‘Phenomenal’: LSU’s Jayden Daniels plays the game with reckless abandon
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Alex Scarborough, ESPN Staff Writer
BATON ROUGE, La. — In a scene that’s become all too familiar this season, LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels deftly escaped the pocket only to take off and run with reckless abandon, absorbing the type of body blows that make coaches and fans alike wince.
No, this wasn’t that cringeworthy hit against Florida State or that breathtaking hit against Ole Miss or that freight train of a hit against Mississippi State. This was the shot Daniels took on the road at Missouri, the one that finally knocked him out of the game. After corralling an errant snap, splitting two defenders and cutting upfield, he crossed the goal line for an apparent touchdown. But just as he relaxed and dropped his shoulders into a defenseless posture, linebacker Chuck Hicks came out of nowhere and drilled him squarely in the back and tackled him to the ground.
As tight end Mason Taylor pleaded with officials for a personal foul, Daniels popped up quickly and tried to play it off. But he felt a sharp pain in his ribs growing more acute by the second. Unsteady on his feet, he tapped his helmet to signal he needed a substitution. He fell to a knee about 10 yards short of the sideline, where a pair of trainers huddled around him.
“It’s a TV timeout,” the trainers advised him. “You’ve got time.”
“Nah,” Daniels said. “I’ve got to get off this field.”
If he was going to get looked at, it wasn’t going to be in full view of everyone in the opposing stadium. Best not to let them see him vulnerable.
As he was helped to the privacy of the medical tent, coach Brian Kelly checked on his star QB.
“You good?” Kelly asked. “Can you finish the game?”
“Give me a minute,” Daniels said. “I just need a minute.”
Inside the tent, while his ribs were being examined, Daniels noticed his left hand was swollen. That was new, he thought. “I think it got hit by a helmet,” he said, unsure of when the injury occurred. The trainers asked if he was OK, and he didn’t hesitate. “Yeah,” he told them, “I need to go back out there.”
Backup quarterback Garrett Nussmeier had finished out the series, which continued because of a false start penalty that negated Daniels’ touchdown and ended with a missed field goal. After Missouri went three-and-out, Daniels went back in the game. Four plays later, he threw a strike to Malik Nabers for a 35-yard reception. Every little movement stung, though he tried not to let it show. Throwing the football, he said, “hurt a lot.”
But on third-and-3, Daniels took one step backward, planted his back leg on the Missouri 40-yard line and took off. Bruised ribs and aching hand be damned, he knifed through the front seven, past a hapless linebacker, past a sprinting safety and ran untouched until he was tackled while falling into the end zone to give LSU its first lead of the game.
“I could feel the pain in the moment,” Daniels recalled, “but I had to help my team win.”
LSU did win as Daniels completed 15 of 21 passes for 259 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. He also ran for 130 yards and a score. Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz found Daniels on the field after the game, gave him a hug and tapped his helmet in a sign of respect. When he met with reporters later, Drinkwitz said Daniels is “as good as any quarterback I’ve ever gone against.”
Kelly handed Daniels the game ball in the locker room and called him a “warrior” a year after wondering if Daniels, at a slender 190 pounds, could handle the job.
The challenge ahead is twofold, beginning with a trip to Alabama on Saturday (7:45 p.m. ET, CBS). The outcome will likely determine LSU’s future as a playoff contender and Daniels’ status as a Heisman Trophy front-runner.
To reach those tandem goals, Daniels will have to keep posting show-stopping numbers and keep getting up after show-stopping hits.
“They’re the No. 1 offensive team in the country and it starts with the quarterback, Jayden Daniels,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said Monday. “I mean, this guy is a phenomenal player.”
KELLY INITIALLY HAD his doubts about Daniels, whether it was his durability or his decision-making. Kelly said they brought Daniels in from Arizona State and weren’t exactly sold that “he’s our guy.”
They weren’t sure he’d beat out Nussmeier for the starting job. When Daniels injured his foot shortly after arriving on campus, Kelly groaned, “Oh, he’s from the West Coast. He’s not very tough.”
Kelly smiled thinking back on that moment. He has never been so happy to be proved wrong.
Kelly said last year’s game between LSU and Alabama provided a sample of what Daniels was capable of.
