Can One Game or Hot Stretch Swing a Rookie of the Year Race?

On August 20, Paige Bueckers, rookie for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, dropped 44 points against the Los Angeles Sparks, the most ever scored by a rookie in a single game. When Bueckers passed the previous single-game rookie scoring record (40 points, set by Candace Parker, who won MVP that year), one of the broadcasters remarked that her performance in the game effectively guaranteed her Rookie of the Year honors. Heading into the season, Bueckers was favored to win the award, but strong play from Washington Mystics rookie Sonia Citron forced WNBA analysts to reconsider what once had felt like a foregone conclusion. Bueckers needed the 44-point game to reclaim her place as the sport’s top rookie.

In the WNBA’s 40-game season, one game can legitimately swing an awards race, especially in the context of a sport where a star player can dominate a game and a point guard like Bueckers touches the ball on every possession. To find an analog in a 162-game baseball season, one might have to look for a hot streak spanning several games or a particularly close race that features a game with enough narrative heft to sway the sensibilities of the writers voting on the award. Looking back at recent rookie seasons reveals a few possible examples.

Last season, Yankees starter Luis Gil reeled off a stretch of seven starts from May 1 to June 4 in which he threw 44 2/3 innings, allowed just three runs total, and struck out 50. In a six-inning start on May 18, he struck out more than half the batters who stood in against him (14 of 24). Despite getting knocked around quite a bit over the remainder of the season, Gil’s 97 mph fastball, slider that refused to be barreled, and dominant month of May stuck with voters.

The final ROY vote was close, with 15 first place votes going to Gil and 13 to Orioles outfielder Colton Cowser. And though Cowser posted a 3.8-WAR season (compared to Gil’s 2.1 WAR), he did so by consistently going 1-for-4 and 2-for-5 instead of having an especially dominant stretch. He sprinkled in a couple of two-homer games (one in April and one in September), but batting in the lower third of a lineup with a bunch of other young guys who all sort of look like him — and who all topped the 100 wRC+ mark — made it easy for Cowser to blend in with the furniture of a long season. He lacked a signature game or hot streak to bring his candidacy into focus, while Gil’s seven-start heater provided a vivid memory for voters.

In 2021, Reds second baseman Jonathan India managed to do what Cowser couldn’t: He washed away the memory of another player’s strong early-season start. This time, the competition was Marlins starter Trevor Rogers, who began the season with five starts in which he combined for 28 innings, four runs allowed, and 38 punchouts. He remained steady, albeit slightly less dominant for the remainder of the year, finishing with the majors’ second-best HR/9, at 0.41, and 12th-best K/9, at 10.62 (minimum 130 IP).

India on the other hand, started the season slow, but after getting his footing in June, he leapt off the launchpad to post a 168 wRC+ in July. He set the tone for the month from the jump. On July 1, in a game against the Padres, India combined performance with plotlines, distilling a wide swath of skills into a tightly contested game. He led off by taking a plunking. For some hitters, getting hit by a pitch is incidental, but India finished the year tied for third in the majors in HBP with 23, suggesting that holding his ground against inside pitches was actually a strategy at the plate. After taking his base, India advanced to second on a Nick Castellanos walk, then successfully stole third. In the second inning, after a fielder’s choice from Luis Castillo got Cincinnati on the board, India hit an RBI double to put the Reds up 2-0. Following a fourth-inning strikeout and walks in the sixth and seventh, India stepped to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with one out, a runner on first, and the score tied. Against Mark Melancon, India took a fastball and two knuckle-curves, all outside the zone, then watched two cutters for called strikes. With the count full, Melancon went back to the cutter, but left it over the plate; India lined it to left field for a double. A fielder’s choice and intentional walk put India on third before a single from Tyler Stephenson allowed him to trot home as the winning run.

