As a player’s body changes over time, the same movements he used to make may not work well for him anymore. Adjusting to these changes (or not) will make or break his career. These changes have been especially stark for Giancarlo Stanton. The 35-year-old slugger serves as an interesting case for observing how great hitters can alter their swings over time to adjust to their changing physical attributes.

Stanton had a 116 wRC+ in 459 plate appearances in 2024 – the 15th season of his career. That’s nearly identical to the 118 mark he set across 396 plate appearances as a rookie in 2010. The difference between Stanton then and now, though, is night and day. Let’s take a look at Stanton at age 20 to get an idea of what his swing was like during his first major league season:

Open stance, non-neutral shin angle, slight hand row. None of these things are currently present in Stanton’s swing. None. When he came up, he looked like an uber-athletic NFL tight end. He could run well, move fluidly, and was twitchy enough to have a bit of extra movement in his swing (compared to recent years) and still have success. Yeah, he struck out over 30% of the time in his rookie campaign, but he was still learning big league pitching. He boasted a 141 wRC+ the following season with a very similar swing. It wasn’t until his third season where there was an obvious change. This was when Stanton showed what he was really capable of at the plate (and when he started going by Giancarlo):

Now that’s what I’m talking about. These are truly Stantonian homers here. In 2012, Stanton raised his wRC+ to 158, delivering 5.1 WAR in just 123 games. He cemented himself as one of the scariest sluggers in the game, and much of that should be attributed to his mechanical adjustments. He changed his stance to a neutral position and raised his hands up a considerable amount. From this point on, his hands would stay in a higher slot. His hand row from the previous two seasons always brought him to a higher point than where he started in his setup. As a player with 80-grade power, he didn’t really need that extra movement to create force. Depending on your body type (arm length, upper body flexibility, etc.), swinging a flat bat from a high slot makes it easier to get your bat on plane. Since he wasn’t the type of hitter who varies his shoulder plane all that much, it was a logical change to simplify his approach.

Even with these changes, we’re still pretty far off from where Stanton has been over the last few seasons. He maintained these mechanics throughout 2012 and 2013. However, during this time, health became an issue. He missed time in both of these seasons for knee, abdominal , ankle, thigh and shoulder injuries. Without biomechanical data, we can’t definitively say these injuries forced his body to change and/or he had to adjust his swing to compensate for his compromised health, but my goodness, those are injuries almost from head to toe! It wasn’t until the 2014 season that Stanton played over 140 games in a single season. And unsurprisingly, he came into that year with another modified setup:

This is the first time in his career where we saw Stanton narrow his stance. I’m theorizing here, but taking away movement could have had two benefits for him: Similar to my point before, he is so strong that he never really needed to move all that much to create power, and less movement would give him a better shot at making contact. Second, by narrowing his stance and not crouching as much, he would put less stress on his body. He ended this season with a 161 wRC+, the highest mark of his career. He also remained healthy until the middle of September, when he was hit in the face by a pitch that prematurely ended his season.

The narrowed stance kept working for him in 2015. Across his 74 games to start the year, he scorched 27 home runs — a full-season pace of 58. But on June 26 — his 74th game — he broke his hamate bone swinging at some point during his final two at-bats, both strikeouts, and missed the rest of the season.

The one thing about Stanton’s swing that he has never really reconciled is that he doesn’t decelerate much. I think this is a big reason why we see such egregious whiffs from him. Once he gets started, there is no slowing down. It also comes with some added risk of injury. This is such a violent swing, and his body bears the brunt of that force because he doesn’t have the brakes in place to come to a controlled stop.

Although he was healthy to start the season in 2016, it was clear the injury had compromised him. By the end of the year, he’d completely gotten away from the setup that he’d had so much success with before the hamate injury. In fact, he returned to a similar stance that we saw from him early on in his career:

Forward lean, slightly open hips, and more knee bend. Sound familiar? That’s because this is essentially rookie year Stanton, not the great hitter he was in 2014-2015. His performance also reverted back to where it was in 2010; his 118 wRC+ in 2016 was identical to his mark as a rookie. It makes sense, then, that he ditched this setup in 2017. Closed stance Stanton has entered the chat:

Stanton didn’t close his stance off until about June, but he didn’t run it back the first few months with the stance he used during his down 2016 season. He came into 2017 with the same stance he had in 2014-2015, when he was raking. But from the summer on, he closed things up, finishing the season with 59 home runs and winning NL MVP. It was a special run that completely took off due to another mechanical change – probably the most important of his career.

Stanton was traded to the Yankees following the 2017 season and showed up with the same exact setup, and for good reason. After struggling big time out of the gate, he ended up with a 128 wRC+. Not great but still very good. He was healthy for pretty much the entire season too, playing in 158 games. Then in 2019, the injuries piled up. After a knee injury that kept him out for almost the entire year, he returned in the playoffs and sustained a quad injury. Then it was hamstring injury that limited him to 23 games during the shortened 2020 season. Over the two years, he played in a total of 61 regular season games.

Unlike other times in his career, Stanton’s injuries in those seasons didn’t lead to a mechanical overhaul. At this point in his career, he knew what the best version of himself looked like. If he could get his body back to feeling healthy, it made sense not to go through any big changes. And in 2021, that worked out well. He swatted 35 homers in 139 games and finished with a 138 wRC+. He suffered a minor quad strain early in the season, but other than that, he was healthy all year.

Though he missed 10 days with a minor calf strain in late May/early June, Stanton was also mostly healthy for the first half of 2022, and he hit well enough to make the All-Star team (133 wRC+ during the first half). But then the lower body injuries returned, and this time they were even lower than before. He made it three days into the second half before landing on the IL with Achilles tendonitis. He missed just over a month, and when he came back in late August, it took him about two weeks to get going. He also had a minor injury scare when he fouled a ball off his foot on September 5; he wasn’t in the lineup for the Yankees’ next four games, though he did pinch hit in two of them. He caught fire upon returning to the lineup on September 10, posting a 133 wRC+ with seven home runs over his final 79 plate appearances of the regular season.

Still, these particular injuries represented a new challenge for Stanton. As a closed-stance hitter, he is far more reliant on his connection to the ground, making these repeated injuries from the ankle downward especially concerning. Not only does he have to regain his strength, but he also has to figure out how to move in space and interact with the ground. This gets more difficult for players as they age and the injuries compound. The thing about Stanton, though, is he has always been willing to tweak his mechanics. However, he needed to hit rock bottom before deciding to go away from the setup that he’d had so much success with for so long.

Health was a problem for Stanton again in 2023. He strained his hamstring in April and missed almost two months. Upon his return, he was far off from his diminished 2022 form, when he finished the year with 113 wRC+, which to that point was the worst mark of his career. His 86 wRC+ to end the year was bleak. He stayed healthy after his return, but the awful performance brought up the question: Was this just too much for him to overcome? For Stanton, the answer was to do what he had done so well for his entire career. He made some more changes, this time to his mechanics and his body.

There was a lot of discussion around Stanton’s adjustments at the beginning of 2024, including this comprehensive look from Jay Jaffe. In short, the main point was that he slimmed down (a lot!) and shifted closer to the neutral setup he had from 2014 and 2015 rather than the extreme closed stance he had employed beginning in June of 2017.

This goes back to the talk about matching your swing to your physical attributes. Stanton has dealt with so many lower body issues over the last five years, and they have impacted what he can do physically. He couldn’t sustain the same movement pattern in the closed stance with his current body, so he went to a similar version of the swing that his body could handle. His regular season still wasn’t great, but it was a major step up from the year before. And when you consider the show he put on in October, it’s safe to say his changes worked pretty well overall. For a last look, let’s see where he stands as of October, from a mechanical perspective:

Whatever your opinion is of Stanton’s career, how he projects for the rest of it, or anything related to that, there is no denying that what he has done throughout the last 15 years has been remarkable. There aren’t many hitters who can change as much as he has and still have success. A big part of being a great baseball player is making adjustments. Stanton has done that incredibly well for a long, long time.

Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s free agent class features a recent — as in the past two years — MVP. He’s playing the same position he has his entire career and has suffered no recent major injuries: 151 games played in his MVP campaign, 154 in each of the two that followed. And yet interest in this legend of the game is expected to be limited.