Daniels remembers standing on the sideline inside Tiger Stadium and watching what seemed impossible as Alabama quarterback Bryce Young followed the five D’s of dodgeball: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. The reigning Heisman Trophy winner at the time looked like Houdini as he escaped the LSU pass rush and found a wide-open Ja’Corey Brooks for the go-ahead score with less than five minutes left in the fourth quarter.
Then, Daniels said, Young turned toward the LSU sideline and smirked.
A year later, Daniels remembers it clear as day. The defining moment of the game and that season wasn’t the touchdown and 2-point conversion later in overtime, he said, it was the drive LSU put together in response to Young’s heroics: a methodical seven-play, 75-yard march in less than three minutes, featuring a 31-yard run by Daniels to extend the drive on third down and a 7-yard touchdown pass to retake the lead.
Daniels relished the chance to be a part of what he’d only dreamed of as a kid — Alabama-LSU, at night, in prime time. “Those are the big moments,” he said.
After the game, Daniels and Young spoke. The Southern California natives have known one another since they were in elementary school, competing in youth games and camps. “You know,” Daniels said of last spring’s No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft, “he’s never beaten me.”
LSU’s 1-point victory over Alabama catapulted the Tigers to the SEC championship game. No one — especially not Kelly — is saying that Daniels was anything other than good during his first season at LSU. He threw for just shy of 3,000 yards, 17 touchdowns and only 3 interceptions. And he ran for a team-high 885 yards. He threw the most catchable ball in the country (83% catchable pass rate).
But he rarely took shots downfield, ranking 103rd in rate of pass attempts 20-plus yards downfield (10.6%).
The lack of explosive plays was a drag on the offense.
During a practice before this season, Kelly said, he pulled Daniels aside.
“This drill,” he told his quarterback, “is set up for you to be aggressive and to make those tough throws. Don’t be afraid to put it into tight coverage. Don’t be afraid to make that throw that is being contested.”
Kelly wanted Daniels to trust his eyes, his arm and his receivers.
“For some reason, everything had to be wide open or it wasn’t open at all,” Kelly said.
Nabers admitted he got frustrated with Daniels’ careful nature as well. The team’s No. 1 receiver recalled another practice this summer when he couldn’t get Daniels to look his way.
“Bro,” Nabers told Daniels, “just throw it up.”
Daniels told Nabers he wasn’t open, and he wasn’t technically wrong. Nabers was garnering a lot of double coverage.
“I don’t care. Just throw it up,” Nabers told him. “They look like they’re beside me, but I’m getting past them.”
Nabers said they watched film together that evening and Nabers pointed out how he was, in fact, pulling away from the defensive backs as the play developed. Nabers said Daniels relented, “All right, I’m going to give you some chances.”
The defense still double-covered Nabers during the next day’s practice, but this time Daniels gave him a chance.
“And he was launching them and I was jumping over people and just making plays,” Nabers recalled, smiling. “I was like, ‘Bro, I told you.'”
Nabers sat in the corner of LSU’s indoor facility last week, looked out on the practice field and reminisced. Because Daniels joined the team so late last year — the day before spring practice — and he wasn’t named the starting quarterback until September, Nabers said they didn’t have the time they needed to get on the same page. But this offseason was different.
They spent so many early mornings out here, Nabers said, running through the entire route tree. Countless reps. Countless conversations. Daniels and his receivers learned about one another over the course of months — on the field and off it. And the result was a combination of chemistry and trust that’s paying off today.
But there was another piece that went into Daniels’ transformation this season. Rarely does a quarterback go from being timid to decisive.
Preparation, Daniels said, has been the key.
IT COULDN’T HAVE been later than 6 a.m., Kelly recalled, noting that the sun hadn’t risen by the time he pulled up to the football facility the morning after the Week 6 Missouri game. As he parked his matte black Tesla, Kelly looked around the mostly empty lot and noticed Daniels’ car.
Checking to make sure Daniels hadn’t left it there the night before, Kelly walked to the quarterback room, where he found Daniels in his own world, watching film.
Daniels not only skipped sleeping off his injuries, he beat almost the entire coaching staff to the office.
“OK,” Kelly said he thought, “this is a little different.”
Kelly said it’s the first time he has ever been surprised like that. And, he added, it’s a credit to the habits Daniels developed this season. It’s like clockwork. Daniels comes in early every morning, watches film on his own and then spends a few hours in the training room before most of his teammates have even started their day. From there, it’s on to practice and then back home.
