A night 63 years in the making: Inside the celebration as the Texas Rangers — finally — became World Series champions
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
PHOENIX — AROUND 1 A.M., just hours after he managed the Texas Rangers to their first World Series championship in 63 years of existence, Bruce Bochy hoisted himself from a chair and ambled toward the door at the back entrance of the Arizona Biltmore hotel. Bochy moves in slow motion these days, lurching more than walking, but before heading to his room for the night, he wanted to bid farewell to the men he’d spent the previous 8½ months preparing for this very moment.
When Bochy poked his head into McArthur’s restaurant, he saw the spoils of his work: drinks being downed and laughs being had and success being rewarded. Almost every Rangers player was present, the room packed to the gills with family and friends, and once they noticed who had come to pay homage to this moment decades in the making, they cut off their conversations and started to chant themselves hoarse.
“Boch! Boch! Boch!” they yelled in unison.
About 30 minutes earlier, Bochy sat outside, nursing a beer and talking about Game 5 of the 119th World Series, a 5-0 victory against the Arizona Diamondbacks that ended with a swarm of Rangers moshing around the mound. Less than a year ago, he was spending his retirement in Nashville, Tennessee, coaching his grandson’s T-ball team, and now he was the owner of a fourth championship, only the sixth manager with as many.
“The whole thing just doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Bochy said.
On one hand, Bochy is correct. This year, this October in particular, the Rangers drove through a thunderstorm and emerged dry. They finished the regular season with 90 wins. One fewer and they’d have spent the postseason at home. They beat a 99-win team and two division champions to get to the World Series, where they faced an 84-win Arizona team whose own kismet came with an expiration date. They went 11-0 on the road in the playoffs, a record unlikely ever to be matched.
On the other, it makes all sorts of sense. The Rangers were no accident. They were a master plan executed to a gilded end. They played exceptionally clean baseball. They hit for average and power. They pitched enough not to drag down their strengths. They let neither the gravity of October nor that of their past subsume them. They won because they played better than everyone else for a month, something they’d nearly done once before — something that haunted them for the past dozen years until a called third strike Wednesday finally delivered the peace they’d long sought.
THE MASTER PLAN began on Dec. 4, 2020, when the Rangers, “sick of losing,” hired Chris Young as their general manager. Young, a Dallas-area native, had spent 13 years pitching in the major leagues, including his first two for the Rangers. He had worked as an executive at Major League Baseball, where he was beloved, and now would work alongside Jon Daniels, the Rangers’ president and architect of their World Series teams in 2010 and ’11.
Over the next year, Daniels and Young carried out an audacious objective. They were going to spend their way back to relevancy. Despite three last-place finishes over the previous four seasons, they believed the heart of the organization — drafting, signing international free agents and developing players — was strong. Free agency done right could accelerate the process.
In a 24-hour period from Nov. 28-29, 2021, the Rangers signed second baseman Marcus Semien, right-hander Jon Gray and shortstop Corey Seager for a combined $556 million. Never before, nor since, has a team committed so much money in such a short timespan. For Seager (10 years, $325 million) and Semien (seven years, $175 million) in particular, the choice to sign with a Texas team that looked to the industry like it was going nowhere fast registered as puzzling.
“We told them, ‘This is an immense challenge. Are you up for this? You don’t have to be. You can go anywhere you want. Are you up for this? It’s going to be hard,’ ” Young said. “They each sat up in their chair and looked at me with this competitive edge and said, ‘I’m not afraid of that.’ And you could just see it in their eyes.”
Their first season with Texas last year left those eyes bloodshot. The Rangers went 68-94. On Aug. 15, they fired manager Chris Woodward, and two days later, owner Ray Davis let go of Daniels, too, leaving Young in charge. The Rangers understood that as seminal as the 2021-22 offseason was, the next winter would prove every bit as important. Because after shoring up their offense, the second part of the plan included finding someone who could lead Texas where it intended to go.
That process started one year and two weeks ago, when, for seven hours, over crustless egg salad and chicken salad sandwiches cut into triangles, Chris Young and Bruce Bochy talked baseball. Young had flown to Nashville to convince Bochy to return to what he did better than anyone in his generation: manage a big league team. Young had played for a year under Bochy with the San Diego Padres, and the experience stuck with him. Nobody amalgamated baseball knowledge with human touch quite like Bochy. He’d won three World Series with the San Francisco Giants and already etched his eventual Hall of Fame plaque. Young’s only hope was that the competitive fire in Bochy still glowed.
“We laughed, we shared stories, our vision for what the game should look like, the balance of people versus front office influence,” Young said. “And it was a great conversation. I left there thinking there may be a chance. He had studied. He knew our organization. He was asking about prospects. He asked me about our R&D department. He said, ‘I need information. I need to know, are you guys good in this area?’ I could tell just like everything, and now I see it on a daily basis, he just listens and processes and synthesizes and then makes great decisions.”
Bochy agreed to a three-year deal on Oct. 21, 2022, a week before the World Series began, and got to work immediately. His presence alone didn’t lead to a roomful of people chanting his name. Leadership change is all well and good. But going from 68-94 to contender would take a bevy of arms and another boatload of money.
WHEN HE TOOK the GM job with the Rangers, Chris Young warned his wife, Liz, and their three kids that life was going to get a little weird. Running a team takes a special sort of freneticism, a working-at-all-hours motor.
Even though he had signed the best pitcher on the free agent market, Jacob deGrom, to a five-year, $185 million contract and added left-hander Andrew Heaney for $27 million over two years, Young lived by the credo that a team can never have too much pitching. And it just so happened that Nathan Eovaldi, the veteran right-hander whose postseason excellence earned him a reputation as one of the game’s great warriors, remained unsigned in late December, even as the rest of the industry had lavished more than $3 billion on free agents.
Hearing Young talk invigorated Eovaldi. It wasn’t just their shared experience as pitchers and the shared language they spoke. Young spoke about the Rangers with the certitude of someone who ran a team that had gone 94-68 the previous season, not 68-94.
“Our talks in the offseason, it was all about winning the World Series championship,” Eovaldi said. “The offense was there. CY was really adamant about adding pitching, and when they signed deGrom and Heaney, I thought I was done. And then Christmas, we were able to make it happen.”
Eovaldi was Davis’ two-year, $34 million Christmas gift to the Rangers. The team had already spent half a billion dollars on a pair of middle infielders. Not chasing it with more money, more talent, would have been the half-measure to end all half-measures. As much as the industry scoffed and saw Texas as the most OK team money can buy, something bigger was happening.
Seager and Semien were the centerpieces, yes, but Adolis Garcia had evolved into an All-Star-caliber right fielder and Jonah Heim had emerged as a solid catcher and Nathaniel Lowe won a Silver Slugger at first base. Josh Jung, drafted by Daniels in 2019, had developed into an excellent third baseman, and Evan Carter, whose selection in the 2020 draft prompted guffaws from MLB Network analysts who had never heard of him, was one of the best outfield prospects in baseball, perhaps a year or two from the big leagues. Complementing that group with an overhauled pitching staff, and tapping Bochy to play alchemist, added up to something interesting.
That interesting turned good in a hurry. The Rangers swept Philadelphia, the defending National League champion, in their opening series. During Seager’s early-season five-week absence with a hamstring pull, Texas scored more runs than every big league team. The Rangers led the American League West every day of the first half but one. As the Aug. 1 trade deadline approached, Young assessed the Rangers’ current state of affairs — still light on pitching after deGrom’s season-ending elbow-ligament tear — and wondered if he should add more.
The Rangers’ front office decamped to Young’s house in San Diego, where the team was playing a three-game series, for the deadline. He surveyed his staff about the proper approach. How aggressive should they be? Is this a team that can win the World Series? Answering such questions vexes baseball-operations departments around the game. For many, baseball is too damn unpredictable to mortgage the future for a present so sodden with randomness. Young does not abide by this approach, and his subordinates share that aggressiveness. If they could win, they would try to win.
So first the Rangers acquired Max Scherzer, the 39-year-old future Hall of Famer, from the New York Mets for Luisangel Acuna, a top prospect and brother of Atlanta star Ronald Acuna Jr. A day later, they dealt a pair of prospects, infielder Thomas Saggese and right-hander T.K. Roby, to St. Louis for left-handed starter Jordan Montgomery and right-handed reliever Chris Stratton. Other teams saw it as a coup for the Cardinals, and with the deals completed in the midst of San Diego’s three-game sweep of Texas, flickers of self-doubt emerged in Young.
“What am I doing?” he asked Liz.
What needed to be done, it turns out. Because Young was right. You never can have enough pitching. Eovaldi’s elbow started barking and sent him to the injured list. Without Scherzer and Montgomery, the Rangers’ late-season swoon — which included an eight-game losing streak — might have turned into a full-on collapse and thwarted any sort of October appearance, let alone a championship run.
