It’s awards week, just in time to ease the withdrawal symptoms from the lack of baseball! As usual, we start with the Rookie of the Year award, and in the National League, Drake Baldwin won the hardware, finishing with 21 first-place votes, while Cade Horton received a total of nine first-place votes. Baldwin was the only candidate to appear on all 30 ballots. Horton finished second, followed by Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins and Darren Leal.
Did the BBWAA members who took on this task make wise choices? It’s up to you. I’m here to fulfill my daily duties of explaining/justifying/defending how I voted for my award this year, the National League Rookie of the Year Award. I like to think I’m doing a good job, but I personally feel my responsibility to vote should exceed my confidence in my abilities. This is ostensibly a panel, not a federal election, so voting here is not a question of my right to vote, but my responsibility to exercise it thoroughly. People in baseball, from the most casual fan to the players themselves, should know Why I vote for someone and not someone else. This is especially true when many people disagree with me, like when I voted for Jackson Merrill last year and Trevor Rogers in 2021.
As a reminder, I won’t simply rank players based on war and call it a day. There are a lot of subtleties in war, some thorny issues in different war estimates involving different philosophies, and our best value estimates sometimes don’t perfectly capture what matters. There’s a reason why we don’t think a 2.8 WAR player is significantly different in terms of value generated than a 2.5 WAR player. Like any tool, using it well requires knowing when the tool is available no Suitable for the task at hand. Axes are good at chopping things, but not very good at slicing steaks or trimming toenails (not that I only have feeling in 9 1/2 toes).
As usual, I start with the numbers. How could I not? Baseball is a sport that largely consists of dueling individuals within a team, and these numbers can provide a good picture of what happened, how it happened, and who deserves credit or blame for it. The WAR framework we use is very useful in giving us a base case, but the differences between its statistics and other versions don’t necessarily make conclusions obvious.
For No. 1, the numbers here agree that Baldwin is the best rookie, or at least the best most valuable Rookie. I’ll come back to this later. At 3.1 WAR, he’s half a game ahead of the Brewers’ three rookies; that’s a decent margin, but not so wide that I’d automatically vote for Baldwin. So let’s look at some other numbers to see if anything is inflating Baldwin’s value. He’s throwing the ball very well, with a wRC+ of 125, which is close to the Contreras brothers’ career averages. We have high confidence when it comes to batter offensive numbers, so I think his WAR is pretty solid here. Baldwin ranks third in the NFC in offensive rating (11.9), one point behind Collins (12.8) and three points behind Lear (15.1). That number is forward Position adjusted so catcher “bonus” doesn’t do an unreasonable amount of work. Nor are there any odd framing figures that could be the year-long vignettes that fuel his defensive wars. So Baldwin was my first choice and I’m very happy with that.
The rest of the vote is trickier because there isn’t a slew of standout candidates. Among last year’s rookie contenders, I confidently placed Merrill, Paul Skenes, Jackson Jolio, Marcin Winn, and Shota Imonaga at the top of this year’s voting, and I actually had to sit back and think about whether Baldwin would be ahead of Joey Ortiz, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Spencer Schwerenbach, and Jacob Young.
So, with a lot of great candidates who aren’t All-Star caliber, my question for No. 2 is who actually played the best? It’s kind of like a smaller version of the Don Sutton/Sandy Koufax comparison. Sutton’s career is certainly more valuable in terms of win totals he produced for his team, but if you asked basically anyone which pitcher was better, I’m sure almost everyone would say Koufax. Jacob Massey hasn’t played all year, but when he has he has been outstanding. His offensive value (11.4) ranks fourth among NFC rookies, and he’s reached that level despite playing only half as many minutes as Baldwin and Collins. He also played solid center field for the Marlins. Even in an incomplete season, the center fielder’s 133 wRC+ was impressive, and the stolen bases (14) were a nice bonus. I believe awards are more about greatness than merit, so like the Hall of Fame debate, I prefer to consider measures relative to average rather than replacement. So Marsee is my number two.
For third place, I chose Holden. He only played part of the season in the majors, but he did a great job helping stabilize a Cubs rotation that lost Justin Steele early on. His 2.67 ERA is impressive, but ERA often isn’t the whole story. He was just average in terms of missed hits, and his ERA reflected a lot of help from the Cubs’ extremely skilled defense. He’s still figuring out how to beat major leaguers. If he had played a full inning, or shown more dominance in the game, I would have placed Horton slightly higher than Massey, which is not what I ended up doing. I’m very confident World Health Organization The second- and third-best NL prospects are in 2025, but the order of those two is one of my most difficult voting decisions.
At this point, Brewers fans might be a little annoyed with me because Collins, Durbin, and Chad Patrick are all missing out on the top three. Along with Lyle, these are the four candidates for the last two seats on my ballot, and I basically see them all evenly matched in terms of suitability, so it has to come down to the little things. Collins’ defensive value is much lower than Durbin’s and he’s not hitting as well as Lyle (.299/.347/.498), essentially writing him out. Patrick’s failure stemmed from the simple fact that he struggled a bit during the stretch when the Brewers finally had success against the Cubs in the standings, to the point where he was demoted for a while; when he came back, it was mostly in a swing role. This leaves Dubin and Leal with the last two spots, but in what order? Ultimately, I give Durbin the nod because he’s the more complete player.
Well, here are my votes for 2025, at least until the Hall of Fame is voted in next month. Am I 100% sure this is the ideal vote? Of course not, but after my due diligence I felt this was the best vote I could put together based on my impressions of the event.
