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.”

Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.

The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.

When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.

I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021, my decision to vote for Trevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) Read the rest of this entry »

Picture peak Kyle Hendricks. He didn’t blow hitters away, but he sure recorded a lot of outs, deceiving hitters with a flurry of cutters, sinkers, and changeups. All of those pitches traveled in a similar tunnel; hitters couldn’t help but hit the ball with the thin part of their bat. Even late-period Hendricks manages to sit atop the hard-hit rate leaderboards in spite of a 87-mph fastball. His ability to do so is a function of his arsenal, which is designed to keep hitters off balance and off barrel.

They’re the same age, but Nick Martinez just spun up a peak Hendricks season, reliably generating yucky contact on balls in play. Those results earned him a qualifying offer of $21.05 million from the Reds, which he reportedly accepted on Sunday.

When the Reds initially proffered Martinez a QO, I saw a hefty helping of both consternation and skepticism around that decision, but I think it holds up well. Sure, Martinez doesn’t strike out a ton of batters. But who needs strikeouts when you’ve got routine fly balls?

To think Martinez is unlikely to deliver $21 million of value for his club in the 2025 season, you have to believe that the ability to generate weak contact is fluky, subject to the vicissitudes of randomness. But that belief might be misplaced. Read the rest of this entry »

The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.

“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”

That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”

The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.

The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »

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 Colorado Rockies.

Batters

Are the Rockies a good team? No, they are not. Are the Rockies even a middling team? Again, no. But things may slowly be getting better. Colorado will still have a lousy offense in 2025, but you can at least see the light at the end of a (very) long tunnel, most obviously when looking at the lineup. No one would confuse the Rockies with the Rays in terms of the cleverness with which they construct their roster, but the utter disaster that is the Kris Bryant signing does appear to have to had some kind of effect on their organizational decision-making. Since the start of 2023, they’ve done some very un-Rockies things. Jumping on the opportunity to snatch up an upside play like Nolan Jones isn’t something this team would have done in the late 2010s. The old Rockies would have found a way to play a mediocre veteran over Ezequiel Tovar, and there’s no way Brenton Doyle would have been given anywhere near enough rope to stick around for a possible breakout. Can you imagine past Rockies teams being patient with fringy prospects like Michael Toglia, giving an opportunity to a veteran journeyman like Jake Cave, or releasing Elias Díaz, a veteran catcher who made the All-Star Game the year prior, to find playing time for a prospect? Now, it hasn’t all worked out, but it at least represents some movement away from the strategies that slammed the competitive window of the last good Rockies team closed. You can’t get out of a hole until you stop digging. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge is the best hitter on the planet. Over the last three seasons combined, he has a 202 wRC+. We’re witnessing one of the best stretches by any hitter in baseball history, full stop. The fact that a player as great as Judge can struggle as much as he did this postseason (113 wRC+ in 64 plate appearances) is telling of how slumps can happen to anybody at any time, regardless of talent. You could chalk it up to randomness, and you’d probably be right, but randomness doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.

For example, hitters can find their mechanics out of whack, sometimes with no explanation. When that happens, they look to address the inefficiency and get themselves back on track. Sometimes it’s bad luck, but oftentimes it’s mechanics. Those blips can explain why hitters go through ups and downs. And depending on who you are and what your hitting style is, the fluctuations can be wide.

During the World Series, when Aaron Boone was asked if he thought Judge was pressing at the plate, he made a comment that stuck with me. Boone said, “… it can always be a little bit of a mechanical thing.” It’s not exactly clear if he meant that for Judge specifically or for all hitters, but regardless, I think it illuminates the mindset of players when they work through slumps. Depending on the shape or severity, it usually pushes hitters to get in the cage to figure out what tweak will unlock the best version of themselves. With Judge in particular, any mechanical issues can completely disrupt his bat path. Let me clarify that a bit further. Read the rest of this entry »

The players at the top of the market usually determine the shape of free agency. A team in need of offensive help in the outfield isn’t going to drop $100 million on Anthony Santander until it knows Juan Soto is no longer available. And Santander probably wouldn’t sign anyway. His agent would want to try to squeeze an extra few million out of a team that, having missed on Soto, needed desperately to go home with something.

A year ago, Shohei Ohtani held up the free agency deluge, and everyone reacted like he’d gotten to the front of a long line at Starbucks and had no idea what he wanted to order. (I mocked the public opprobrium then, but having stumbled into that simile I get it now. Everyone hates the Starbucks lollygagger.) Then Scott Boras, who usually waits out the market anyway, took even longer than usual to find homes for his top three clients. So free agency didn’t get going in earnest until mid-December, and stretched into March.

Of course, that’s only the top of the market. Every year, there’s a flurry of activity that starts only days after the end of the World Series, including some fairly big names changing teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting coaches and swing coaches aren’t the same thing.

I heard those exact words, or variations thereof, a number of times this season while talking to coaches. More often that not, the words were accompanied by an opinion that too many hitters — especially young hitters — are overly focused on honing a perfect swing, whereas what they should primarily be focusing on is… well, actually hitting the baseball. That’s not to discount the importance of good swings — every hitting coach understands their value — but much more goes into squaring up pitches within a game environment. As San Diego Padres special assistant Mark Loretta put it in yesterday’s Talks Hitting interview, “Obviously, you have to swing to hit the ball, but swinging isn’t hitting.”

Here is what three MLB general managers had to say on the subject, primarily as it relates to player development.

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Ross Fenstermaker, Texas Rangers GM

The Texas Rangers named a new general manager on November 4, promoting Ross Fenstermaker from assistant GM/player development and international scouting, a role he’d held since October 2021. A University of California Davis graduate, Fenstermaker has been with the organization since 2010, initially coming on board as a baseball operations intern.

Given his PD experience — and with swings in mind — I asked Fenstermaker about the advancements the Rangers made in that area over recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »