Baseball America’s latest MiLB Pitcher of the Year honor has put Kade Anderson in a weird spot: celebrated on one hand, immediately dragged into curse talk on the other.
On Monday, Baseball America named Anderson the 2026 winner of its MiLB Pitcher of the Year award, and Geoff Pontes and J.J. Cooper said it was an easy call after what they called “a season for the age.”
The numbers back that up. Anderson led all minor league pitchers with a 1.06 ERA and a 0.643 WHIP, and he punched out 135 hitters across 93.1 innings.
But for a certain slice of Mariners fans, the award came with an unwanted side effect: the kind of superstition that makes people start eyeing jinxes. Baseball America has only handed out the honor since 2022, but the list of winners has already taken on an eerie look.
Andrew Painter won it in 2022. Robby Snelling took it in 2023.
Quinn Mathews got it in 2024. Jonah Tong followed in 2025.
Now Anderson is on the list in 2026.
None of the previous four has turned the award into a clean launchpad. Painter reached the majors with the Phillies this season and became a regular in the rotation, but he finished with a 5.40 ERA and a 1.413 WHIP over 25 appearances, 23 of them starts.
Snelling, who was traded by the Padres to Miami the year after winning, made his big league debut this season for the Marlins and struggled in it, allowing five hits, four walks and three earned runs in 5.0 innings. Mathews debuted for the Cardinals this year and was not a disaster in nine starts, but he has been mostly ordinary so far.
Tong, the only one of the four to debut last season, improved in his second year, though the Mets still don’t seem to know what comes next for him.
Anderson’s case is different, though. He wasn’t just better than that group in the season he won the award; he was operating on a different timeline.
He reached the majors in the same season as three of them, even though he was drafted just last year. He was also taken third overall, while Painter was the closest comparison at 13th in 2021.
That’s why the usual curse chatter doesn’t quite fit cleanly here. Anderson’s award season was supposed to be exceptional, and it was. More importantly, he’s already showing signs that the production can travel.
The clearest example came in just his sixth big league start, against the Rockies. Anderson carved through 7.0 scoreless innings, gave up only three hits and no walks, and struck out seven.
It happened in Colorado, in the high altitude, against a team that ranked fourth in batting average and fifth in OPS at the time. They finished the regular season with those same rankings.
Still, none of that is likely to fully calm the superstition crowd. For people who believe in curses, the award now comes with a warning label. Anderson may need some kind of good-luck ritual to fend it off - though probably not fried chicken before every game like Wade Boggs, or a gold thong like Jason Giambi.
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