“He is a pro,” Kelly said. “Everything he does, a pro would do it the same way.”
True to his routine, Daniels was back in the quarterback room on a Wednesday morning during the bye week. A graphic of a pointing Joe Burrow looming large over his right shoulder, Daniels sat down, shut the lights off and began scribbling notes as a recording of the Alabama-Tennessee game played on the projector. It took half the season to fill up his notebook, he said, so he switched to an iPad for more storage.
He put his pen down and gripped a football with both hands as he spoke to a reporter. The light from the projector illuminated the embossed words on the worn leather: “National Football League.”
Yes, Daniels said, he thought long and hard about turning pro after last season. He spent about a week and a half deliberating the pros and cons. Five years of college had seemed like more than enough. But he knew the quarterback class was going to be crowded. Young and Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud would be the first two quarterbacks off the board — “and rightfully so,” he said. While he believed he was just as talented as them, Daniels acknowledged that not everyone felt the same way.
“It wasn’t my time yet,” he said. “It was best for me to come back as one of the few returning starters in the SEC. So it was like, ‘OK, I’m going to come back and not live with any regrets.'”
Kelly didn’t take the decision for granted.
“I thought we had to show him the plan,” he said. “I thought if we didn’t recruit him, if we didn’t show him why we felt it was important for him to be here, if we didn’t open up avenues for NIL, if we didn’t do those things, I think it could have made it easier for him to go.”
Kelly paused for a moment when asked whether Daniels is making more money now than he would have as a rookie in the NFL.
“Yes,” he said.
Daniels acknowledged that NIL made his choice to come back easier, but that it wasn’t the end-all, be-all. He knew he had room to improve if he was going to leave no doubt that he was worthy of a high draft pick. “I wanted to take my game to the next level,” he said.
So he changed his practice habits, getting in early each day. He also incorporated virtual reality training, donning a headset three times a week to get a better feel for the defenses that he’ll face and the look and feel of opposing stadiums.
He did some serious self-scouting as well, he said. And what he found was that while he could recognize the coverage and spot the open receiver, he was too hesitant.
“It’s a mental battle,” he said. “My preparation, that’s what made me confident. Last year, I was thinking a lot while I was playing. This year, I just wanted to go out there, play football, just play fast and have fun.”
Daniels has made a Burrow-esque Year 2 leap. He’s tied for the FBS lead in touchdown passes (25) — despite throwing only three interceptions — and ranks second in Total QBR (91.8). His rate of passes thrown 20 or more yards downfield per game has gone up from 10.6 to 14.9; no one has more completions of 20-plus yards this season (49).
If he’d turned pro and spent the year as a backup, he might never have gotten the reps needed to develop a more well-rounded game. In conversations with scouts, Kelly said he has told them, “You won’t have to worry about who’s first in, who’s last to leave, the tone in your locker room. You already have a pro.”
DANIELS BROKE INTO the open field against Auburn and decided, now’s the time.
He was going to show Nussmeier and the rest of the quarterbacks they were wrong about his inability to slide. But to quote the immortal Woody in “Toy Story,” what happened next wasn’t exactly a textbook slide. It was more like Daniels was “falling with style.”
“I turn to the sideline and everybody’s cheering,” Daniels recalled.
But they were laughing, too.
“It was awful,” Kelly said.
He asked Daniels whether he’d played baseball before. Daniels shook his head no.
“It looks like it,” Kelly told him.
So maybe he slides differently than most people, Daniels said, “but it’s effective.”
“It still worked out the same way,” he added. “I still pop right back up.”
True. But Kelly and the rest of the coaches are glad he’s at least making an effort to get down and protect himself from those big hits. They marvel how, given his slight frame, he keeps popping back up. A staff member compared him to Gumby — you can’t break bones that aren’t there.
Strength and conditioning staffers have told Kelly that although Daniels — standing 6-foot-4 — weighs only about 190 pounds, his body density is close to 170.
“He just needs to take what’s available and then be smart,” Kelly said. “I think he’s more aware of it now, and hopefully he’ll continue to make a better choice than getting cut in half.”
Daniels knows it’s a long season and he needs to protect himself.
“If we want to accomplish what we need to accomplish,” he said, “I need to be healthy.”