For the rest of the month, India was nearly impossible to keep off the basepaths: He reached base in all but two of his 25 games in July. In parallel with India’s surge, the Reds’ playoff odds rebounded from 8.5% on July 1 (their lowest point all season) to 22.7% on August 1. And then in September, voters gave 29 of their 30 first-place ROY votes to India, leaving Rogers with the lone remaining one.

From what I can tell, the matchup between the Braves and Mariners in Seattle on September 11, 2022, was not covered as a clincher for the two ROY races, but it featured heroics that may have ultimately determined the eventual winners: Julio Rodríguez in the AL and Michael Harris II in the NL.

Through June, Rodríguez had a comfortable hold on AL ROY honors; by the end of August, Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman had closed the gap. After a late May call-up, Rutschman spent a couple of weeks acclimating to the big leagues, but from June 10 onward he posted a wRC+ of 150, which combined with his defensive value behind the plate put him in the conversation with Rodríguez.

On the NL side, Harris was playing catch-up with his teammate, Spencer Strider. The pitcher started the year with the big league club, but worked in relief for the first two months of the season. He transitioned to starting at the end of May, around the same time Harris was promoted to the majors. To that point, Strider had pitched to a 54 ERA- with a FIP- of 38 and was striking out 38.9% of batters he faced. By the end of August, Strider’s ERA- sat at 70 and his FIP- at 53, with a 36.7% strikeout rate, while Harris had posted a 139 wRC+ with a 3.6 WAR that was on par with Strider’s 3.5. With both players performing well above average, a statement game is the sort of thing that can set one player apart.

In that mid-September meeting, Rodríguez kicked off the scoring in the bottom of the first with a solo home run. Seattle subsequently built up a 6-1 lead heading into the eighth inning. Harris led off the top half of the frame with a solo shot of his own to make it a 6-2 game, which held until he came up again in the top of the ninth. This time there were two outs and runners on second and third, so when he sent a ball clanging off the facade of the third deck, he brought his team within a run. Atlanta scored twice more before the third out was recorded to take a 7-6 lead. Rodríguez was due up second in the ninth, and with one out, he sent a line drive over the fence in left to tie the game. The Mariners walked it off on the second homer of the afternoon from Eugenio Suárez, but the story of the game was the two rookies delivering dazzling dual performances in a game with a win expectancy graph that looks like this:

Though Strider’s rookie performance rivaled that of his teammate and Rutschman posted a 146 wRC+ in September, both Harris and Rodríguez demonstrated an ability to find another gear when hitting with runners on base and in high-leverage situations, which provided a lot of big moments to point to when constructing the argument in their favor. As such, Rodríguez pulled in 29 of 30 first place ROY votes, while Harris reeled in 22 of 30.

For their part, this year’s rookies have some notable hot streaks and single-game performances in the record books already. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably been wondering when I’m going to mention Nick Kurtz and his four-homer game, and the wait is over. On July 25, the first baseman became the 20th player to hit four home runs in a game (one against a position player) and the first rookie ever to accomplish the feat. Though Kurtz, like Bueckers, set a rookie record, this game did not seal his ROY win, as he is running away with it based on his overall body of work. I won’t gush about Kurtz further because Ben Clemens already did that for us, and other writers from various publications are also bestowing plenty of buzz upon the A’s slugger, too. Eno Sarris of The Athletic noted the swing similarities between Kurtz and a couple of other good hitters — Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. When you’re drawing comparisons to reigning MVPs, you don’t really need a signature game to drive the narrative in your favor.

NL ROY is way more up for grabs — with Brewers outfielder Isaac Collins, Braves catcher Drake Baldwin, Brewers starter Chad Patrick, and Cubs starter Cade Horton as the main contenders — and this is where we could really see a single performance or stretch of excellence decide the race. I am going to apologize in advance to Patrick, who is having a lovely rookie season and deserves to be in the ROY conversation, but I could not find a start, or string of starts, that I could reasonably argue for as his version of the Bueckers 44-point game. Thus, we move to the other candidates.

