entire] group — not just Helly.”
Hellebuyck won the Vezina Trophy last season as the NHL’s top goaltender, as voted on by the league’s general managers. He also won the award in 2019-20 and is the favorite to win it for a third time this season. Hellebuyck is also a finalist for the 2024-25 Hart Trophy, awarded to the NHL’s most valuable player. He was the starting goaltender for Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in February and was expected to do the same for the U.S. in next year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.
But his recent performances in the Stanley Cup playoffs have been the antithesis of that success.
Over the past three postseasons, two of which the Jets lost in the first round in just five games, Hellebuyck is 5-11 with an .860 save percentage.
Hellebuyck failed to finish any of the three games played in St. Louis during the series. He was pulled with 9:28 left in regulation in Game 3, having given up six goals on 25 shots. In Game 4, Hellebuyck was pulled 2:01 into the third period after surrendering five goals on 18 shots. Hellebuyck has allowed four or more goals in seven straight road playoff games, tying the second-longest streak in Stanley Cup playoff history
At home against the Blues in this series, it has been a different story, if not necessarily a great one: Hellebuyck is 3-0 in Winnipeg, with an .879 save percentage and a 2.33 goals-against average.
His home numbers in the regular season: 27-3-3 with a .938 save percentage and a 1.63 goals-against average in 33 games. His road numbers: 20-9-0 with a .911 save percentage and a 2.43 goals-against average. Hellebuyck was not pulled in his 63 appearances in the regular season.
Even with Hellebuyck’s multiple seasons of playoff struggles, his team exonerated him from blame for the Game 6 loss.
“I don’t need to talk about Bucky,” said forward Nikolaj Ehlers, who returned to the lineup for the first time since April 12 after a foot injury. “He’s been unbelievable for us all year. He’s continued to do that. We’ve got to be better.”
Said forward Cole Perfetti, who had a goal in Game 6: “Things got carried away. We lost our game for four or five minutes. They got a couple pucks through, and they found the back of the net. It’s frustrating. Happened a couple of times now this series where we fell asleep and they jumped on us.”
Perfetti said the Jets have rebounded from losses like this — one reason their confidence isn’t shaken ahead of Sunday’s Game 7.
“We had a loss like that in Game 4 [in St. Louis],” he said. “We went home and got the job done in Game 5. We’ve got the home ice. We’ve got the fans behind us and our barn rocking.”
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Bill Connelly
Almost no word in the English language makes a college football fan more defensive than the L-word: luck.
We weren’t lucky to have a great turnover margin — our coaches are just really good at emphasizing ball security! We’re tougher than everyone else — that’s why we recovered all those fumbles!
We weren’t lucky to win all those close games — we’re clutch! Our coaches know how to press all the right buttons! Our quarterback is a cool customer!
We weren’t lucky to have fewer injuries than everyone else — our strength-and-conditioning coach is the best in America! And again: We’re just tougher!
As loath as we may be to admit it, a large percentage of a given college football season — with its small overall sample of games — is determined by the bounce of a pointy ball, the bend of a ligament and the whims of fate. Certain teams will end up with an unsustainably good turnover margin that turns on them the next year. Certain teams (often the same ones) will enjoy a great run of close-game fortune based on some combination of great coaching, sturdy quarterback play, timely special teams contributions … and massive amounts of unsustainable randomness. Certain teams will keep their starting lineups mostly intact for 12 or more games while another is watching its depth chart change dramatically on a week-to-week basis.
As we prepare for the 2025 college football season, it’s worth stepping back and looking at who did, and didn’t, get the bounces in 2024. Just because Lady Luck was (or wasn’t) on your side one year, doesn’t automatically mean your fortunes will flip the next, but that’s often how these things go. Be it turnovers, close-game fortune or injuries, let’s talk about the teams that were dealt the best and worst hands last fall.