“It certainly didn’t guarantee this, but it gave us a better chance of this,” Young said. “And these players deserved that. Boch deserved that. Our ownership and our fans deserve that. And that’s what we’re here to do.”
AT THE BEGINNING of spring training, Young and Bochy introduced a set of organizing principles — simple-to-grok ideals scalable across the organization, from the front office to the field and beyond. They had settled on three pillars.
Dominate the fundamentals.
Compete with passion.
Be a good teammate.
“It’s the things that we know for us to be successful we have to do, and pretty much every component of what we do on a daily basis falls into one of those, whether it’s your behavior, your play, how you work,” Rangers bench coach Will Venable said. “It’s overall accountability, and as much as they might sound corny sometimes, they’re what guide us. [Bochy] creates an environment where people feel they can be themselves. He challenges the staff but is really open-minded and inclusive. So I think everyone just feels empowered to come every day having critically thought about things and is confident to voice their opinions. And he always gets to the best stuff because he asks questions. He’s open, he’s adaptable. He’s amazing.”
Those tenets were signposts throughout the season, and they also made it easier for the Rangers to remain impervious from any panic surrounding their September swoon. As the postseason began, Eovaldi’s elbow had healed. So had injuries to Garcia, Heim and Jung, who had gone from rookie with questions about his defense to All-Star Game starter and Gold Glove-caliber fielder. Garcia’s knee strain had prompted the early ascent of Carter, who thrived at 21 years old and earned an everyday role. Scherzer and Gray were out with injuries, and the bullpen was thin, but Texas’ tenets offered them solace.
They were good teammates, as the 99-win Tampa Bay Rays found out when Texas swept them in the wild-card round.
“A teammate is a person that will do anything to win the game regardless of the situation,” Rangers designated hitter Mitch Garver said. “If Boch told me to bunt” — he last laid down a sacrifice in 2018 — “I would do it. I’m willing to sacrifice my own career to better the team.”
They competed with passion, as the 101-win AL East champion Baltimore Orioles learned when the Rangers swept them in the division series.
“The fact that I’m one of those that shows it outwardly, passionately,” Garcia said, “doesn’t diminish the others who also compete with passion as well in their own way.”
Said Seager, whose outward stoicism is every bit the defining characteristic as his excellence as a hitter: “Being with your teammates. Being out on the field with your guys trying to accomplish one goal. I would say that’s what passion is for me.”
And they especially dominated the fundamentals. While the other two ideals necessitated only effort, dominating the fundamentals took an attention to detail few teams emphasize. The Rangers fixated on limiting errors after committing 96 in 2022. They followed the lead of Semien, who for the fourth consecutive full season played every game and did so because, he said, inactivity stimulates sloppiness. Texas made only 57 errors, the third-fewest by a team in major league history.
“We’ve just got obsessed dudes that are obsessed with their work, that are obsessed with winning, that are just obsessed with the day-to-day,” said catcher Austin Hedges, another trade-deadline acquisition. “I think that’s what baseball’s all about. It’s the day-to-day. We play 162 games plus another whatever in the playoffs, plus spring training. If you don’t love showing up to the field every day with the boys, then it’s not going to go well. But when you truly look forward to it and you have a group of guys you look forward to seeing, those things happen. If you don’t have that obsession, you might as well not even write those things down.”
After winning the AL pennant in spectacular fashion — taking all four road games of the seven-game series against Houston, which beat Texas for the AL West title via head-to-head regular-season record — Texas advanced to a World Series against the team with the second-fewest errors ever: Arizona. And in the course of their five-game romp, the Rangers became the first team since the 1966 Baltimore Orioles to win a World Series without committing an error.
Defense alone wouldn’t carry the Rangers, though. Garcia won ALCS MVP with a historic performance, driving in 15 runs in the series and hitting homer after epic homer. His strained oblique and Scherzer’s locked-up back ended their World Series after the third game, leaving Texas shorthanded. They’d been there, of course, whether in April and May without Seager or later in the season with the injury deluge. They dropped five runs with two outs in the second and third innings of Game 4 and romped. On Wednesday, one day later, Eovaldi threw six scoreless innings and held the Diamondbacks hitless in 10 plate appearances with runners in scoring position. Arizona starter Zac Gallen was even better over those six innings, holding Texas hitless.
