Luis Castillo has become a candidate for the American League Cy Young Award for the second consecutive season due to his outstanding individual performance throughout the Major League Baseball regular season. The right-hander is coming off his first full season in a Seattle Mariners uniform with less than a month left in the season and is the top player in Scott Servais’ rotation.
The 30-year-old Dominican is entering his seventh season in the majors as a pro, and while he has proven to be a pitcher with invaluable abilities since his debut, he continues to improve. , reaching the point of having the best level. His career performance in 2023. 175.1 Labor itemswhich is the product of 29 vacancies, registered 3.08 ERA, 1.04 WHIP, and 191 strikeouts; Those numbers put him in the top 10 in the league in every statistic.
As if that wasn’t enough, Castillo ranks sixth in the entire majors since 2019 with 18.0; behind only big names like this Zach Wheeler, Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, Sandy Alcantara and Max Fried.
The Mariners rotation ace has gone from strength to strength throughout his career, even becoming a benchmark in the best leagues in baseball in the world. In 2018, his second year in the MLB, he had his least productive stretch, during which he accumulated an ERA averaging WHIP 4.30 and 1.22 on 169.2 IP. Since then, he’s made some changes to his game that have improved him a lot.
According to an analysis Mark DeRosaThere have been three major shifts in “The Rock’s” throwing mechanics that have helped him become more effective when shooting.Likewise, he highlighted that usage of his 4-seam fastball has increased nearly 20% from 2019 to the present, and his slider 5%; he considered these facts crucial to the apparent evolution of the Kiskyan gambit.