Jump to a section:
Turnover luck | Close games luck
Injuries and general shuffling | Turnaround candidates
Turnover luck
In last year’s ACC championship game, Clemson bolted to a 24-7 halftime lead, then white-knuckled it to the finish. SMU came back to tie the score at 31 with only 16 seconds left, but Nolan Hauser‘s 56-yard field goal at the buzzer gave the Tigers a 34-31 victory and a spot in 2024’s College Football Playoff at Alabama’s expense.
In the first series of the game, Clemson’s T.J. Parker pulled a perfect sack-and-strip of SMU QB Kevin Jennings, forcing and falling on a loose ball at the SMU 33-yard line. Clemson scored two plays later to take a 7-0 lead. Late in the first quarter, Khalil Barnes picked off a Jennings pass near midfield, ending what could have become a scoring threat with one more first down. A few minutes later, Clemson’s Cade Klubnik fumbled at the end of a 14-yard gain, but tight end Jake Briningstool recovered it at midfield, preventing another potential scoring threat from developing. (Klubnik fumbled seven times in the 2024 season but lost only one of them.)
Early in the third quarter, after SMU cut Clemson’s lead to 24-14, David Eziomume fumbled the ensuing kickoff at the Clemson 6, but teammate Keith Adams Jr. recovered it right before two SMU players pounced.
Over 60 minutes, both teams fumbled twice, and Clemson defended (intercepted or broke up) eight passes to SMU’s seven. On average, 50% of fumbles are lost and about 21% of passes defended become INTs, so Clemson’s expected turnover margin in this game was plus-0.2 (because of the extra pass defended). The Tigers’ actual turnover margin was plus-2, a difference of 1.8 turnovers in a game they barely won.
Clemson was obviously a solid team in 2024, but the Tigers probably wouldn’t have reached the CFP without turnovers luck. For the season, they fumbled 16 times but lost only three, and comparing their expected (based on the averages above) and actual turnover margins, almost no one benefited more from the randomness of a bouncing ball.
It probably isn’t a surprise to see that, of last year’s 12 playoff teams, eight benefited from positive turnovers luck, and six were at plus-3.3 or higher. You’ve got to be lucky and good to win, right?
You aren’t often lucky for two straight years, though. It might be noteworthy to point out that, of the teams in Mark Schlabach’s Way-Too-Early 2025 rankings, five were in the top 20 in terms of turnovers luck: No. 5 Georgia, No. 7 Clemson, No. 9 BYU, No. 11 Iowa State and No. 17 Indiana (plus two others from his Teams Also Considered list: Army and Baylor).
It’s also noteworthy to point out that three teams on Schlabach’s list — No. 6 Oregon, No. 8 LSU and No. 15 SMU — ranked in the triple-digits in terms of turnovers luck. Oregon started the season 13-0 without the benefit of bounces. For that matter, Auburn, a team on the Also Considered list, ranked 125th in turnovers luck in a season that saw the Tigers go just 1-3 in one-score finishes. There might not have been a more what-could-have-been team in the country than Hugh Freeze’s Tigers.
Close games
One of my favorite tools in my statistical toolbox is what I call postgame win expectancy. The idea is to take all of a game’s key, predictive stats — all the things that end up feeding into my SP+ rankings — and basically toss them into the air and say, “With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time.”
Alabama‘s 40-35 loss to Vanderbilt on Oct. 5 was one of the most impactful results of the CFP race. It was also one of the least likely results of the season in terms of postgame win expectancy. Bama averaged 8.8 yards per play to Vandy’s 5.6, generated a 56% success rate* to Vandy’s 43% and scored touchdowns on all four of its trips into the red zone. It’s really hard to lose when you do all of that — in fact, the Crimson Tide’s postgame win expectancy was a whopping 98.5%. (You can see all postgame win expectancy data here)
(* Success rate: how frequently an offense is gaining at least 50% of necessary yardage on first down, 70% on second and 100% on third and fourth. It is one of the more reliable and predictive stats you’ll find, and it’s a big part of SP+.)
