Go and take it! Inside the World Series champs’ Texas-sized turnaround
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Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer
PHOENIX — There is no one way to rebuild a baseball team, and there is no one way to exit that rebuild and ramp up to contention. There is perhaps a sentiment common to the start of any such project, though, one expressed nine months ago in four words by the general manager of baseball’s newest champions, the Texas Rangers.
“We’re sick of losing,” Chris Young said at spring training in Arizona, answering a reporter’s question about how and why the Rangers took an aggressive stance to free agency the winter before.
Nine months later, that sickness has been cured.
The road between that statement in February and Wednesday night’s pileup at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix — only 37 miles away from the spring training facility where it was spoken — was long, meandering and filled with potholes.
In the end, though, those four words were profound enough to point the way to a new destination for the Rangers — the domain of World Series champions.
“Everybody wants to be a winner,” Texas reliever Will Smith said. “That’s what you want to be known for, is a guy who wins. … It’s a whole lot better than losing.”
Smith, incidentally, knows a thing or two about winning. He has now been on the roster of three straight championship teams — the Atlanta Braves (2021), the Houston Astros (2022) and now the Rangers.
“It’s something I don’t take for granted, for sure,” Smith said.
He shouldn’t. Winning the World Series is hard. Entering the 2023 season, six of the 30 existing MLB franchises had never won a World Series. The Rangers, who began their existence with 11 lackluster seasons as the neo-Washington Senators, had played about 1,300 more games than any of the other titleless teams. In fact, if you zoom in on the 51 campaigns Texas played in Arlington before this season, it represents the longest wait any American League fan base has ever endured for that first World Series title.
That wait, as of Wednesday, is over.
You don’t think of the Rangers as perennial losers. They’ve employed several of the more larger-than-life managers we’ve ever had in baseball, from Ted Williams to Billy Martin to Whitey Herzog to Bobby Valentine, Ron Washington, Buck Showalter and, especially, their current skipper, four-time champion Bruce Bochy. Some of the biggest stars of the past half-century have played for the Rangers, including Ivan Rodriguez, Nolan Ryan, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, Adrian Beltre, Frank Howard (who died during this World Series at age 87) and Ferguson Jenkins. Heck, one of their former owners used to be president of the United States.
Yet, somehow, until Wednesday, these elements had never coalesced into championship form. And until, well, not very long before Wednesday, there had been little evidence that would change any time soon. Entering this season, the Rangers’ five-year winning percentage (.417, or 67.5 wins per 162 games) was the franchise’s worst since 1974, its third season after the move from Washington.
Now, after all of those requited summers baking in the hot Arlington sun, that title thirst has finally been quenched. In the aftermath of seasons with 102 and 94 losses, the Rangers are champs. How did this Texas-sized turnaround happen so fast?
“We *were* sick of losing,” Young said after the Rangers finished off their five-game win over Arizona. “These players were sick of losing. But Bruce Bochy believed this was a winning team. I just can’t describe how awesome this feeling is.”
Winter 2021
Starting with the 2021-22 offseason signings of Corey Seager, Marcus Semien and Jon Gray by former lead exec Jon Daniels, the Rangers had, in essence, started to put the finishing touches on a work in which the outlines were not yet clear.
Certainly, there was hope that the player development system was going to start yielding key contributors, and it has. But when Seager and Semien committed to the Rangers, they were being sold on a vision, not a track record.
Daniels was calling the front office shots at the time, with Young his top lieutenant, but even as the previous rebuild was faltering, a newer, quicker and, let’s face it, more expensive version was well underway.
“Meeting the Texas Rangers and listening to Chris Young, it definitely aligned with what I wanted to do as a player,” Semien told ESPN in September. “He said he wanted pitching too. He has done everything he said, and Ray Davis, our owner, has been on board too. When you play for an organization that is moving forward and wanting to win, that’s exactly where you want to be.”
All of the Rangers’ key acquisitions in free agency, plus Bochy, were in essence buying into a vision because the team on the field had not been winning. All of them are quick to point to Young — known throughout the sport as C.Y. — as being the key to selling that vision, not just because of his Princeton-honed acumen, but because of the un-executive way he wears his emotions close to the surface. It’s something that stands out in an industry where many of the game’s chief decision makers are hard to differentiate from a tech CEO because of their corporatized jargon.
