The Tight NL Rookie Of The Year Race That Isn’t

Think about how many of the major awards are all but sewn up with just under a week before the ballots are due, won’t you?

Clayton Kershaw is clearly winning the NL Cy Young, probably unanimously. Felix Hernandez, despite a late push from Corey Kluber and an atrocious outing in Toronto on Tuesday, is still the favorite to win the AL Cy Young, though I guess I’m less certain of that each day. Mike Trout is obviously the AL MVP, becoming a three-time winner at age 22. (Oh.) Jose Abreu is even more obviously the AL Rookie of the Year, since Masahiro Tanaka missed so much time. There’s a fair amount of uncertainty about the NL MVP, but Kershaw’s momentum continues to build, and he’ll get a #narrative boost if the Dodgers clinch the NL West with him on the mound on Wednesday night. I won’t even bring up the managerial awards, because they’re less interesting and impossible to discuss.

But then there’s the NL Rookie of the Year, and that might be the award that’s hardest to pin down. With apologies to Ken Giles, Ender Inciarte, Joe Panik, Kolten Wong, and a few others, it’s pretty clear that this is a two-man race. It’s either Billy Hamilton, or it’s Jacob deGrom. That’s it, and with deGrom’s surprisingly effective rookie season now coming to an end with the Mets’ decision to shut him down in advance of his final start, this seems like an opportune moment to get into it.

Hamilton, for a while, has been seen as the front-runner, and it’s not hard to see why, because he was seen that way since before the season started. In our 2014 staff predictions, Hamilton was tied for first along with Gregory Polanco and Archie Bradley. Polanco came up late, impressed early, then stalled out; Bradley struggled with arm injuries and never made it up to the big leagues. It wasn’t just us, though, because you yourselves participated in our crowd projections, and Hamilton won there, collecting 19% of the vote.

deGrom wasn’t even mentioned in the comments of either of the two projection posts, nor should he have been, because he wasn’t really on the radar, starting out with Triple-A Las Vegas. As best as I can tell, deGrom had never even been referenced in the pages of FanGraphs until Eno started talking about his changeup in May, after deGrom’s first two major league starts (which, unintentionally, I was in attendance for). deGrom wasn’t Matt Harvey or Zack Wheeler or Noah Syndergaard or Rafael Montero; he was ranked in the 7-12 range of Mets prospects whether you were looking here, at Baseball America, or at Minor League Ball. Most projections considered him a 3/4 starter or a reliever. And why not? Entering his age-26 season, he’d thrown fewer than 300 professional innings. He’d pitched only 83.1 innings in college. It’s not so much that we missed this, but that there wasn’t anything to miss, not yet, anyway.

That’s two very different paths to a similar outcome, in the sense that in total value, there’s not a ton of difference between the two. Hamilton, entering Tuesday’s game, has been worth 3.4 WAR. deGrom’s season ends at 3.1 WAR and 3.5 RA9-WAR. That’s all close enough to essentially call it a wash.

You can make your own choices about which one you prefer. There’s reasons to like either one. Hamilton was the early favorite who played all season long, added value on the bases and in the field, and was at least mediocre at the plate, rather than unthinkably awful, even showing some power with six homers. deGrom was at times dominant, but because he came up six weeks into the season and missed several August starts with a trip to the disabled list, pitched only 140.1 innings. deGrom was objectively “better,” but Hamilton was in the bigs all year, and that has value. If deGrom wins this, he’ll do so with the lowest innings total of any starting pitcher in a non-strike year, beating the 160.2 innings that Dontrelle Willis had in 2003, and that’s not nothing. Months worth of “is the ROY front runner” articles probably don’t have as much actual value, but you never know how the perception of the voter is going to work.

There’s really two questions that are going to drive this in the actual voting, however, since there’s no “can a pitcher win” issue as there is in the MVP: Will the difference in playing time between the two matter? And how much will Hamilton’s late-season collapse hurt him?

Those are important questions, because these two could not have had more divergent second halves, to the point that Hamilton’s best hope may have been that since both the Mets and Reds were never seriously in the playoff race, few people were paying attention. It was that bad.

This first table shows the worst qualified hitters in baseball in the second half (stats, again, not including Tuesday night):

Name	Team	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	SB	wOBA	wRC+	WAR
Matt Dominguez	Astros	210	.176	.202	.271	0	.211	29	-1.4
Andrelton Simmons	Braves	197	.203	.240	.278	1	.231	42	0.1
Billy Hamilton	Reds	246	.204	.259	.262	18	.238	45	0.3
Brock Holt	Red Sox	213	.219	.278	.271	6	.251	52	-0.2
Omar Infante	Royals	243	.228	.267	.290	5	.246	52	-0.5
Jay Bruce	Reds	210	.199	.243	.332	3	.252	54	-1.2
Javier Baez	Cubs	206	.168	.228	.340	4	.255	56	-0.6
Coco Crisp	Athletics	207	.199	.271	.274	3	.247	56	-0.8
Salvador Perez	Royals	237	.228	.236	.345	0	.254	57	0.3
Derek Jeter	Yankees	245	.231	.274	.298	4	.258	58	-0.5

