The NL Cy Young race is rather fascinating this season.

Dodgers lefty Hyun-Jin Ryu has led the league in ERA pretty much all season; he allowed more than two earned runs just one time in his first 22 starts and still tops the NL at 2.45. His past four starts, though, have been rough, and he has a 9.95 ERA in those games.

Max Scherzer is doing typical Max Scherzer things. The three-time Cy Young winner leads the NL in FIP (2.31), K/BB (7.2) and K/9 (12.6), but he missed a couple of weeks and has four or five fewer starts than most other contenders.

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Jacob deGrom has been “worse” this year than when he won the Cy in 2018, but that’s because he was insane last year (1.70 ERA/1.98 FIP) and has just been excellent this time. He leads the NL in strikeouts (231) and is solid across the board — 2.70 ERA/2.84 FIP, 5.37 K/BB, 11.4 K/9 and on and on.

Scherzer’s rotation mates in D.C. — Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg — have been outstanding, too. They’re third and fourth, respectively, in bWAR for NL pitchers (behind Scherzer and deGrom). In Cincinnati, Sonny Gray has revitalized his career and emerging superstar Luis Castillo has started to harness his immense talent. Rookie Mike Soroka — with his 2.67 ERA and NL-best 0.7 HR/9 — has been a huge part of Atlanta’s success.

Today, though, let’s look at a pitcher who wasn’t even worth a passing mention in the Cy Young conversation at the All-Star break.

Cardinals right-hander Jack Flaherty — only 23 and in his second full big-league season — is still a long shot, at best, but he’s doing things that can’t easily be ignored, and in a season without a dominant performance — think deGrom in 2018, Clayton Kershaw in 2014, Randy Johnson in 2001, Greg Maddux in 1995, to name a few — maybe there’s room for Flaherty to earn votes at the top of the five-person ballot.

Flaherty’s ERA through the end of April was 4.06, then 3.45 in May and an ugly 7.01 in June (and, yes, having any ERA above 7.00 for a full month probably essentially disqualifies anyone from the Cy Young conversation. Probably. But the fact that we’re having this discussion speaks to how great what he’s done lately must be, right? So, yeah, humor us.)

In his final start before the All-Star break, Flaherty allowed just one run, two hits and one walk in seven brilliant innings on the road in San Francisco. It was a sign of what was to come.

Flaherty has made 11 starts in the second half of the year. In seven of those starts, he’s shut out his opponent. He’s allowed one earned run twice and two earned runs twice. That’s it. Add in that final first-half start and Flaherty has a 0.80 ERA in his past 12 starts.

Yeah. A 0.80 ERA for more than two months’ worth of starts. Incredibly impressive. In those 12 starts, covering 78 1/3 innings, Flaherty has 95 strikeouts, 39 hits allowed and 18 walks. He’s allowed only four home runs. In his two September starts, Flaherty has thrown 16 innings, allowed six hits, two walks, zero runs and struck out 18.

His ERA has crept below 3.00, at 2.99 heading into his next start, scheduled for Saturday vs. Milwaukee. He has a 4.5 bWAR, 3.7 fWAR, 3.66 FIP, 1.028 WHIP, 10.5 K/9 and 4.00 K/BB.

Flaherty’s run draws memories, at least personally, of Jake Arrieta in 2015. I had one of the 30 official Cy Young votes that year, so I spent way too many hours (and days, if I’m being honest) trying to compare Arrieta’s extended streak of brilliance to amazing seasons crafted by Dodgers stars Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw.

Arrieta was good-not-great for the Cubs through the first couple of months of the season. He had a 2.02 ERA in April, then a 4.07 ERA in his next nine starts. By mid-June, he was sitting at 3.40 for the season. But he threw a shutout in Minnesota on June 21 — four hits, seven strikeouts — and that started an incredible stretch of pitching, one of the best we’ve ever seen.

In his final 20 starts of the year, Arrieta had a 0.86 ERA. Not a typo. In his final dozen starts of the year, that ERA dipped to 0.41. Let’s look at Arrieta’s numbers of those 12 starts …

— 88 1/3 innings, 41 hits, 14 walks, 7 runs (4 earned), 89 strikeouts, 1 homer, .136 average

Now, again, Flaherty’s numbers in his current 12-game stretch.

— 78 1/3 innings, 39 hits, 17 walks, 8 runs (7 earned), 95 strikeouts, 4 homers, .146 average

Arrieta’s are better, yes, but pretty damn close, right?

It’s at this point, we should make a couple of things clear. Yes, Arrieta started his incredible run sooner, and a 20-game stretch with an 0.86 ERA is more impressive than a 12-game stretch with an 0.80 ERA. And Arrieta started his stretch from a 3.40 ERA (it finished at 1.77), not the 4.90 ERA Flaherty owned before that start in San Francisco.

On the other hand, Flaherty’s competition for the top of the ballot isn’t as fierce, either. That year, Kershaw finished with an 8.6 fWAR, 2.13 ERA and 301 strikeouts. Greinke had a 9.1 bWAR, 0.844 WHIP and his ERA never even reached 2.00 all season, finishing at 1.66. In many years, Arrieta, Greinke or Kershaw would have been a unanimous Cy Young winner, but in 2015, with all that brilliance, the first-place votes were split, 17 to 10 to 3, respectively.

I wound up giving my first-place vote to Greinke, valuing his season-long brilliance over Arrieta’s extended dominance by the slightest of margins. Arrieta, of course, wound up winning the Cy Young, by 22 votes over Greinke (169 to 147). Kershaw was third — one of the best third-place Cy Young seasons ever, with one of only three 300-plus strikeout seasons since 2002 — with 101 vote points.

Flaherty has three starts remaining this season: Sept. 14, 19 and 24. Should he be needed — if the Cardinals falter and Game 162 suddenly becomes really important — the final game of the season would be on regular rest for Flaherty, thanks to an off day on the 26th. If the Cardinals are locked into their playoff spot, of course, the team would certainly hold him for their first game of the postseason.

Anyway, for argument’s sake, let’s say he continues his brilliance and gets his ERA in the same area as Ryu, Scherzer, Soroka, deGrom and Gray. Would that run — like Arrieta’s run — be enough to push him to the front? It’ll depend on how each of the 30 voters weighs the factors (and no, I don’t have a vote this year).