“A lot of it was C.Y.,” Seager said. “Just the way he laid it out, how he laid it out. He didn’t hide from anything. He didn’t shy away from anything. He knew where they were and he knew where they wanted to go. It’s just awesome. This is the vision, right?”
Bochy had to marvel while on the interview podium after the game when he was read the list of legendary managers who have won four or more World Series: Joe McCarthy, Casey Stengel, Connie Mack, Walter Alston, Joe Torre and, now, Bruce Bochy. All the others are Hall of Famers, as will be Bochy someday. Yet even he is quick to point to Young, with the support of ownership, for leading the way.
“That’s a credit to Chris Young and the ownership, Ray Davis,” Bochy said. “They were determined to get winning baseball back to the Texas Rangers. And when we met that’s when we talked about, that’s what they talked about to me. And they did everything they said they were going to do.”
If there is a takeaway for other teams from the Rangers’ sudden success, it’s that if you believe in your system, you don’t have to wait to invest in the roster.
“To some extent, it was to accelerate the rebuild,” Young said in September. “In a market this size, I think that our fans deserve that. They shouldn’t have to go through a five-, six-, seven-year rebuild.
“Part of it was because we felt very good about our player development system and the group of players that we had on the cusp of the big leagues, and we felt like accelerating their development would be facilitated by having the right veteran players around.”
Winter 2022
Despite 94 losses in 2022, the Rangers had in place the makings of a solid offense, in large part because of Seager and Semien’s success. Texas finished eighth with 198 homers and scored runs at a clip safely above the MLB average — and those two players set examples for the younger Rangers coming through the system.
“When your best players, the players you’re counting on the most like Seager and Semien, work extremely hard and they care deeply, your team always has a chance to reach its ceiling,” said Rangers senior advisor of baseball operations Dayton Moore, architect of a Kansas City Royals title-winning team. “Semien and Seager are as committed as players as I’ve ever been around. Watching them throughout the season, their work ethic is unbelievable.”
On the pitching side, Young’s club needed more T.L.C., where the Rangers were a bottom-10 team by ERA+. In response, Young dealt for righty Jake Odorizzi early in the offseason. Then, with the blessing of Davis, Young went hard in free agency in the spring, landing, in order, Jacob deGrom, Andrew Heaney and Nathan Eovaldi. That quartet, along with 2022 holdovers like Gray, Martin Perez and Dane Dunning gave the Rangers one of the deepest and most accomplished core rotations in the majors.
“We went into the offseason knowing that we needed to improve our starting pitching,” Young said during the AL Championship Series. “It was a big limitation for us last year. We knew that we had scored runs and we were going to have pretty much the same offensive team back. So the key to us being a good team was going to be to improve our starting pitching. We obviously were very active in the free agent market.”
Based on those acquisitions alone, the Texas baseline win projection moved into the .500 range — and that was without considering the late October news that Bochy had signed on to return to the dugout and guide the team.
The biggest splash on the acquisition list was deGrom, arguably the best pitcher in baseball when he’s able to stay on the mound. Since the beginning of the 2018 season, deGrom has a composite 2.08 ERA with 290 strikeouts per 162 games. That’s not merely ace material, that’s Cooperstown stuff.
The Rangers hit spring training with their brand-new rotation and their legendary manager — and then the depth chart began to thin before the season even began. Odorizzi went down with a bum shoulder that ended up requiring season-ending surgery.
It was only the first such challenge for the Rangers.
Spring 2023
Losing Odorizzi stung, but the Rangers still had good rotation depth as the season began. They still had a dream October one-two punch in deGrom and Eovaldi — as long as they could get to October.
Then, on April 28, during a win over the New York Yankees, deGrom threw his last pitch of the season, leaving early because of two dreaded words: forearm tightness. He tried to work his way back, throwing a bullpen session in late May. In June, he underwent Tommy John surgery.
DeGrom had been the latest marquee free agent to be wooed by not just Davis’ dollars but also Young’s plans to build a sustainable contender. He was a big part of that plan, an irreplaceable component, if lost, from any team’s rotation.
Even when the roster-building plan is perfect, things go wrong. The ineffable quality of a championship team is something else, something more elusive. That something can be called clubhouse chemistry or team culture or what the players might call the “next-man-up mentality.” How you create it or how you even define it is hard to say, but invariably, a championship team is going to have it.