On the Top 50 free agents list, Ben Clemens ranked him 41st, which is third at his own position and lower than eight — EIGHT! — relief pitchers. I don’t know why I’m being coy about this player’s identity, actually, because presumably you can see the headline and header image and already know I’m talking about Paul Goldschmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

When I interviewed him back in January, Richard Fitts told me that his goal was to be a longtime big leaguer in Boston, and that his focus was simply on becoming the best version of himself. He’s since taken important steps on both fronts. The 24-year-old right-hander worked on fine-tuning his repertoire and usage at Triple-A Worcester, then impressed after receiving his first call-up in September. Moreover, he etched his name into the record books. Fitts didn’t allow an earned run over his initial 18 2/3 innings — this over three-plus starts — the most ever for a Red Sox pitcher to begin his career. As of right now, Roster Resource projects Fitts to be in the Red Sox rotation next season, though that could change depending on Lucas Giolito’s health and whether they sign a frontline starter or two this winter.

The Auburn University product had recently come to Boston via trade when we spoke 11 months ago. A sixth-round pick in the 2021 draft, Fitts was acquired along with Greg Weissert and Nicholas Judice from the New York Yankees in exchange for Alex Verdugo. At the time he’d been relying primarily on a four-seam fastball, with a slider serving as his best secondary. He described the latter as being “a little bit in between” a conventional slider and a sweeper.

How does the current iteration of the 6-foot-4, 245-pound hurler compare to the one I’d spoken to last winter? Is he basically the same pitcher? I asked him those questions on the final day of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working at FanGraphs long enough — more than two full years now — that I’ve started to build a track record. By that I mean that when I get something right, I can go back and gloat about it.

In February 2023, I wrote about Rangers outfielder Adolis García: A power-over-hit player who struggled to get on base and did not play a premium position. Some years ago, I was at a Starbucks a couple blocks from my house when I saw someone who looked like an ex-girlfriend of mine a few tables away. On further reflection, I don’t think it was really her, but I packed up my computer, downed my macchiato, went home, and never came back. You can never be too careful.

I would ordinarily avoid players like García with even greater alacrity. Nevertheless, I reasoned that the Rangers, having invested much more heavily in pitching than hitting, needed their right fielder to be at his best if they hoped to achieve anything in 2023. And García had made very good contact the previous season, but had not been rewarded accordingly. So despite my trepidation regarding his overall skill set, I predicted that García would take a step forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Mets really did it. On Tuesday, they finally went out and landed the electric Dominican outfielder with the big tools and the ebullient personality, the one they’d been dreaming of for so very long. Well, they landed one of the electric Dominican outfielders they’d been dreaming of, anyway.

In a one-for-one swap, the Mets received center fielder Jose Siri from the Rays in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Eric Orze. Siri is a thrilling player with four jaw-dropping tools: power, defense, speed, and throwing. The complete absence of a hit tool leaves him kind of like a boat with the world’s greatest bilge pump and a gaping hole in the hull. He’s forever battling to mash enough moonshots and make enough improbable catches to stay afloat despite running a strikeout rate that falls somewhere between catastrophic and cataclysmic. In a move that will surprise no one who is even passingly familiar with the Rays, the team turned Siri into a pitching prospect the moment he could conceivably begin to cost them actual money. The Mets now control Siri for his three arbitration years, and MLB Trade Rumors projects him for a $2.3 million salary in 2025 (plus a luxury tax penalty). Given that the trade went down Tuesday, the Rays have probably already turned Orze into a bona fide ace.

The move could indicate something of a pattern for the Mets, who signed the glove-first Harrison Bader to a one-year contract before the 2024 season. Here’s how similar the two players are: At the time of his signing, Bader was 29 years old and had posted a career wRC+ of 90 while averaging 20 OAA per 150 games. Right now, Siri is 29 years old and has posted a career wRC+ of 89 while averaging 19.1 OAA per 150 games.

That move didn’t exactly pan out. Bader managed to avoid the injured list for the first time since 2020 and his 85 wRC+ wasn’t far below his career mark, but it wasn’t exactly the bounce-back season the Mets had hoped for. He started nearly every game against right-handed pitching, but against lefties, he went from ceding the occasional start to Tyrone Taylor at the beginning of the season to sitting more often than not by the end of it. This wasn’t ideal considering Bader has a career 109 wRC+ vs. lefties and an 84 wRC+ vs. righties. By the time the playoffs rolled around, he was the odd man out. He got into nearly all of the team’s postseason games, but started just twice and made just six plate appearances.