Vandy managed to overcome these stats in part because of two of the most perfect bounces you’ll ever see. In the first, Jalen Milroe had a pass batted at the line, and it deflected high into the air and, eventually, into the arms of Randon Fontenette, who caught it on the run and raced 29 yards for a touchdown and an early 13-0 lead.
In the second half, with Bama driving to potentially take the lead, Miles Capers sacked Milroe and forced a fumble; the ball sat on the ground for what felt like an eternity before Yilanan Ouattara outwrestled a Bama lineman for it. Instead of trailing, Vandy took over near midfield and scored seven plays later. It took turnovers luck and unlikely key-play execution — despite a 43% success rate, Diego Pavia and the Commodores went 12-for-18 on third down and 1-for-1 on fourth — for Vandy to turn a 1.5% postgame win expectancy into a victory. It also wasn’t Alabama’s only incredibly unlikely loss: The Tide were at 87.8% to beat Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl but fell 19-13.
(Ole Miss can feel the Tide’s pain: The Rebels were at 76.0% postgame win expectancy against Kentucky and 73.7% against Florida. There was only a 6% chance that they would lose both games, and even going 1-1 would have likely landed them a CFP bid. They lost both.)
Adding up each game’s postgame win expectancy is a nice way of seeing how many games a team should have won on average. I call this a team’s second-order win total. Alabama was at 10.7 second-order wins but went 9-4. That was one of the biggest differences of the season. Somehow, however, Iron Bowl rival Auburn was even more unfortunate.
Based solely on stats, Arkansas State should have won about four games, and Auburn should have won about eight. Instead, the Red Wolves went 8-5 and the Tigers went 5-7.
Comparing win totals to these second-order wins is one of the surest ways of identifying potential turnaround stories for the following season. In 2023, 15 teams had second-order win totals at least one game higher than their actual win totals — meaning they suffered from poor close-game fortune. Ten of those 15 teams saw their win totals increase by at least two games in 2024, including East Carolina (from 2-10 to 8-5), TCU (5-7 to 9-4), Pitt (3-9 to 7-6), Boise State (8-6 to 12-2) and Louisiana (6-7 to 10-4). On average, these 15 teams improved by 1.9 wins.
On the flip side, 19 teams overachieved their second-order win totals by at least 1.0 wins in 2023. This list includes both of 2023’s national title game participants, Washington and Michigan. The Huskies and Wolverines sank from a combined 29-1 in 2023 to 14-12 in 2024, and it could have been even worse. Michigan overachieved again, going 8-5 despite a second-order win total of 6.0. Other 2023 overachievers weren’t so lucky. Oklahoma State (from 10-4 to 3-9), Wyoming (from 9-4 to 3-9), Northwestern (from 8-5 to 4-8) and NC State (from 9-4 to 6-7) all won more games than the stats expected in 2023, and all of them crumpled to some degree in 2024. On average, the 19 overachieving teams regressed by 1.9 wins last fall.
It’s worth keeping in mind that several teams in Schlabach’s Way-Too-Early Top 25 — including No. 6 Oregon, No. 8 LSU, No. 11 Iowa State, No. 13 Illinois and, yes, No. 21 Michigan — all exceeded statistical expectations in wins last season, as did Also Considered teams like Army, Duke, Missouri and Texas Tech. The fact that Oregon and LSU overachieved while suffering from poor turnovers luck is (admittedly) rather unlikely and paints a conflicting picture.
Meanwhile, one should note that three Way-Too-Early teams — No. 12 Alabama, No. 23 Miami and No. 25 Ole Miss (plus Washington and, of course, Auburn from the Also Considered list) — all lost more games than expected last season. With just a little bit of good fortune, they could prove to be awfully underrated.
Injuries and general shuffling
Injuries are hard to define in college football — coaches are frequently canny in the information they do and do not provide, and with so many teams in FBS, it’s impossible to derive accurate data regarding how many games were missed due to injury.