As Michael Baumann wrote last month, working walks is key to what Collins does at the plate. A walk-heavy profile doesn’t make for the most eye-popping offensive performances, but I’ll submit for your consideration an August 10 matchup between the Mets and the Brewers. Collins doubled off Sean Manaea in the first, but his teammates stranded him at second. Manea struck out Collins swinging in the third, but it was a Collins single in the fifth that ended Manea’s outing. This time, Collins came around to score when catcher William Contreras went deep against Reed Garrett. In the seventh, Collins faced Tyler Rogers and reached on a fielder’s choice, then went first-to-third on a groundball single from Contreras. Collins was stranded once again, but I chose to mention it anyway because the Brewers are a first-to-third factory, and this was Collins demonstrating that he is a willing cog in that machine. Still, at that point in the game, his performance was solid, though hardly spectacular. That changed in the bottom of the ninth inning, when he stepped in against Mets closer Edwin Díaz and crushed a walk-off home run. Might that memorable moment sway voters toward Collins in a close race? Perhaps, but there are other rookies whose best games or signature stretches have been just as good, if not better, than what we saw from Collins against the Mets. It was a pretty rad game, to be clear, yet it might not be enough to break a potential tie.

The strongest contender for the Drake Baldwin Game came on July 21 as the Braves faced off against the Giants. The headline in this one was Baldwin’s six RBI and two runs scored en route to Atlanta’s 9-5 win over San Francisco. Baldwin batted with the bases loaded in the first and hit a bases-clearing double, then came home on a single from Nick Allen. With two outs and runners on first and second in the fourth, Baldwin sent a single up the middle with enough hair on it to drive in both Braves on the bases, though it surely helped that it was Ronald Acuña Jr. on first. Baldwin advanced to second on the throw home, then scored on an Ozzie Albies single. Moving to the sixth, Baldwin stood in with Acuña on second and hit an RBI double to left-center field. Baldwin doesn’t deserve full credit for this one, because both Heliot Ramos and Jung Hoo Lee could have made the catch, but Baldwin should get partial credit for running hard enough to still make it to second on what should have been a fairly routine fly ball. The Braves backstop is hitting well enough to produce a 127 wRC+ and match Collins’ offensive output; that he is also logging almost 600 innings at a premium defensive position makes him a worthy ROY candidate. And that game, in which he was involved in eight of his team’s nine runs, was a loud way for Baldwin to underscore what he can do standing at the plate, in addition to crouching behind it.

Horton is the laggard in this race when it comes to WAR. He sits at just 1.6, while Collins has 2.6, Baldwin has 2.5, and Patrick has 2.1. If anything is going to vault Horton to the top of ballots, it’s memorable single-game outings as the Cubs jockey for playoff position. Currently, the Cubs sit 5 1/2 games behind the Brewers, but on July 20, the two teams were tied atop the NL Central. Then from July 20 through August 23, when the Brewers were the hottest team in baseball and winners of 14-straight and the Cubs were struggling to keep pace, Horton provided a stabilizing force. He made seven starts covering 37 innings and allowed just two earned runs. He was a top-five pitcher in all of baseball during that span, posting the lowest ERA among all qualified pitchers (0.49), the third-lowest HR/9 (0.24), and the highest rate of stranded baserunners (97.9%). Sure, I’m cherry-picking Horton’s most favorable stats, but a rookie leading the league in any category for over a month is always going to be impressive, and his heater came when the Cubs needed him most. Granted it didn’t prevent them from falling out of first place, but the outlook on the North Side would undoubtedly be worse without Horton. (This is also where I note that Bueckers’ 44 points didn’t prevent the Wings from losing that game to the Sparks, but it still unequivocally ruled.)

In some years, the season-long stats point to an obvious choice for ROY, one player who dominates the competition across the board; in others, the choice isn’t so clear cut. Sometimes all of our league and park adjusted stats give a collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And for that reason, I highly recommend rookies pad their résumés with as many record-breaking games as possible. It’s better for everyone that way.