In all, the Mets got just 1.6 WAR in center field in 2024. That ranked 22nd in all of baseball, and it was the lowest ranking of any position on the field for the team. The only other spots on the diamond where the Mets were even in the bottom half of the league were starting pitcher, catcher, and right field. With Bader and Jesse Winker entering free agency and Taylor undergoing surgery to repair a hernia and remove a loose body from his throwing elbow, Siri is unlikely to be the last outfielder the Mets acquire this offseason.

The Athletic’s Will Sammon cited sources who reported that this wasn’t the first time the Mets had sought to get their hands Siri, and it’s not hard to see why. Siri is as tempting a project as any player in the game. He’s an incredibly gifted defensive center fielder with light tower power and absolutely no semblance of plate discipline or contact ability. The team that could get him to chase just a little bit less, to whiff just a little bit less, would have a monster on its hands. However, Siri is entering his age-29 season, and it’s hard to imagine that even the team that wanted him badly enough to risk the humiliation of trading a pitching prospect to the Rays really expects to finally unlock him. Unlike lower-back pain, plate discipline isn’t something you just happen to pick up once you hit your 30s. In 2024, Siri ran a 37.9% strikeout rate. Among players with 400 plate appearances in a season, that’s the third-highest mark in major league history. His 35.8% career strikeout rate ranks 14th on our career leaderboard, and five of the 13 players ahead of him were pitchers.

Just like Bader in Flushing, Siri started losing playing time as the 2024 season went on. Jonny DeLuca, who in 2024 featured – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – excellent speed and defense to go with some trouble getting on base, absorbed that playing time and will presumably be starting in center for the Rays next season. This time, the Mets got their solid, if flawed, center fielder on the trade market because there really aren’t any to be had in free agency. Understandably, they’re not keen to ride the Bader train again. Michael A. Taylor and Manuel Margot, the only other true center fielders on the free agent market, are both on the wrong side of 30 and coming off their own extremely down 2024 seasons. Siri’s production may look a lot like Bader’s, but he’s got a better track record when it comes to health, and because he cost a prospect rather than a free agent contract, he’ll come with a smaller luxury cap hit.

In Orze, the Rays landed a 27-year-old multi-inning reliever with a killer splitter and a modest track record of minor league success. The Mets selected him in the fifth round of the 2020 draft out of the University of New Orleans. If you’re familiar with him already, you’re either aware that he has survived two types of cancer or you’ve heard about his unfortunate major league debut. On July 8, Orze entered in the sixth inning against the Pirates and allowed a walk and two singles without recording an out. All three runners would score and he’d be tagged with the loss to go with his infinite ERA. Orze would make just one more appearance with the Mets.

Despite an unspectacular 29.7% chase rate in the minors in 2024, Orze has had excellent strikeout rates throughout his minor league career. However, those strikeouts have come hand-in-hand with dangerously high walk rates. In 2022, Eric Longenhagen ranked Orze seventh in Mets system, writing that he was a “near-ready multi-inning reliever… a super valuable piece for a contending team, and a huge draft and dev feather in the cap of the org.” Unfortunately, Orze stalled out, posting a 5.13 ERA at Triple-A Syracuse in 2022 and a 5.31 ERA there in 2023. After the ranked portion of the team’s 2024 prospect list, Eric wrote simply that Orze “has a plus-plus changeup and struggles to throw strikes.” He wasn’t wrong. Among minor leaguers with at least 75 plate appearances tracked by Statcast in 2024, Orze’s 44% zone rate put him in the just 13th percentile.

To be fair, Orze’s peripherals outpaced his ERA, especially in 2022. In 2024, he had a 2.92 ERA with a 3.65 xFIP. He looks like a classic pronator, able to make the ball run to his arm side at will. Both scouts and stuff models are in love with his splitter, and his slider should be serviceable. His four-seamer is the problem. The pitch averages a hair under 94 mph, and as you can see from Max Bay’s Dynamic Dead Zone app, its movement profile is unlikely to fool too many hitters.