“Getting no-hit in the seventh, we still find a way,” Montgomery said. “I mean, I think that sums up the grit of our guys and the battle. There was no panic in that dugout. Because here’s the thing. We’ve still got Corey Seager and Marcus Semien.”
Seager, who would go on to join Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson as the only two-time World Series MVPs, squibbed a single to left field to lead off the seventh. Carter, hitting behind him in the lineup because Bochy surmised that Arizona manager Torey Lovullo would not use his best relievers — all right-handers — instead of attacking back-to-back left-handed hitters with a lefty reliever, doubled Seager to third. Garver smashed a fastball through a drawn-in infield. After 19 at-bats of futility, Texas needed only three to score the game’s first run.
After Josh Sborz, a 29-year-old with a career 5.08 ERA who emerged as Texas’ best of a thin relief corps this postseason, threw a scoreless eighth, Bochy approached him in the dugout, wary of throwing closer Jose Leclerc for a third consecutive day for the first time since July 26-28, 2019.
“You wanna finish it?” Bochy said.
“Let’s do it,” Sborz said.
The Rangers’ hitters were exceptionally good teammates in the top of the ninth. Jung and Lowe led off the inning with back-to-back singles against Arizona closer Paul Sewald, and both scored when a Heim single up the middle slinked underneath the glove of center fielder Alek Thomas and rolled to the wall. Semien followed by blasting his second home run in two nights, and Texas’ 1-0 lead was quintupled.
Sborz emerged for the ninth, struck out Geraldo Perdomo looking on a curveball, induced a popout from Corbin Carroll and ended the World Series by snapping Ketel Marte’s 20-game postseason hitting streak by snapping off a two-strike curveball that landed in the top of the strike zone. Marte stared at the pitch, and so began a celebration that would last deep into Thursday morning.
If there was one error made by Texas in the World Series, it was the team’s continued fixation with 1990s alt-rock band Creed. As the Rangers sprayed bubbly and doused one another with beer, “Higher” strained through the clubhouse speakers and provided the soundtrack for their revelry. Whatever they might lack in musical taste they made up for in baseball acumen and righting wrongs.
“This,” Scherzer said, “is baseball nirvana.”
He was not wrong. Carter, all of two months into his career, looked around and said: “How spoiled am I?” The answer was very — a fact that two other attendees of the party at the Biltmore know well.
Two hours after that locker room celebration, next to fire pits and underneath string lighting and surrounded by fountains, Adrian Beltre and Michael Young sat across from one another and reminisced. They played together on the 2011 Rangers, a team that wound up on the wrong side of one the greatest World Series games ever.
In the Metroplex, Game 6 are curse words. What’s a story of triumph in St. Louis is one of horror to Rangers fans: One strike away from a win, the Rangers gave up a two-run, score-tying, ninth-inning triple to David Freese, blew another two-run lead in the 10th and lost on a Freese home run in the 11th.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Beltre said.
Every day since, he said, he has carried it with him. Young concurred. The sting of the moment eventually faded into an ever-present ache. Nothing short of a championship would salve them.
No one in the clubhouse would dare suggest this reached the levels of Boston in 2004 or Chicago in 2016, but the Rangers have disappointed generations of people. This win, Beltre said, “takes a weight off my shoulders — off all our shoulders.”
About 20 feet away sat Bochy, holding court before the team serenaded him. The daughters of pitching coach Mike Maddux, who had never before won a World Series in his 30-year career playing and coaching in the major leagues, congratulated and thanked him. Coaches and scouts paid homage. Bochy deferred credit, aw-shucks as ever, even as he joined a list of the greatest managers in history — Casey Stengel, Connie Mack, Joe McCarthy, Walter Alston and Joe Torre.
On the other side of the bar, Young held court with the front office. During games in Young’s suite, they’d developed a habit of high-fiving every good play — “positive touches,” they called it — and the camaraderie was clear. Winning a championship bonds people forever. Winning the first championship in the 63-year history of a franchise immortalizes them.
Which is why back inside at McArthur’s, Lowe asked for the music to be turned down so he could deliver a speech. He arrived via trade in 2021, and from that team, only Lowe, Garcia, Heim, Sborz, center fielder Leody Taveras and right-hander Dane Dunning were on the World Series roster. Lowe witnessed the birth of the plan, its execution and the fruit it bore. And it gave the Rangers, he said, “the best f—ing ships.”
He paused slightly before delivering perhaps an even better walk-off than Garcia’s home run that won Game 1.
“Friendships,” Lowe said, “and championships.”
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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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