2025 MLB Cy Young Award Odds and Best Bets

The start of the 2025 MLB season means it’s time to look hard and heavy at the awards market. Today, we’re going to take a peek at the Cy Young betting market for both leagues.

Last year brought us one out-of-the-blue winner — with Chris Sale bouncing back from half a decade of injuries and ineffectiveness to claim 26 of 30 first-place votes and run away with the NL award — and one (Chandler Bing voice) smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-blue winner — with Detroit’s Tarik Skubal riding a blazing-hot end-of-2023 stretch into an elite 2024 that saw him win the pitching Triple Crown (which Sale also won) and the unanimous AL Cy Young. In other words, last year showed us the winner can come from just about anywhere on the odds board.

So who should we be eying for 2025? Let’s take a look.

(All odds are per DraftKings Sportsbook.)

American League Cy Young Awards Odds and Best Bets

The Odds

The Favorite

Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers (+380)

Skubal ran away with last year’s award, even finishing seventh in AL MVP voting. There are a few warning signs to be aware of — he more than doubled his innings pitched last year, from 80.1 in 2023 to 192.0 in 2024, and the Tigers look likely to have a below-average offense that could make Skubal getting to 18 wins again difficult. Still, there’s not much doubt Skubal is the best pitcher in the American League entering the season. The question is whether he’s worth the odds.

Other Candidates

Garrett Crochet, Boston Red Sox (+450)
Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers (+1400)
Tanner Bibee, Cleveland Guardians (+3500)

We just saw Skubal go from a pitcher who could be counted on to pitch well but wasn’t a guarantee to stay healthy to a pitcher who ran away with the Cy Young, so why can’t Crochet do it as well? Crochet had 73.0 big-league innings in 2020-2023 before putting up 4.1 bWAR in 146.0 innings last year, and he could have blown past that innings number if not for the White Sox keeping him in bubble wrap to maintain his health. Now in Boston pitching for a Red Sox team that hopes to contend in 2025, the kid gloves will be removed. We’ll see if Crochet’s body can hold up to the workload.

If he’s healthy, deGrom is the best pitcher in baseball, it’s just that the first three words of this sentence have been impossible to count on over the course of his career. If he gets to 160-plus innings, he’s all but guaranteed to win the award … he just hasn’t pitched that many innings in a season since before the pandemic. He hasn’t even pitched that many innings in two consecutive seasons combined since 2020-2021, and even then it was 160.0 on the nose.

The Guardians are a starting pitcher conveyor belt. They develop them, wear them out, and then develop another. Corey Kluber led to Shane Bieber, who led to Bibee. No, it’s not quite that simple, but this is what Cleveland does. Bibee has already been announced as the team’s Opening Day starter, and the pitcher who just turned 26 earlier this month has put up 6.6 bWAR and a 3.25 ERA in two seasons, plus a 1.88 ERA in three spring games. At +3500, the odds are good for a pitcher coming from the Pitcher Factory.

Best Bet

Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers

I guess I’m ready to get hurt again. But the vibes around deGrom are positive right now, and while that could go away with any single throw, getting that at +1400 is enticing. My pick to win the award is Skubal, but there’s not much value at +380.

National League Cy Young Awards Odds and Best Bets

The Odds

The Favorite

Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates (+300)

On a per-inning basis, Skenes was probably the best pitcher in baseball last year, with the only thing keeping him from winning last year’s Cy Young being the fact that the Pirates held him down to start the season and generally limited his innings total. Still, his ERA was 1.97 and he managed nearly 6.0 bWAR (5.9) in just his 133.0 innings. It feels like every pitcher is just waiting for the arm to snap, as depressing as that sounds, but if the arm holds out, Skenes is rightly the heavy favorite.

Other Candidates

Zack Wheeler, Philadelphia Phillies (+750)
Michael King, San Diego Padres (+2200)
Sandy Alcantara, Miami Marlins (+2500)

Wheeler is the reigning pitching iron man right now. If you needed to bet on a single pitcher to reach 200 innings, he’d be the winner in a runaway. And he’s not just an innings eater, with three top-six finishes (and two top-two) in the last four years, including second place last year. He has a 2.94 ERA in five years in Philly, and while he turns 35 before the end of May, he hasn’t shown much in the way of aging yet.

King’s innings total jumped from 64 and below before 2023, to 104.2 in 2023, to 173.2 last year, but the production stayed strong, a 2.95 ERA and 3.33 FIP good for a seventh-place Cy Young finish. The possibility the Padres deal Dylan Cease gives King a chance to be the SP1 in San Diego this year, and the Padres should contend for at least a Wild Card spot.

Alcantara has looked unhittable in spring so far as he returns from Tommy John surgery. The good news is that the surgery was in October of 2023, so he’s had ample recovery time. The downsides are that even with the surgery 18 months ago, there’s plenty of reason to expect Alcantara’s innings to be limited, and of course the extremely real chances the Marlins sell him to an American League team at some point. If you told me Alcantara would pitch all year in the National League, I’d be way more enticed here.

The Pick

Zack Wheeler, Philadelphia Phillies

Skenes is the best pitcher in the National League, but Wheeler isn’t that much behind him, and while no arm is a guarantee, the tracker record for Wheeler is much longer. It’s against the grain, but give me the veteran.