See how the pink oval of the pitch’s actual shape matches up almost perfectly with the light blue ovals that indicate the shape that a batter would expect? That’s no good. If the Rays are going to turn Orze into their next star, they’ll need to help him with his command, and they’ll need to help him unlock a better fastball. Still, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the Rays post something like this on Bluesky, everyone should be afraid.

Let’s play a little guessing game. See if you can identify the pitchers who produced the two seasons below.

Got your guesses ready? Awesome. The answer is… after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Angels announced that they had signed catcher Travis d’Arnaud to a two-year deal. I was on vacation at the time and I didn’t hear about the move until later. Truthfully, I didn’t think about it too much once I did hear about it. However, I heard immediately about what happened on Sunday, and when I did my ears perked right up. Deep within a Tampa Bay Times article about the Rays’ housing crisis, Marc Topkin buried a gem: “The Rays had interest in” d’Arnaud. Why is that minor detail so consequential? Because it means that We Tried season is officially underway. For the uninitiated, We Tried is what teams sometimes tell their beat reporters after a free agent they coveted signs with another team. The beat reporters dutifully report this retrospective interest to their readers. It’s a bizarre ritual, but it’s also a lot of fun (unless you were a fan of the Mets during the Wilpon Era, in which case I apologize for not including a trigger warning at the top of this article).

Only one team gets to sign each free agent, but every team is free to announce publicly that they wanted that free agent and to do so in whatever language they choose. The Phillies were reportedly in on Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Red Sox had interest in Kodai Senga. Topkin’s report included the tidbit that d’Arnaud didn’t sign with the Rays because he “supposedly wanted to get back to his native southern California.” Frankly, there’s no reason to limit this to baseball teams. Anybody can do it. For example, I can officially report that I was interested in Michael Wacha. Unfortunately, he decided to return to the Royals for several million dollars before I had time to make my opening offer of $35, unlimited soda from the vending machine, and two of those really big pumpkins you see at the state fair.

“Plans are real things and not experience,” wrote John Steinbeck. “A rich life is rich in plans. If they don’t come off, they are still a little bit realized.” MLB front offices agree with him. Organizations normally go to absurd lengths in order to keep their best-laid plans secret, but once those plans gang agley, they’re more than happy to make sure that the public awards partial credit for them. The move carries no real risk. These reports almost never indicate the name of the executive who made the claim, and even if the claim is untrue, the free agent in question usually has little reason to refute it.

Teams often have legitimate reasons for announcing to the world that they were in on a free agent. First of all, it might simply be the truth, and telling the truth is generally a good thing. It could be a signal to your fans or your current players that you’re really going for it and that good times are coming. It could be a signal to other free agents that you’re open for business. Unfortunately, teams also have plenty of shadier reasons. A team might just say it to make themselves appear more relevant than they really are. Sometimes it’s just a matter of feeding a reporter harmless information in order to keep greasing the skids of a transactional relationship. Sometimes teams want to make a player look bad, or to not-so-subtly intimate that the team that signed them overpaid.

There’s no limit to the number of ways to announce that you tried. You can say that you had interest in a player, that you met with them, that you had talks, that you were in on them, that you were involved, that you were close to a deal, that you couldn’t agree to terms. As the Rays did with d’Aarnaud, you can even provide a reason behind the player’s decision that conveniently absolves you of responsibility. However you couch things, the message is the same: We tried. We failed. We alerted the press because we wanted the whole world to know about our failure. That’s one particularly weird facet of this practice. How often do you hear uber-competitive front office types announce to the public at large that they tried and failed at anything? They’ll only do so when it might also mean making them look good (or making someone else look bad).

Over at Jon Becker’s indispensable Free Agent Matrices, you can find a color-coded spreadsheet that breaks down every team’s interest level in every free agent using 11 different categories. And that’s just one tab. The Matrix is – and I say this with nothing but admiration – a monument to the absurdity of the game we love and a work of absolute madness. Remember the movie Dave, when Dave calls his friend Murray into the White House to eat bratwurst and find $650 million in the federal budget? After perusing the 16 different tabs of the Matrices, I genuinely believe that Becker could balance the budget and fix the deficit in one afternoon even without the bratwurst.

