Beyond the fact that pitcher's W-L records are a horrible way to measure their quality (see, e.g., Hernandez, Felix), the idea that a player who is dominant for part of a season might get an award instead of a player who was really good from beginning to end is hardly new in baseball.
The immediate example that comes to mind is the 1984 NL Cy Young winner, who was 16-1 in 20 starts with a 2.69 ERA and an ERA+ of 144 for a team that won its division as a feel-good story. The rest of his 1984 story is that he was 4-5 with a 5.15 ERA with an ERA+ of 80 in his first 15 starts that year, which happened to have all been with a really bad American League team.