The Jaime García All-Stars

I feel a little bad for Shota Imanaga. The Cubs left-hander is sixth among qualified starters in ERA and ninth in K-BB%. He’s thrown 173 1/3 innings, which is a bunch by modern standards, and while we don’t put much probative value in pitcher record in this day and age, Imanaga is still 15-3 for a pretty mediocre Cubs team. After Imanaga threw seven scoreless innings on Sunday — the second time he’s done that this month — I saw a little bit of Twitter chatter from people wondering where his Rookie of the Year buzz went?

FIP doesn’t like Imanaga that much, because he gives up a bunch of home runs, but even after getting dinged for that, Imanaga has put up a 3.1-WAR season as a rookie. There are years where that, in addition to his pretty uncontroversially awesome traditional stats, would be good enough to win Imanaga some hardware.

Unfortunately, Imanaga is the third competitor in a pretty thrilling two-man race between Paul Skenes and Jackson Merrill. Do you want the flashy giant with triple-digit heat and an unhittable off-speed pitch that defines classification? Or do you want the guy who learned a brand new position basically overnight at age 20, and oh by the way is nearly hitting .300 with power in a park that’s unfriendly to hitters?

Me? I’d go with Skenes, but would have a hard time mounting a negative argument against Merrill. Either one would be a deserving winner. As for Imanaga, I’m actually not sure he’d be the third man on my ballot if I had one. That’d probably be Jackson Chourio, who would have a legitimate case if Merrill hadn’t broken the curve. Tyler Fitzgerald isn’t a sexy name, but he’s got a 135 wRC+ in 90 games, mostly as a shortstop. Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s case was undone by injuries, but he’s nearly equaled Imanaga’s WAR total in roughly half as many innings. He’ll get down-ballot votes as well.

The thing is, Rookie of the Year is a volatile competition. The MVP and Cy Young classes vary in quality from year to year, but not by much. The list of best players in baseball is pretty stable from one season to the next.

Best rookies, however? That’s another question. Future MVPs and Hall of Famers don’t bubble up from the minors in a steady stream. Sometimes they come two and three at a time. Sometimes they come in April, other times in August, too late to influence the Rookie of the Year race. Sometimes there are several in one league but none in the other.

Some years, well, they mint a new plaque for each league every year, and you’ve got to give it to somebody. And that’s not even counting flash-in-the-pan cases who won the award on merit but fizzled out later. For instance: Bob Hamelin is easy to mock because he was a pudgy guy who wore glasses and was a replacement-level player for bad teams for almost all of his short career. But the man raked in 1994: .282/.388/.599, with 24 homers and 56 walks in just 374 plate appearances. He earned his spot as a historical footnote, don’t let anyone tell you different.

But in other cases the first great season of a superstar career goes completely unrewarded. Or a relatively underhyped rookie puts in a big first season and barely gets noticed. Which is what will happen to Imanaga, in all likelihood.

At times like this, I think of Jaime García. Like Imanaga, García was an unassuming-looking lefty for an NL Central team who would’ve had a real shot at Rookie of the Year if he weren’t up against two monsters. In 2010, García posted a 2.70 ERA in 163 1/3 innings. And this was back when a 2.70 ERA meant something — that was a 69 ERA-. He did get a single first-place Rookie of the Year vote, but only one, because Buster Posey and Jason Heyward were also in that class. Posey took his first step toward Cooperstown with that season, and Heyward set himself up for a lifetime of disappointment by posting a career-high .393 OBP. It takes a lot to get noticed in that environment.

I went back through the Rookie of the Year races since 1980, which is when voting went from one player per ballot to (brushing off my old comparative politics textbooks) ranked choice voting. And I’ll say this: As much as the BBWAA voters went through a rough time during the Fire Joe Morgan era, and as much as the Hall of Fame continues to be a contentious battlefield pitting the forces of reason against the forces of silliness, the writers have gotten to the right answer most of the time. There are always cranks and outliers (I was amused to discover Ichiro was not a unanimous Rookie of the Year in 2001, and that five voters chose Miguel Andujar over Shohei Ohtani in 2018), but the collective has been solid.