So here’s what I propose: We create a We Tried Tracker. We’re going to steal Becker’s idea, but our matrix is solely for teams that announce that they tried to sign a player after the fact. Just like Becker, I’ve created a spreadsheet to keep tabs on everything. It’s simple now, but we’ll trick it out once things get going. Maybe we’ll color-code things too. Mauve could mean “We were involved.” Chartreuse could mean “We were interested, but we weren’t about to pay as much as those jabronis did.” Fuchsia could mean “We liked the cut of his jib, but the seas are rough out there and our boat is so little.”

I can’t do this alone. I’m sure I’ll miss a We Tried here or there, so I am officially asking for your help. If you see a We Tried, let me know on social media. If you don’t have social media, send me an email at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. Yes, that’s a real email address and I will be monitoring it. Please be a part of the ridiculous thing that we are building. If and when the We Tried market really heats up, I’ll provide updates. We’ll keep a leaderboard of the teams and players that execute and incite the most We Trieds. We’ll document the different ways that teams express the sentiment. Together, we can make this offseason 10% more fun and at least 20% more stupid.

Update: Jon Becker graciously offered to fold the We Tried Tracker into the Free Agent Matrices, so the link above has been updated to take you deep into the heart of that now 17-tabbed spreadsheet.

As of 1:00 PM Eastern, Becker has yet to balance the federal budget.

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

For the third time in the last four years, the Mariners hung around the playoff race for most of the 2024 campaign, before falling just short by the season’s denouement. When it comes to winning 85 to 90 games a year like clockwork, Jerry Dipoto’s ship is airtight and his sailors always on the ball. But so far, St. Louis Cardinals: Pacific Northwest hasn’t been quite as effective as the original series — the Mariners aren’t going to have as easy a time stealing division titles as the Cardinals did, playing as they do in a harder division. While the Mariners aggressively add players and make trades, there’s a basic conservatism here that limits the team’s ultimate upside; despite seven winning seasons in the last 11 years, Seattle has maxed out at just 90 wins. This isn’t a new thing either — the franchise only has one 95-win-or-better season in its history (the 116-win 2001 season, of course). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season gave us the most predictable pair of Rookie of the Year races in recent memory. Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll were our top two prospects entering the year and the overwhelming preseason ROY favorites among our staff. At season’s end, they each earned all 30 votes on their respective ballots. It was only the second time in the 21st century that both the AL and NL ROY winners were unanimous decisions (Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger won unanimously in 2017) and the first time that the clear preseason favorites were also the undisputed victors. By comparison, the 2024 Rookie of the Year races were about as predictable as a toddler’s favorite food.

You don’t want Wyatt Langford? But you loved Wyatt Langford yesterday!

So you either like Paul Skenes or Jackson Merrill, but you won’t tell me which one and if I pick wrong you’ll throw him on the floor and scream? Got it.

AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil missed most of the 2022 and 2023 seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery. Even before he tore his UCL, a future move to the bullpen seemed possible, and if it weren’t for his strong spring training (15 2/3 IP, 2.87 ERA) and Gerrit Cole’s elbow injury, that’s likely where Gil would have begun the 2024 campaign. Runner-up Colton Cowser was a slightly more promising prospect; he graduated with a 45+ FV to Gil’s 40+. Still, like Gil, his starting role in the majors was not guaranteed until he earned it with a red-hot spring and an equally scorching start to the regular season.

Of the three finalists in the AL, only third-place finisher Austin Wells ranked among our top 100 prospects ahead of the season. And of the five players who earned votes for AL Rookie of the Year as part of our preseason staff predictions exercise (Langford, Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, Holliday, and Colt Keith), only Langford ended up earning so much as a single vote from the BBWAA. He finished seventh with one second-place vote and four third-place selections.

The NL contenders weren’t quite as surprising. All three finalists, Skenes, Merrill, and Jackson Chourio, were among our top 30 prospects entering the season. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most popular NL Rookie of the Year choice in March, only fell out of the race due to a triceps injury that cost him almost half the season. Yet, although the NL field was not so surprising, at least not like the AL field turned out to be, the final results were just as hard to predict. The voting ultimately wasn’t all that close – Skenes earned 23 first-place votes to Merrill’s seven – but those numbers might undersell what a difficult decision all 30 voters had to make. Dan Szymborski did a great job breaking down why it was such a tough choice (and why he ultimately cast his ballot for Merrill).

Merrill showed off all five tools in 2024, the most impressive of which was his center field defense, considering he was a shortstop up until this year. OAA, UZR, and Baseball Prospectus’s DRP loved him in center. Only DRS disagreed (0 DRS), but even a perfectly neutral defensive performance is admirable coming from a 21-year-old playing the position for the first time. Combine that glove with good baserunning, great contact skills, and a surprising amount of power, and you get Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, more than a full run higher than any other rookie in either league. The last rookie to produce more WAR and still lose the ROY was Kenny Lofton (5.8 WAR) in 1992. Thus, the fact that Skenes came out on top is a testament to the dominant season he put together. Over 23 starts and 133 innings, he pitched to a 1.96 ERA and 4.3 WAR. No rookie starter has thrown more innings with a lower ERA in over 50 years. If Skenes had been on the Pirates’ roster on Opening Day, it’s very likely he’d have surpassed Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, and this conversation wouldn’t have been so complicated. But that’s the debate in a nutshell. On the one hand, you can’t blame Skenes for not pitching in the majors sooner. He was clearly ready to make the Pirates’ roster out of camp. On the other hand, you can’t give him credit for innings he didn’t pitch.

Only two more rookies earned votes in the NL, and either of them very well could have won the award outright if they’d played in the opposite league. Chourio wasn’t quite as strong of a hitter as Merrill, but he excelled on both sides of the ball, finishing with 21 homers, 22 steals, 6 OAA, and 3.9 WAR. Meanwhile, fourth-place finisher Shota Imanaga was terrific in the first year of what now looks like an incredibly team-friendly four-year, $53 million deal with the Cubs. His 2.91 ERA ranked third among all qualified NL pitchers. His 3.72 FIP was significantly higher, so his 3.0 WAR ranked just 19th among NL hurlers. Still, among rookie pitchers, it was second only to Skenes.

A trio of NL infielders also deserve some recognition for their strong rookie seasons; any of them might have earned some down-ballot votes in a weaker year. Masyn Winn (3.6 WAR) and Joey Ortiz (3.1 WAR) were strong defenders with roughly league-average bats, while Tyler Fitzgerald (3.0 WAR) put up a .217 ISO and 132 wRC+ over 96 games while looking just capable enough with the glove to be an everyday shortstop.

The AL rookie class didn’t have quite as much top-end talent or mid-tier depth. Gil was a solid, mid-rotation starter who moderately outperformed his peripherals. That’s no knock on the righty, who was a valuable member of the Yankees’ AL pennant-winning roster, but he didn’t have a star-making debut season like Skenes, Imanaga, or Yamamoto. According to WAR (and 14 out of 30 voters), Cowser actually had the more impressive season. Even so, it’s hard to ignore how similar Cowser’s numbers were to those of the NL’s distant third-place finisher Chourio. And considering neither Gil nor Cowser was a slam dunk to win, one might have thought Wells would earn some first-place votes himself. He blossomed into a terrific defensive catcher by anyone’s metrics (13 FRV, 11 DRS, 14.5 DRP), which is quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately, he disappeared at the plate in September (22 wRC+) and may have cost himself the hardware in the process.

Where the AL rookie class really stood out this year was in the bullpen. Two of the top three relievers by WAR were AL rookies: Cade Smith (2.7 WAR) and Mason Miller (2.3 WAR). Miller was the bigger story because of his triple-digit fastball velocity, gaudy strikeout totals, and strong start to the season, but Smith ended up with a lower ERA and FIP in 11 1/3 additional innings. Nonetheless, narrative often prevails in awards voting, and Miller finished ever so slightly ahead of Smith. It probably didn’t help Smith’s case that he was hidden behind Cy Young finalist Emmanuel Clase in the Guardians’ bullpen, whereas Miller racked up 28 saves as the A’s closer.

