Baseball Bytes: We Really Did Not Know This Year’s Top Rookies
Baseball Bytes: We Really Did Not Know This Year’s Top Rookies
Plus, the Brewers at No. 1 and new White Sox manager Grady Sizemore's Cooperstown what-if.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out three byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Rookies, Revisited
It’s amazing how much difference a handful of months can make. Back in Spring Training, we had a lot of preconceived notions about how the 2024 season would play out — some of which proved more prophetic than others. Few have aged less accurately, though, than the consensus Rookie of the Year picks from before the season. Here were the leaders in both the FanDuel RoY odds and MLB’s executive poll back at the start of the year:
By contrast, here’s what the odds look like now, along with the rookie-eligible leaders in Wins Above Replacement per 162 team games (as of Aug. 11):
Of the 15 players who are currently among the Top 6 in either RoY odds or WAR right now, only four of them — Paul Skenes, Shota Imanaga, Jackson Chourio and Colt Keith — were even mentioned at all in the first table of preseason odds and executive voting. (Or, alternatively, only four of the 14 names from our first table made it into our second table.)
Big NL favorite Skenes was a mere afterthought in preseason; the favorite, Yamamoto, has been very good when healthy (72 ERA-, 66 FIP-) but has also spent 39 percent of the season on the injured list. And remember how the AL race was going to be all about Texas OFs Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford? Instead, Carter has mostly been injured, Langford has struggled to hit for power, and they’re on pace to combine for just 1.7 WAR — which together wouldn’t even crack the AL’s Top 10 among rookies. Meanwhile, current favorites Colton Cowser and Luis Gil weren’t even on the odds board at FanDuel before the season.2
That’s a huge change from last season, when respective AL and NL Rookies of the Year Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll were also Nos. 1-2 in Baseball America’s prospect rankings. Things don’t always work out quite so nicely — neither of 2021’s winners (Randy Arozarena and Jonathan India) ever ranked among the Top 15 prospects, for instance. But the preseason RoY favorites and the eventual best rookies usually tend to have more correlation than they did this season, which has featured a notable scrambling between the rookies we thought would be good and those who actually were.
⚾ Crew with a View
Because they’ve been winning recently while their fellow top-tier teams have been more up-and-down, the Milwaukee Brewers woke up Sunday morning to a brand-new placement in the MLB Elo rankings: Number 1.
That’s a pretty rare sight. Though the Brewers have been pretty good for a while now — they actually have MLB’s sixth-best winning percentage since 2017 — Sunday marked Milwaukee’s first time atop the league Elo rankings since October 2, 1992, the third-to-last day of the ‘92 regular season.
It didn’t help the Brewers that much in 1992; they were already 2 games out of the division lead (and therefore the playoffs) on October 2, and they lost the last two games of the season by a combined 17-4 margin to finish 4 games back. But more recently, we have an example of a team (the NHL’s Florida Panthers) finally making it to No. 1 after a long wait, and they eventually parlayed that into a championship. Maybe Milwaukee can do the same!
⚾ What if Grady was Sizemore-talized in Cooperstown?
The dreadful Chicago White Sox became the first (and least surprising) team to make an in-season managerial change this season when they dismissed Pedro Grifol last week. In his place will be interim skipper Grady Sizemore, a name that brought back a flood of memories from mid-2000s baseball.
To me, Sizemore’s career was always one of the big what-ifs of that era. By his age-25 season, he had already produced four different seasons of at least 5.9 WAR per 162 team games, including a 7.3-WAR campaign in 2006 that probably should have gotten him serious AL MVP consideration. Through the age of 25, Sizemore had the 47th-most career WAR3 of any AL/NL batter in history — and if we look at the players who had similar totals at that age, more of them ended up in the Hall of Fame than not:
(LOL at post-25 Bonds breaking the scale on that chart, btw.)
Instead of continuing on his Cooperstown trajectory, though, Sizemore had the fewest remaining career WAR of any player on that list, his potential undone by a long string of injuries. I know Sizemore has limited experience as a manager, and that he’s being set up to have his name associated with managing one of the worst teams in MLB history. But I’m still rooting for him to make up for the lost potential of his playing career with this next act.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
Cowser wasn’t even close to being the Orioles hitter who was supposed to be leading the RoY race — that was going to be teammate Jackson Holliday.
Adjusting each season to 162 team games for each batter.
Synchronicity. I recently caught an interview with Alex Anthopoulos where he was talking about young talent. He challenged the interviewers to examine any of the Top 100 baseball talent lists over the past 10-15 years and consider how few of those players - even the highly touted prospects - make it to the majors and how far fewer perform up to the levels projected.
Baseball talent evaluation, like any evaluation of human performance in any setting, is a knotty exercise - even within a season as you point. Corbin Carroll's regression this season is an additional warning of how long establishment of a stable performance trend takes and the perils of too early declarations of success. Consequently, acquisition strategies remain exceedingly fluid. High school versus college, age versus development, scouting versus data, traits versus production, pitchers versus everyday players, positional value versus best player available, etc.
The scarcity of high-performance talent is a key reason most rosters are typically comprised of a small number of high impact players with a much larger number of fungible players who can be churned in search of incremental gains each year.
As for the future, Anthopoulos' comments strongly suggest that the recent media infatuation with adding Draft picks to trade deadline deals is likely to be of little tangible value outside of additional content for providers and media outlets and those ever so popular but specious "report cards."