Reassessing the Future for This Season’s Disappointing Rookies

Projecting the future is always difficult and full of inevitable misses, and I’m not just saying this because I have a vested interest in having you think I’m good at my job. We have a vague idea of a player’s broad future, enough so that nobody would trade Jackson Holliday for, say, Patrick Corbin. However, there’s always a great deal of uncertainty in prognosticating, and assuming for the sake of this opening paragraph that multiverse theory is correct, there will be planes of existence in which Corbin wins the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2025 when the Dodgers somehow fix his slider after a five-minute conversation. That’s not the way to bet, of course, and it’s likely that struggling rookies, especially ones with immaculate pre-2024 credentials — such as Holliday — will see this season as a bump in the road rather than a nasty car-destroying pothole.

Turns out, this was the season for longshot Rookie of the Year picks, especially in the American League. Of the top 17 AL rookies based on the preseason Rookie of the Year betting odds, only two players, Colton Cowser and Wilyer Abreu, ever had a plausible argument for being in the conversation once games started. Luis Gil and Austin Wells were nowhere to be found. For the table below, I’ve included 15 of the 17 players who were given AL Rookie of the Year awards odds by DraftKings before the season, sorted by their preseason ranking in descending order, along with their actual 2024 stats. I’m citing these rankings to get a general sense of who the favorites were back in March, not because I think they are more or less accurate than any other sportsbook odds.

(I’ve excluded the two other players, outfielder Everson Pereira and pitcher Ricky Tiedemann, because neither of them have reached the big leagues this season.)

Only six of these 17 players played even a half-season’s worth of games in the majors. It’s not just sportsbooks and bettors that got it wrong; by the time voting is official, we will have gone 0-for-25 here at FanGraphs.

I’ve done the same thing for the 19 NL players who were given preseason Rookie of the Year odds, with one table for hitters and another for pitchers. (All of the AL rookies who received preseason odds and actually played in 2024 are position players.) Things went significantly better for senior-circuit rookies.

So, what’s next for the rookies who are out of the awards picture? To get an idea of the change in their futures, I re-ran their projections for the next five years to compare to what their outlooks were during the preseason, using data as of Tuesday morning. I left out the players who have at least two WAR in 2024, as well as Matsui, who is a reliever and performed right in line with expectations, giving us a group of 21. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a National League Rookie of the Year voter this year, so I will not express any of my personal feelings regarding who should win that award.

In the projections, Evan Carter took the biggest hit. With a rather short, walk-heavy pedigree, ZiPS already saw him as riskier than the other top projected rookies, and then he had a rough early-season performance and a back injury that ruined his 2024. Taking all of this into account, ZiPS drops his 2025 line to .244/.338/.399; with a decent glove, that’s enough to be an average corner outfielder in this offensive environment, but well short of his preseason .259/.358/.412 projection. Carter’s teammate, Wyatt Langford, was a source of much projection disagreement entering the season, with Steamer and ZiPS quite excited, and THE BAT being rather meh about the situation. So far, meh has been closer, though he has hit much better (.258/.326/.424 in 91 games) since returning from an injury in late May.

Jasson Domínguez mainly makes this list for two reasons, more time on the injured list, causing ZiPS to take a foggier view of his health, and the fact that he didn’t have the major breakout yet, which is one of the things that ZiPS was banking on for him. His performance in Triple-A was good, but minor league offense is still crazy; ZiPS has his minor league translation at .263/.320/411, compared to his actual .309/.368/.480 line. That said, Domínguez should be starting every day for the Yankees over Alex Verdugo.

ZiPS is definitely bearish on Nolan Schanuel, and it’s increasingly confident that he won’t develop enough power, or enough secondary skills to compensate for his lack of power, to be a real plus at first base. The projections never bought into Hunter Goodman; he hit even worse than expected this year, and is not particularly young. I’m actually surprised DL Hall didn’t take an even bigger hit; back in a starting role, the walks came back with a vengeance, to the extent that returning to the bullpen for good might be the far better fit for him now.

Jackson Holliday’s numbers didn’t take a big hit for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, despite a really lousy debut in the majors, he played well enough in the minors — plus he’s so young and his résumé is so strong — that his small-sample struggles barely register. By reverse-o-fying Holliday’s major league woes into an untranslated minor league line and including it in his overall Triple-A production, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve had a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A this season, down from his actual mark of 142. A 20-year-old shortstop with a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A would still top everybody’s prospect list.

Several of these players simply didn’t get enough playing time to make a real impression. Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad never really had significant chances to grab starting roles with the Orioles this year, and James Wood and Dylan Crews were both midseason call-ups. Even so, the two Nationals rookies received some of the biggest bumps in their new projections. For Crews, the improvement was massive, largely because ZiPS has very little to go on and didn’t translate his college numbers as positively as Wyatt Langford’s, meaning that with a good first impression, Crews had a lot of room to grow in the eyes of ZiPS. Wood added nearly 200 points of OPS at Triple-A from his previous season — a combined .874 mark between High- and Double-A — at the time of his call-up; it was such a drastic improvement that if I had re-done the ZiPS Top 100 prospect list then, he would have come out on top.

None of these 21 players is in contention for the Rookie of the Year awards that will be announced in a few months. But for most of them, the lack of hardware in 2024 doesn’t represent a setback that changes their future outlooks too much.