So, in addition to García himself, I present the Jaime García All-Stars:

A key characteristic of the Jaime García All-Stars is that they did not actually deserve the award. So while Orel Hershiser was awesome in 1984, posting a 2.66 ERA in 189 2/3 innings split between the rotation and the bullpen, he had the misfortune of coming up against Samuel, who hit .272 and stole 72 bases. And also Gooden, who put up one of the greatest rookie seasons of all time. Tough beat.

Brown had a case to win Rookie of the Year by WAR, but Olson was a reliever and we all know WAR doesn’t count for relievers. What does count: a 1.69 ERA and 27 saves. It’s fine. But this was the start of Brown — for reasons I still don’t understand — being wildly underrated by awards voters. He never won a Cy Young and really only came close once, in 1998, when he lost a three-way battle with Tom Glavine and Trevor Hoffman. (Glavine, at the risk of reiterating an opinion that’s gonna get me yelled at, is the most overrated pitcher of his generation, which makes Brown being snubbed for him all the more fitting.) And, of course, Brown lasted a single year on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot. When I’m dictator of baseball, Brown will get the respect he deserves.

Ichiro and Pujols were two of the most obvious Rookies of the Year ever, and then backed it up by putting on lengthy Hall of Fame-worthy careers. But their success obscures how good the rest of that rookie class was: a future Hall of Famer in Sabathia, several Hall of Very Gooders in Oswalt, Soriano, and Rollins. Plus Adam Dunn. And a David Eckstein sighting! Oswalt is the only one who really ought to feel aggrieved at not winning Rookie of the Year — everyone else burst into the league with decent-but-not-great campaigns — but this is quite a list of names to have beaten back so resoundingly.

The WAR totals make this look like a miscarriage of justice, but it’s important to remember that Braun hit 34 home runs and stole 15 bases in just 113 games, while Tulowitzki played 155. Also, the defensive metrics have Tulowitzki an astonishing 49.1 runs ahead of Braun. Based on the what happened to both players later in their careers, I’m inclined to believe that Braun was a bad third baseman and Tulo a very good shortstop, but I have a hard time trusting that big a gap based on data from 2007.

Either way, poor Hunter Pence got lost in the shuffle. A literal shuffle, one might say, given Pence’s unorthodox running style. Even so, a 132 wRC+ in 108 games is a great rookie season — hardware is routinely won with less.

García, Imanaga, Ryu… I’d argue J.A. Happ in 2009, though he finished second in a pretty forgettable class. Voters like left-handers without elite velocity enough to notice them, but not enough to give them serious consideration for the top of the ballot. I get Ryu’s falling down the pecking order because he was a 26-year-old KBO veteran, and because he was overshadowed not only by Clayton Kershaw, but by Puig, who was the most buzz-worthy player in the league at the time. The only person who came close was, well, Fernández.

I remember this race between Acuña and Soto being much closer than it was. That happens sometimes in award voting (the Jose Altuve vs. Aaron Judge race for AL MVP in 2017 was like this too) where there’s a clear closely matched top two, but rather than that manifesting in an even split of votes, everyone comes down on the same side of a close call.

Either way, Buehler, despite his single first-place vote, was a distant third. It’s in keeping with a career where Buehler was always among the best on his team, or in the league, or whatever cohort you want to choose, but never clearly the best.

Another close race with a lopsided result. And in contrast to the 2018 NL race, where Acuña had the better season, I think the voters missed on this one. Not that Rodríguez wasn’t special — or that he didn’t turn into an absolute superstar — but I think the difficulty of posting a 135 wRC+ from behind the plate, as Rutschman did as a rookie, continues to be wildly underrated. Even so, the true hard case here is Kwan, who hit .298/.373/.400, stole 19 bases, and still wound up an afterthought. Behind his old college teammate, no less! What an indignity.

This was an even stronger rookie class than that, with Bobby Witt Jr., George Kirby, and Jeremy Peña also getting down-ballot votes. Kirby didn’t have a huge workload, Witt had not fully crystallized into what he would become (he hit 20 homers and stole 30 bases, but posted an OBP of just .294), and your opinion of Peña probably depends on which defensive metrics you believe.

Kwan was incredible as a rookie by anyone’s standards, but was still clearly the third-best player in his class.

This being a highly subjective exercise, this is not — and cannot be, really — an exhaustive list. (Please share your favorite forgotten rookie season in the comments.) But the larger point is this: Imanaga is still having a great rookie campaign, even if he doesn’t get any hardware to show for it. Sometimes there’s just a better rookie.