This is ranked by wRC+, though Hamilton managed to at least gain some value back in other areas. This is really, really ugly, especially if for some reason you thought the Brock Holt Experience was going to run indefinitely, and it’s something of a continuation of an issue for Hamilton. Needing to get off to a quick start to ward off the worries of those who saw his 2013 .308 Triple-A OBP, he didn’t, putting up a 68 wRC+ in April and just a 79 wRC+ in May. In June, it should be noted, he was outstanding, with a .327/.348/.500 line that gave hope that he’d figured out some of his issues, and while a lot of that was obviously BABIP-fueled, he seems like the most obvious player in the game to outperform BABIP expectations.

It didn’t last, obviously. July was an 83 wRC+. August was 74. September, even before Tuesday’s 0-3, was a nearly unthinkable 17. Again, assuming that his value is entirely based on his offense is selling him short, because his defense has been well-received across the board, and despite some stolen base efficiency problems, he’s been a valuable player on the bases. Unfortunately, the net result here is one excellent offensive month, four mediocre ones, and one absolute catastrophe.

Now, the best pitchers in baseball in the second half:

Name	Team	GS	IP	GB%	K%	BB%	HR/FB	ERA	FIP	xFIP	WAR
Corey Kluber	Indians	13	96	47.3%	30.8%	4.5%	5.6%	1.88	1.85	2.24	3.7
Clayton Kershaw	Dodgers	12	94	47.6%	29.0%	5.1%	5.3%	1.82	2.15	2.59	3.2
David Price	– – –	12	84.2	44.1%	26.2%	4.3%	7.1%	3.61	2.43	2.74	2.6
Max Scherzer	Tigers	13	88	38.0%	26.9%	6.7%	6.7%	2.97	2.73	3.10	2.4
Carlos Carrasco	Indians	9	71	50.0%	27.7%	4.0%	6.4%	1.77	2.00	2.27	2.3
Alex Cobb	Rays	12	77.1	54.1%	23.9%	6.9%	1.6%	1.51	2.38	3.19	2.2
Marcus Stroman	Blue Jays	12	73.1	57.7%	20.2%	5.1%	3.8%	3.56	2.50	3.03	2.2
Jacob deGrom	Mets	10	66.2	50.0%	27.9%	5.8%	3.8%	2.03	2.03	2.61	2.1
Chris Sale	White Sox	11	73	36.4%	32.1%	6.7%	9.2%	2.34	2.77	2.82	2.1
Phil Hughes	Twins	12	80	37.8%	22.5%	1.5%	7.3%	3.15	2.78	3.13	2.1
Jose Quintana	White Sox	12	73.2	40.5%	20.7%	5.8%	3.7%	3.18	2.73	3.57	2.1

That’s ranked by WAR, to show how much value deGrom has generated despite his lesser amount of innings, and those are some impressive names. (Also, holy good lord, Corey Kluber). Eno explained how deGrom improved his secondary pitches, partially thanks to Johan Santana. August Fagerstrom regaled us with GIFs of deGrom striking out eight consecutive Marlins to start a game last week.

Again, though, to display it like this shows the main issue here. This award isn’t for “best rookie of the second half,” it’s for “best rookie in 2014,” or at least it should be. Fairly or (mostly) not, finishing strong counts in the minds of some voters. Think about how long ago Kershaw’s missed time in April seems compared to Giancarlo Stanton’s lost September. As voters sit down to fill out their ballot, what’s going to be fresh in their minds is two months of deGrom being brilliant, and two months of Hamilton being atrocious. That Hamilton had some success earlier on in the year shouldn’t be lost; then again, that’s not how human nature works.

If it sounds like I’m talking myself into deGrom, I think I am. Hamilton’s season was a success in many ways, but I don’t know that we’re walking away from it any more convinced that he’s the answer the Reds need. The biggest strike against deGrom — maybe the only one, really — is that he didn’t pitch as much as you would have liked in the bigs this year. But really, it’s not like he was mediocre for a while and then had a great finish. In his debut, he held the Yankees to one run over seven innings. He held the Pirates scoreless over 6.2 innings in his third start. In his fourth, he struck out 11 hitters. Only three times all year did he allow more than three earned runs.

So really, for me, it comes down to this: If deGrom had made three more starts that weren’t total disasters, are we even talking about this? I’m not sure that we are. Hamilton had his moments. deGrom, despite being around less, had more. What stopped Hamilton from being more valuable was his own performance; what stopped deGrom was opportunities given, plus he had the likely boost of finishing well while Hamilton did not. deGrom is the choice for the Rookie of the Year on these pages, and I think, in a tight vote, the actual voters will agree.