But just as he has to be unafraid in the passing game, he can’t be timid tucking the ball and running. He can’t help that he’s hardwired to fight for extra yards. It’s a product, he said, of playing defense growing up.
“I’ve always been a fearless runner,” he said. “Even though I’m a quarterback now, I was never afraid of contact.”
As a kid, he played in the streets of San Bernardino, California, where he said the rule was if it’s not broken, “shake it off.” After you get over the initial shock of a big hit, he added, the pain is usually manageable.
“He’s a tough kid,” Kelly said. “Tougher than I ever thought he was.”
The team, in turn, feeds off that toughness.
“I don’t know what he’s been throughout his life, but when you come to Louisiana, we’re different,” Nabers said. “When we play football, we don’t care. We don’t care if we got a bump or bruise. We don’t care if we got a hurt ankle, we’re going to get back up and we still keep going. So I think that he found his Louisiana way. That’s him showing that, ‘I’m from Cali, but I’m in The Boot now.'”
No one appreciates it more than Nabers when Daniels hangs in the pocket and throws passes deep downfield. But he’s no different from the rest of us when Daniels flees the pocket. He becomes a fan. He said he’ll catch himself thinking, “Oh, he’s breaking out, he’s juking, he just broke a tackle.”
“He’ll be flying,” Nabers said, forgetting that he needs to transition into a blocker.
And then Daniels runs into traffic, and Nabers is a fan all over again — this time a concerned one. He’ll find himself shouting, “Dude, go down, go down.”
“Damn,” he said, thinking back to one of those midair collisions, “that’s got to hurt.
“He said it doesn’t hurt. But I’m like, ‘Yeah, but one of them will.'”
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Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer
Welcome to MLB Awards Week.
November has become awards season in baseball, which increasingly serves as a way to keep eyeballs on the game before the hot stove season ramps up. So far, we’ve gotten the Gold Glove Awards, Silver Sluggers, the All-MLB Team and more.
Now, it’s time for the biggies — the four major awards determined by Baseball Writers’ Association of America voting and that will feature prominently in baseball history books and Hall of Fame résumés of the future. The winners are being announced live each night on MLB Network, starting at 6 p.m. ET.
On Monday, a pair of starting pitchers — Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Luis Gil of the New York Yankees — got the week rolling, winning the Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Award in the National League and American League, respectively.
Here’s the rest of the week’s schedule:
Tuesday: Managers of the Year
Wednesday: Cy Young Awards
Thursday: MVP Awards
Below, we list the three finalists in each of the big four categories, with what you need to know before the results are announced, and who our panel of ESPN MLB experts believes should take home the hardware. We’ll update each section with news and analysis as the awards are handed out.
Jump to:
Rookie of the Year: AL | NL
Manager of the Year: AL | NL
Cy Young: AL | NL
MVP: AL | NL
American League Rookie of the Year
Winner: Luis Gil, New York Yankees
Final tally: Gil 106 (15 first-place votes); Colton Cowser, Orioles, 101 (13); Austin Wells, Yankees, 17; Mason Miller, Athletics, 16 (1); Cade Smith, Guardians, 12 (1); Wilyer Abreu; Red Sox, 11; Wyatt Langford, Rangers, 7
Experts’ pick: Gil (7 votes); Cowser (1 vote); Smith (1 vote)
Doolittle’s take: This was a race in which you could have plucked the names of any of about seven players out of a hat without worry of finding a wrong answer. Of course, by the time Monday rolled around, we were down to three names in that hat, the finalists, but the statement holds true. There was no wrong answer, which is probably why the voting was so close.
With no clear front-runner, voters had to weigh some narrative aspects alongside a muddy statistical leaderboard, one that gave different answers depending on which site you happened to pull up. That’s why AXE (see note) exists — to create a consensus from these different systems — but it didn’t do much to clarify the AL rookie derby.
Gil and Wells, both essential rookie contributors to the Yankees’ run to the World Series, excelled with a lot of eyeballs on them all season, and that certainly didn’t hurt their support. Cowser’s role as an every-day player for the playoff-bound Orioles also had a high-visibility context. It feels like that, as much as anything, is why this trio emerged as finalists in a hard-to-separate field.