We can glean quite a bit from starting lineups, however. Teams with lineups that barely changed throughout the season were probably pretty happy with their overall results, while teams with ever-changing lineups likely succumbed to lots of losses. Below, I’ve ranked teams using a simple ratio: I compared (a) the number of players who either started every game or started all but one for a given team to (b) the number of players who started only one or two games, likely as a stopgap. If you had far more of the former, your team likely avoided major injury issues and, with a couple of major exceptions, thrived. If you had more of the latter, the negative effects were probably pretty obvious.
Despite the presence of 1-11 Purdue and 2-10 Kennesaw State near the top of the list — Purdue fielded one of the worst power conference teams in recent memory and barely could blame injury for its issues — you can still see a decent correlation between a positive ratio and positive results. The six teams with a ratio of at least 2.8 or above went a combined 62-22 in 2024, while the teams with a 0.5 ratio or worse went 31-56.
Seven of nine conference champions had a ratio of at least 1.3, and 11 of the 12 CFP teams were at 1.44 or higher (five were at 2.6 or higher). Indiana, the most shocking of CFP teams, was second on the list above; epic disappointments like Oklahoma and, especially, Florida State were near the bottom. (The fact that Georgia won the SEC and reached the CFP despite a pretty terrible injury ratio speaks volumes about the depth Kirby Smart has built in Athens. Of course, the Dawgs also enjoyed solid turnovers luck.)
Major turnaround candidates
It’s fair to use this information as a reason for skepticism about teams like Indiana (turnovers luck and injuries luck), Clemson (turnovers luck), Iowa State (close-games luck), Penn State (injuries luck) or Sam Houston (all of the above, plus a coaching change), but let’s end on an optimistic note instead. Here are five teams that could pretty easily enjoy a big turnaround if Lady Luck is a little kinder.
Auburn Tigers: Auburn enjoyed a better success rate than its opponents (44.7% to 38.5%) and made more big plays as well (8.9% of plays gained 20-plus yards versus 5.7% for opponents). That makes it awfully hard to lose! But the Tigers made exactly the mistake they couldn’t make and managed to lose games with 94%, 76% and 61% postgame win expectancy. There’s nothing saying this was all bad luck, but even with a modest turnaround in fortune, the Tigers will have a very high ceiling in 2025.
Florida Gators: The Gators improved from 41st to 20th in SP+ and from 5-7 to 8-5 overall despite starting three quarterbacks and 12 different DBs and ranking 132nd on the list above. That says pretty spectacular things about their overall upside, especially considering their improved experience levels on the O-line, in the secondary and the general optimism about sophomore quarterback DJ Lagway.
Florida Atlantic Owls: Only one team ranked 111th or worse in all three of the tables above — turnovers luck (111th), second-order win difference (121st) and injury ratio (131st). You could use this information to make the case that the Owls shouldn’t have fired head coach Tom Herman, or you could simply say that new head coach Zach Kittley is pretty well-positioned to get some bounces and hit the ground running.
Florida State Seminoles: There was evidently plenty of poor fortune to go around in the Sunshine State last season, and while Mike Norvell’s Seminoles suffered an epic hangover on the field, they also didn’t get a single bounce: They were 129th in turnovers luck, 99th in second-order win difference and 110th in injury ratio. Norvell has brought in new coordinators and plenty of new players, and the Noles are almost guaranteed to jump up from 2-10. With a little luck, that jump could be a pretty big one.
Utah Utes: Along with UCF, Utah was one of only two teams to start four different quarterbacks in 2024. The Utes were also among only four teams to start at least 11 different receivers or tight ends and among five teams to start at least nine defensive linemen. If you’re looking for an easy explanation for how they fell from 65th to 96th in offensive SP+ and from 8-5 to 5-7 overall, that’s pretty succinct and telling.
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