The MLB on Wednesday announced the winners of the 2019 Cy Young Award, the top honor for pitchers. Jacob deGrom of the New York Mets (National League) won the award for the second year in a row, while Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros (American League) beat his teammate Gerrit Cole to win the honor for the second time in his career.

DeGrom received 29 of the 30 first-place votes in the NL, defeating quite a few top pitchers including Hyun-jin Ryu of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals and Stephen Strasburg to become the 11th consecutive winner of the Cy Young Award in the Majors history.

However, he only claimed 11 wins as the Mets' starting pitcher, which had a lot to do with the team's struggling offense. Individually, DeGrom remained dominant with 255 strikeouts, NL's second-best earned run average (ERA) of 2.43 and NL's No. 1 walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP) of 0.971.

Thanks to DeGrom's victory, the Mets made a new record by watching plural players win BBWAA award. The other is the 24-year-old first base Pete Alonso who won the NL Rookie of the Year Award.

The last time Verlander pocketed the Cy Young Award was in 2011 when he was still playing for the Detroit Tigers. Since then he had multiple chances of doing it again but lost in very close contests: he had the second-most points in 2012, 2016 and 2018, especially, in 2016, Verlander actually had six more first-place votes than Rick Porcello.

Nonetheless, at the age of 36, Verlander threw one of the best seasons in his career. Having started in 34 games, he took 21 wins and ranked AL's No. 1 in Opp batting average (0.172) and WHIP (0.80). 0.80 is also the Majors' third lowest WHIP since 1900.

It was still a close win for Verlander because Cole also had an incredible season. The 29-year-old beat Verlander in strikeouts (326-300) and ERA (2.50-2.58). In the end, the two shared all 30 first-place votes – 17 for Verlander and 13 for Cole – before Verlander won the competition by a mere 17 points.