The emergence of Gil and the gaps he filled in an injury-depleted Yankees rotation were too much to ignore. It was a surprising emergence: Gil is 26, and he debuted in professional baseball way back in 2015 as a 17-year-old in the Minnesota organization. But when you talk about impact, you can conjure up all sorts of ill scenarios for New York had he not led AL rookies with 15 wins, 141 strikeouts and a 3.50 ERA (minimum 10 starts).
The voters got it right, if only because they could not possibly have gotten it wrong.
Here’s how my AXE leaderboard had it:
1. Smith, Guardians (117 AXE)
2. Langford, Rangers (116)
3. (tie) Miller, Athletics (115)
Abreu, Red Sox (115)
Gil, Yankees (115, winner)
6. Wells, Yankees (113, finalist)
7. Cowser, Orioles (111, finalist)
Note: AXE is an index that creates a consensus rating from the leading value metrics (WAR, from FanGraphs and Baseball Reference) and contextual metrics (win probability added and championship probability added, both from Baseball Reference), with 100 representing the MLB average.
ROY must-read:
Bump in the road or ominous sign: Has Luis Gil hit a wall after his red-hot start?
National League Rookie of the Year
Winner: Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates
Final tally: Skenes 136 (23 first-place votes); Jackson Merrill, Padres, 104 (7); Jackson Chourio, Brewers, 26; Shota Imanaga, Cubs, 4
Experts’ pick: Skenes (8 votes); Merrill (1 vote)
Doolittle’s take: Skenes emerged as the winner of a star-studded NL rookie class that was deep in impact performances put up by high-upside prospects who should only get better as the years progress. It was also a classic debate, one that stirs the passions whether you are driven by traditional approaches or the most current of performance metrics: Can a starting pitcher really produce more value than a position player given the disparity in games played?
It’s a debate mostly settled in the MVP races, where pitchers only occasionally bob up to forefront of the conversation. The one in the NL Rookie of the Year race this season between Skenes, Merrill and, to a lesser extent, Chourio was a classic example.
Sure, Skenes was absolutely dominant; he’s a finalist in the NL Cy Young race, for goodness sake. Still, we’re talking about 23 games. Meanwhile, Merrill’s gifts were on display in 156 contests for the Padres, while Chourio played in 148 games for Milwaukee. Yes, the value metrics are supposed to clarify these comparisons, but, still, how do you weigh that kind of disparity between players with entirely different jobs?
In the end, I’m not sure there’s a right answer to that debate, nor is there a wrong answer to this balloting. Each of the finalists would have been a slam-dunk winner in many seasons. Skenes might very well be the best pitcher in baseball by the time we get to these discussions a year from now, if he isn’t already. In less than a year and a half, he has been the top overall pick in the draft, started an All-Star Game and become a finalist in two of the NL’s major postseason awards.
You can certainly makes cases for Merrill and Chourio. But you can’t really make a case against Skenes, 23 games or not. Since earned runs became official in 1913, Skenes became the fourth pitcher with a strikeout rate of at least 11 per nine innings while posting an ERA under 2. He’s just that much of an outlier.
Here’s how my AXE leaderboard had it:
1. Skenes, Pirates (131 AXE, winner)
2. Merrill, Padres (128, finalist)
3. Chourio, Brewers (123, finalist)
4. Masyn Winn, Cardinals (119)
5. Imanaga, Cubs (117)
ROY must-reads:
Why Pirates called up Paul Skenes now — and why he could be MLB’s next great ace
Ranking MLB’s best rookies: Is Paul Skenes or an outfielder named Jackson No. 1?
American League MVP
Finalists:
Bobby Witt Jr., Kansas City Royals
Juan Soto, Yankees
Experts’ pick: Judge (9 votes; unanimous)
Doolittle’s take: While the outcome seems like (and almost certainly is) a no-brainer, don’t let that make you lose sight of the overall dynamic around this award. In a nutshell: This is one of the greatest MVP races ever, in terms of historically elite performances from players in the same league.
The dominant performances went beyond the finalists. Five AL players posted at least 7.9 bWAR, led by the three MVP finalists, as well as Boston’s Jarren Duran and Baltimore’s Gunnar Henderson, who both finished with higher bWAR totals than Soto. Only once before has the AL had five players produce at that level in the same season — way back in 1912.
While Soto was never far out of the picture, this was a high-octane two-player race for most of the season between the mashing dominance of Judge and the five-tool mastery of the dynamic Witt. Judge won the bWAR battle by a good margin (10.8 to 9.4) and seemed to pull away at the end of the season. Even if you don’t like to think of this in terms of bWAR, it’s hard to look past league-leading totals of 58 homers and 144 RBIs and a third-place .322 batting average, all on the league’s best team.
The real drama surrounding this award is tied to that of the NL: Will we have two unanimous MVP picks? If so, that would be just the second time it’s happened. The first? Last year, when Shohei Ohtani (then with the Angels) and Ronald Acuna Jr. (Braves) pulled it off.
MVP must-reads:
Aaron Judge is the fastest ever to 300 home runs — but how many more will he hit?
Only Juan Soto can decide if his future is with the Yankees
Baseball’s next superstar? Bobby Witt Jr.’s rise to MLB’s top tier
National League MVP
Finalists:
Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers
Francisco Lindor, New York Mets
Ketel Marte, Arizona Diamondbacks
Experts’ pick: Ohtani (9 votes; unanimous)
Doolittle’s take: When the DH became a part of big league baseball back in the 1970s, those who defended it tended to point out how it would allow older superstars to hang around for a few more years. Thus the default image of the DH was the aging, plodding slugger trying to generate occasional glimpses of what he used to be.
Things have changed. Ohtani did not don a baseball glove during a game this season and yet established himself as far and away the most dominant player in the National League. The numbers were staggering: .310/.390/.646, 54 homers, 59 stolen bases. He scored 134 runs and drove in 130, even though 57% of his plate appearances came as the Dodgers’ leadoff hitter.
As with Judge, the intrigue isn’t about whether Ohtani will win, but whether or not he’ll be a unanimous pick. And, let’s face it, there’s not much intrigue about that, either. If Ohtani does it, it’ll be the third time he has been a unanimous selection. No one else has done it even twice.
MVP must-reads:
51 HRs AND stolen bases?! How Shohei Ohtani transformed MLB — again
Breaking down Ohtani’s path to 50/50 — and the historic game that got him there
How Francisco Lindor became the heart and soul of the Mets
American League Cy Young
Finalists:
Seth Lugo, Kansas City Royals
Emmanuel Clase, Cleveland Guardians
Experts’ pick: Skubal (9 votes; unanimous)
Doolittle’s take: Long touted for his upside, Skubal put it all together in 2024, becoming the AL’s most dominant and consistent starting pitcher during the regular season, leading the Tigers to a surprise postseason berth.
Skubal became the AL’s first full-season winner of the pitching triple crown since another Tiger, Justin Verlander, did it in 2011. (Cleveland’s Shane Bieber did it in the shortened 2020 season.) With league-leading totals of 18 wins, 228 strikeouts and a 2.39 ERA, Skubal is well positioned to win his first Cy Young.
Lugo becomes the Royals’ rotation representative in the finalist group, honoring one of MLB’s breakout units in 2024, though teammate Cole Ragans might have been just as worthy. Entering the season, Lugo had never qualified for an ERA title, but in his first campaign for Kansas City, he threw 206⅔ innings, going 16-9 with a 3.00 ERA.
Clase struggled in the postseason but the voting took place before that, and it recognized his unusually dominant season, good enough to justify his presence in this group despite his role as a short reliever. In 74 outings, featuring 47 saves, Clase allowed just five earned runs. He’s still a reliever and, thus, a long shot to win the award, but getting this far says a lot. The last reliever to win a Cy Young Award was the Dodgers’ Eric Gagne in 2003.
Cy Young must-read:
It’s Tarik Skubal time: With season on the line, Tigers turn to ‘best pitcher in the world’
National League Cy Young
Finalists:
Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates
Zack Wheeler, Philadelphia Phillies
Experts’ pick: Sale (8 votes); Wheeler (1 vote)
Doolittle’s take: What an interesting group of finalists this is. Value-wise, it’s a close race.
Wheeler is the constant here, as he’s enjoying a seven-year run as one of the NL’s top starting pitchers. Wheeler is still looking for his first Cy Young and entered the balloting this time around with his best résumé to date. Yet Wheeler is coming up against two pitchers with arguably more compelling — and very different — narratives.
Skenes is baseball’s ascendant ace. Few pitchers have reached the majors with higher expectations in recent years. He met the hype head-on and, if anything, proved to be even better than we thought. With the innings volume of baseball’s best starters much less than it used to be, it is possible for an elite run preventer to save runs at a clip that puts him among the league leaders during a partial season. It wasn’t Skenes’ fault that he wasn’t called up until the second week of May. All he did after that was post a 1.96 ERA over 23 starts while displaying a remarkable degree of consistency. There wasn’t a true clunker in the bunch.
And yet Sale might have been more dominant if you consider defensive-independent ERA (or FIP), in which Sale’s 2.09 bested Skenes’ 2.45. Also, like Skubal, Sale (18 wins, 2.38 ERA, 225 strikeouts) became the first pitching triple crown winner of his league since 2011. In Sale’s case, he became the first to do it since L.A.’s Clayton Kershaw.
All this from a pitcher who once finished sixth or better in AL Cy Young voting seven straight seasons. He has never won, though, and the last of those seasons was 2018. Sale’s days as a premier starter seemed long gone … and then he did this. That’s a good narrative.
Cy Young must-reads:
Did Chris Sale pitch himself into the HOF this year?
The best stuff in baseball? How Paul Skenes is using his pitches to dominate MLB
American League Manager of the Year
Finalists:
A.J. Hinch, Detroit Tigers
Matt Quatraro, Kansas City Royals
Stephen Vogt, Cleveland Guardians
Experts’ pick: Quatraro (5 votes); Hinch (3 votes); Vogt (1 vote)
Doolittle’s take: The AL Central had four solid teams in 2024, three more than most thought the division would have, and the three surprise clubs are represented here as finalists.
All of these managers have compelling cases. Hinch guided the Tigers to their second-half surge even after Detroit subtracted at the trade deadline and had to navigate around a depleted starting rotation. He has finished in the top five of balloting four times but has never won.
Vogt, a first-time manager filling the shoes of Cleveland legend Terry Francona, also had to lean on his bullpen because of rotation issues and did so with aplomb.
Yet it’s Quatraro who really stands out, leading a Royals team that lost 106 games in 2023 to the postseason. Kansas City had lineup holes and a constantly evolving bullpen picture, yet Quatraro and his staff found a way to leverage his team’s strengths (rotation, defense, Witt) into an October appearance.
National League Manager of the Year
Finalists:
Carlos Mendoza, New York Mets
Pat Murphy, Milwaukee Brewers
Mike Shildt, San Diego Padres
Experts’ pick: Murphy (6 votes); Mendoza (3 votes)
Doolittle’s take: Mendoza had a fantastic first season in the Mets’ dugout, helping the team overcome a sluggish start and eventually end up facing the Dodgers in the NLCS. He did so with quiet, consistent leadership and that bodes well for his ability to last a long time in one of baseball’s most challenging environments.
Shildt, who won the award in 2019 while with the Cardinals, proved to be a feisty presence on a star-laden team with middling expectations that kept rising as the season progressed.
Murphy’s season is hard to beat. Handed the reins of a big league team for a full season for the first time at 65, Murphy was able to put his imprint on the young Brewers. This was no small feat given the departure last winter of his onetime protege, Craig Counsell, arguably the face of the franchise.
Milwaukee went young, suffered rotation shortages and had a number of moving parts in its lineup. Behind Murphy, the Brewers changed their style of play to better accentuate the athleticism on the roster, won 93 games and cruised to another NL Central title.
Earlier awards
Executive of the Year: Brewers president Matt Arnold named exec of the year
Doolittle’s take: I’ve written a couple of times this year that I think the Brewers might be the best-run organization in baseball right now, so that speaks to how I view the work of Arnold and his staff. I also have a kind of organizational mash-up metric I track during the season that considers things such as injuries, rookie contribution, payroll efficiency and in-season acquisitions, and Milwaukee topped that leaderboard.
And yet it’s somewhat stunning that Kansas City’s J.J. Picollo did not win this honor. He oversaw the team’s leap from 106 losses to the playoffs, using free agency to bolster the roster and staying proactive at the trade deadline (and the August waiver period) to provide essential upgrades that put the Royals over the top. It’s hard to do a better one-season job as a baseball ops chief than what Picollo did this season.
All-MLB: 2024 All-MLB First and Second Team winners
Doolittle’s take: Nobody asked me about these picks, but they read as if they did. I had the same first team. On the second team, I might have opted for Matt Chapman over Manny Machado at third base, but if that’s my one note, the selectors did a heck of a job. Or maybe I did.
Gold Gloves: Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. among 14 first-time Gold Glove winners
Doolittle’s take: For all the uncertainty in making defensive picks, the consensus defensive metric I used more or less mirrored the Gold Glove selections. I would have taken Chourio or Washington’s Jacob Young as one of the NL’s outfielders in place of Ian Happ.
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Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
Paul Skenes was named the National League’s Rookie of the Year on Monday, beating out a loaded field after posting one of the best rookie campaigns for a pitcher in major league history.
While fellow finalists Jackson Merrill and Jackson Chourio had seasons that would have unquestionably warranted the honor almost any other year, Skenes’ rookie campaign was historic.
Hyped as a generational talent, Skenes, who debuted less than a year after being selected with the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft, surpassed expectations in his first taste of the big leagues to become the second Rookie of the Year award winner in Pirates history (Jason Bay, 2004) with 23 of the 30 first-place votes.
Skenes, 22, went 11-3 with a 1.96 ERA in 23 starts across 133 innings. The 1.96 ERA was the lowest for any rookie with at least 20 starts in the Live Ball Era, dating to 1920, and the lowest in baseball in 2024 among pitchers with at least 130 innings pitched. His 0.95 WHIP was tied for best in the National League. His 170 strikeouts were a franchise rookie record. His 4.3 fWAR ranked 10th among major-league pitchers. With the performance, he was named one of the three finalists for the NL Cy Young Award along with veterans Chris Sale and Zack Wheeler. That winner will be announced Wednesday.
On Monday, Merril finished second with the other seven first-place votes and Chourio in third behind Skenes. Merrill, a shortstop in the minors through last season, was the San Diego Padres‘ starting center fielder on opening day at just 20 years old. He excelled in all facets, finishing the season with a .292/.326/.500 slash line, 24 home runs, 90 RBI and 16 steals in 156 games while playing above-average defense. His 5.3 fWAR led all rookies.
Chourio, who doesn’t turn 21 until March, signed an $82 million extension last offseason before making major-league debut and, after a slow start, lived up to the investment. Chourio went on a tear after carrying a .201 batting average and .575 OPS through June 1, batting .305 with 16 home runs and an .888 OPS over his final 97 games. He finished the year with a .275/.327/.464 slash line, 21 home runs, 22 steals and 3.9 fWAR in 148 games, becoming the youngest player ever to post a 20/20 season.
There was little doubt Skenes was a major-league-caliber pitcher out of spring training, but the Pirates chose to not include him on their opening day roster. The rationale was simple: Skenes logged just 6 ⅔ innings as a pro in 2023 after he accumulated 122 ⅔ innings for LSU. So Skenes was sent to Triple A for more seasoning and dominated on a limited workload. In seven starts, Skenes posted a 0.99 ERA with 45 strikeouts across 27 ⅓ innings.
Finally, on May 11, Skenes made his major-league debut against the Chicago Cubs. He surrendered three runs with seven strikeouts over four innings. He would allow three or more earned runs just twice more over his final 22 starts.
His first 11 outings were so dominant (1.90 ERA, 89 strikeouts to 13 walks in 66 ⅓ innings and seven no-hit innings in his final start of the first half against the Milwaukee Brewers) that he was named the starting pitcher for the NL All-Star team, setting the stage for an electric first inning in Arlington against four of the sport’s best hitters. Skenes, the fifth rookie to ever start the exhibition, threw 16 pitches to Steven Kwan, Gunnar Henderson, Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. He walked Soto in an otherwise clean inning. He touched 100 mph and showcased his splinker — a splitter-sinker hybrid. The sequence, like every one of his starts, was must-watch television.
He pitched into the ninth inning for the first time as a pro in his first start out of the All-Star Game, taking a hard-luck 2-1 loss against the St. Louis Cardinals after giving up a run in the ninth. But Pittsburgh, despite adding at the trade deadline, fell out of the wild card race down the stretch.
The Pirates, cautious to not overwork Skenes, had him pitch on extra rest — either five or six days’ — in all of his starts. But he logged at least six innings in 16 of his 23 starts. He threw at least 100 pitches in nine of them. He closed his campaign with three strikeouts in two perfect innings against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium on the penultimate day of the regular season.
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