The other two AL rookies receiving votes were outfielders Wilyer Abreu (3.1 WAR) and Langford (2.9 WAR). The two had similarly valuable seasons; each was above average at the plate, while Abreu was the stronger fielder and Langford the better baserunner. However, Abreu came into the season as a relatively unheralded name, and Langford’s top-prospect reputation preceded him. Thus, compared to Abreu, who looked like a blossoming star, Langford almost seemed to be a disappointment — at least relative to expectations. That could explain why Abreu earned a couple more votes, including a pair of second-place selections from outside the Boston chapter of the BBWAA.

The emergence of star prospects like Skenes and Merrill, the breakouts of less-heralded rookies like Cowser and Gil, and the close ROY races in both leagues highlight what was another banner year for rookies. Overall, they combined for 138.3 WAR in 2024, surpassing the previous record of 134.8 set by last year’s rookie class:

What’s more, this past year’s rookies represented 13.8% of WAR league-wide. That figure isn’t quite record-breaking, but it is the highest percentage of WAR to come from rookies since 1947, fittingly the first season of the ROY award, created for and won by Jackie Robinson. These are the top seasons in history according to percentage of WAR produced by rookies, excluding 1871 (when everyone was a rookie):

Of course, all of this is partly because rookies have seen a steady increase in playing time since the start of the 21st century. When rookies play more, it stands to reason that they’re going to produce more value. Therefore, it’s also relevant to look at the ratio of rookie WAR to rookie playing time, which I’ve calculated by taking the percentage of league-wide WAR produced by rookies and dividing it by the percentage of league-wide plate appearances and batters faced by rookies. Rarely is that ratio going to be higher than 100% (that would mean rookies were outproducing non-rookies on a rate basis), but the closer the number is to 100%, the better rookies have performed compared to the rest of the league.

By this metric, the 2024 season isn’t quite as historic. Still, it was the strongest year for rookies since 2012 and one of the top three seasons of the last 30 years. The graph begins in 1916, when TBF data is first available:

Another metric to consider is the number of rookies who reached a certain WAR threshold. Decimal places of WAR are pretty insignificant, and any WAR threshold I pick is going to be somewhat arbitrary. Still, I think it’s interesting to identify the number of rookies who made a lasting impression in any given season. For instance, 28 players on our rookie leaderboards finished with at least 2.0 WAR this past season. The last time there were more two-win rookies was 1920, which was the first season that any of the Negro Leagues are considered major leagues, and therefore the rookie season of all-time great players like Oscar Charleston and Cristóbal Torriente. Meanwhile, the last time rookies made up such a high percentage of all two-win major leaguers was 1947:

Similarly, the last time there were more three-win rookies on our leaderboards was 1920, and the last time rookies made up a higher percentage of three-win players was 1947.

At this point, I feel compelled to note that due to MLB’s two-pronged rookie eligibility requirements, our leaderboards include a handful of players who have already exhausted rookie status. It’s easy to filter out players who have reached 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the majors; it’s harder to filter out those who have accumulated 45 days on an active major league roster during the championship season (not counting days on the injured list) without reaching either of those other playing time thresholds. For the sake of consistency, the numbers I’ve cited up to this point come directly from our leaderboards. I could have manually extracted the few players who weren’t technically rookies in 2024, but it would be impossible to do that for every season on record. Moreover, I don’t think it’s a grave sin to include a player like Lawrence Butler when I’m looking at general rookie trends; if he had been called up just a week later in 2023, he’d still have been rookie eligible in 2024.

However, in case that makes you skeptical about the greatness of this year’s rookie class, let me ease your troubled mind. Even if I manually correct the 2024 data and remove players like Butler, rookies still made up a higher percentage of all two-win players in 2024 than in any season since 1920 and a higher percentage of all three-win players than in any season since 1984. And keep in mind, that’s without manually correcting the data in any other season.

Some of these rookies will become superstars in the years to come. At least one of them already is. Others may look back on 2024 as the best year of their careers. As their futures unfold in different ways, we may soon forget that all of these players crossed the major league threshold in the same season. Still, for this brief moment in time, all of these players are a unified graduating class. So, let me leave them with the distinctive, touching, and unforgettable words of my high school principal’s graduation speech: “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives.”