So how did the Rangers respond? By June 12, the date of deGrom’s surgery, Texas owned the second-best rotation ERA in baseball (3.38), leading all teams in innings from starters and ranking fourth in quality starts.
All of those measures remained strong through the All-Star break, partially because Eovaldi and Gray were pitching like All-Stars and because Dunning, who stepped into deGrom’s place in the rotation, owned a sub-3.00 ERA.
“A few guys go down, but you’ll have to face a little adversity in the season to have success,” said Eovaldi, a key member of the 2018 champion Boston Red Sox. “I feel that was one of our main things this year, we had a lot of key players, not just even pitchers, but a lot of guys step up when one of the guys went down and filled in the role nicely.”
It wasn’t just the pitching staff. In April, Seager turned up with a sore hamstring that kept him out of the lineup for several weeks. With deGrom ailing, as well, the Rangers were pressing ahead in the rugged AL West without their most talented pitcher and most talented hitters.
And what happened? Rookie Josh Jung, Bochy’s every-day third baseman from the outset, flourished, posting 12 homers and 37 RBIs by the end of May and diving around the field on defense, doing the best imitation he could of his historical hero, Brooks Robinson. Semien mashed too, and the Rangers went 20-13 during Seager’s lengthy absence, with utility player Ezequiel Duran hitting .305/.342/.533 during that time. Next man up, indeed.
By the All-Star break, the Rangers were leading the majors in runs.
“We’re just resilient,” Seager said. “We’ve talked about it all year. Just playing good baseball, trying to win series and having a pass-the-baton mentality. You don’t have to be the guy every night. It’s just kind of translated for us.”
Summer 2023
Eovaldi caught fire as the season progressed toward the All-Star break, establishing himself as a likely contender for the AL Cy Young Award.
Not surprisingly, that run started in the immediate aftermath of deGrom’s injury. On April 29, Eovaldi threw a three-hit shutout against the Yankees. From that game through July 18, his first start of the second half, Eovaldi went 9-1 with a 1.97 ERA. Ace stuff. Cy Young stuff.
Then Eovaldi also got hurt. During that July 18 start, he threw six shutout frames against the Tampa Bay Rays, but his velocity was down. A start was skipped. A forearm strain was reported. He didn’t pitch again until September.
When Eovaldi went down, Texas was 19 games over .500 and led the division by 4½ games with the trade deadline looming two weeks away. And then it all started to turn.
The star-starved rotation began to suffer, and the Rangers bled runs at an alarming rate. Texas lost its last three games going into deadline day. Their lead over archrival Houston had shrunk to one game.
So what happened? Young doubled and tripled down on an already expensive rotation, dealing for Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery. Rather than rest on the talent, Young made the Rangers one of the clear winners of deadline machinations.
“By the time we got to the deadline, we needed to readdress our rotation, so that’s what we did,” Young said, his matter-of-fact tone implying that every team goes out and trades for two All-Star starters midstream.
The Rangers won on deadline day, the first of eight straight victories. They won 12 of 14 overall to move a season-high 24 games over .500 by the middle of August. Things were good, with the new order suggested by the Rangers’ strong first half seemingly restored by Young’s characteristic aggression at the deadline.
As it turned out, the Rangers’ roller coaster was just starting to roll. After hitting that high point on Aug. 15, Texas lost nine straight (including twice to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team they just vanquished in the Fall Classic). They fell into a tie in what had become a three-team struggle with the Astros and the Seattle Mariners.
The slump just kept getting worse. From Aug. 16 through Sept. 8, Texas lost 16 of 20. During those games, the Rangers’ staff put up a 6.33 ERA. Only four teams put a lower OPS at the plate. What had seemed like a surefire playoff spot was no longer assured.
Nothing was clicking. Bochy’s pitching staff was on fumes. It all came to a head during what Young refers to as “the disaster series.”
Houston was in town. Despite the Rangers’ slump, they were still in good position, and a strong series against the Astros not only would put Houston in a major hole, but it could restore some of the Rangers’ earlier momentum.
Over the next three days, despite Eovaldi’s return to action and a marquee matchup that pitted Scherzer against Justin Verlander, Houston outscored the Rangers 39-10, a frightening differential that looks even worse when you consider that Texas led the first game 3-0 at one point.
Injuries (including to Jonah Heim and Jung) played a big part in the skid, but Texas looked very much like a team that had fallen into an irreversible spiral.
There was no one moment that pulled it out. Texas started to get healthier, at least on offense, though Scherzer was lost with a shoulder injury that everyone thought would end his season. Young called up top prospect Evan Carter. Eovaldi began to round into form. Montgomery performed like the top-of-the-rotation starter Texas badly needed. The Rangers won six straight and regained their lead in the AL West.
“I think we had to deal with more this year than any year I’ve ever had to manage,” Bochy said. “And that’s what makes me proud of these guys too, how they were focused on that as much as, hey, let’s focus forward. And they kept doing that.”
Carter was a revelation almost from the start, hitting .306/.413/.645 down the stretch while flashing plus speed on basepaths and defense in the outfield. The system Young had bet on was paying off again.
So too was the Rangers’ emergent clubhouse culture where in a room peopled by some of the game’s biggest stars, rookies like Carter and Jung and reinforcements like Duran and Travis Jankowski felt right at home. Next man up, yes, but it was every man up, as well.
“It shows that no matter who we have on the field, we’re going to compete,” Carter said. “A team like us, we’ve got the Coreys, the Marcuses that are so high up there in the baseball world, it’s kind of easy to overlook the other people who are really good contributors. Obviously, Corey and Marcus are huge reasons for our success, but at the same time, we had people come in and contribute in all kinds of ways.”
October 2023
The Rangers had an up-and-down finish to the regular season and missed a chance to win the AL West outright by dropping a 1-0 game in Seattle on the season’s final day. They tied the Astros for the division lead, but Houston owned the tiebreaker (in part because of the disaster series).
Instead of resting at home in the wild-card round, Texas boarded a plane in Seattle, enduring one of baseball’s longest flights: across the continent for a winner-takes-all series against the Rays in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The Rangers took two straight and swept the Rays then won two on the road against the Baltimore Orioles in the next round. By Game 3 of the ALCS, the Rangers had played only one game at home — and had won every single away game they played in three other cities.
There were still more setbacks at the very end of the Rangers’ run. Adolis Garcia, who along with Seager powered Texas’ offense in October, was lost to an oblique injury suffered in Game 3 of the World Series. Scherzer, who shockingly returned during the ALCS, had his back lock up in the same game.
Both players were removed from the Texas roster simultaneously before Game 4 against the Diamondbacks.
And what happened? Bolstered by an emotional pregame speech by the devastated Garcia, the Rangers clubbed Arizona 11-7 in Game 4 and finished off the Snakes in Game 5. Injury after injury, setback after setback, this was one rapid rebuild that was not going to be denied.
Young, a native of the Dallas area and a former Rangers player, had delivered the franchise’s first title. Bochy had won his fourth. While you can look at the splashy free agent signings and the stars acquired through trade, moves that had Seager and Semien and Eovaldi and Scherzer and deGrom and Garcia dancing around the same clubhouse with Jankowski and Jung and Carter and everyone else, what is perhaps most impressive is not how quickly the talent was gathered but how quickly that elusive thing — chemistry, comradery, culture, next-man-upness, whatever you want to call it — became this team’s manna, the fuel that helped the Rangers overcome more than their fair share of roadblocks.
If everyone else was praising Young, he seemed too busy praising everyone else to notice.
It was the vision of Ray Davis and Jon Daniels that got this thing in motion,” Young said. “And then from there, the rest of it goes to these players and the coaching staff.
It was the team Young built, in his first full season as Texas’ lead exec. Not a bad bit of work for a guy who was pitching in the majors just a few years ago. Even when he was still hurling for Moore’s teams in Kansas City, capturing a World Series crown in 2015, the Royals’ title-winning GM knew Young had future exec written all over him.
“Everybody talks about how smart C.Y. is, but he’s got emotional intelligence too,” Moore said. “You have to have a natural love and passion for this game, which he does. You have to have baseball wisdom, which he does. And then you also have to love people. He has all three, and he has a great work ethic. I think he’s got a chance to do this successfully for a long time.”
Young and his team have a tough act to follow after Wednesday, but one thing is certain: They aren’t going to get tired of winning any time soon.
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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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