The entire landscape of Major League Baseball is virtually guaranteed to change from one season to the next. The annual awards that were handed out over the course of this week are yet another example of that.
Just to pick one race, let’s go with the AL MVP competition. Just before the season, SportsBetting.com ranked the most likely candidates as Mike Trout of the Angels and Luis Robert of the White Sox. Based on what we saw in 2020 and, for Trout, over a multiyear period, the status of favorite for both made sense. Indeed, both played like MVPs while they were on the field, but injuries kept both players off the field so often that they were never factors in the race.
Meanwhile, eventual landslide AL winner Shohei Ohtani was tied for third in the futures market with the Yankees’ Aaron Judge. But the AL finalists in addition to Ohtani were further down the list, with Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr. coming in tied for eighth (at 20-1) and Blue Jays teammate Marcus Semien off the board entirely, so somewhere south of 100-1.
That’s just one award, but that dynamic repeats for all of them, no matter where you’re getting your odds. The reason is simple: Predicting the future is hard. It’s hard in life. Hard in sports. Hard when it comes to teams. It’s especially hard when it comes to players.
Let’s do it anyway. Here’s a very early stab at the 2022 MLB awards races. How early? So early, that you might even call it way too early.
AL Rookie of the Year
My favorites: Bobby Witt Jr., Royals; Adley Rutschman, Orioles; Shane Baz, Rays
Witt and Rutschman are two of the consensus top prospects in the game. Both are on a trajectory for a 2022 debut after they played extremely well when they reached Triple-A last season. We don’t know how the current CBA negotiations are going to affect MLB service time as it relates to arbitration eligibility and free agency, so we don’t know if the Royals and Orioles are going to see any benefit in delaying the debuts of their top prospects.
Baz doesn’t carry that caveat because he debuted for the Rays in 2021, and he was dominant over his first three big league outings. He even earned a Game 2 start for Tampa Bay in its division series against the Red Sox. He figures to be a rotation fixture for the Rays going forward, and the Rookie of the Year formula is always an uncertain combination of opportunity and performance.
Early indications are that Witt seems like a no-brainer to break camp with the Royals next spring. There’s simply nothing left for him to prove in the minors, and the Royals are trying to win, so if Witt is part of their best configuration, they’ll want him out there as often as possible. Rutschman’s ETA is a little more unclear than that, and the Orioles are not yet pushing toward contention. It would be great to see a season-long battle between Witt and Rutschman, because it could be a memorable one.
We can’t forget about Seattle OF Julio Rodriguez, who just might be the best prospect of them all. He hit .347 with patience, power and speed across two levels for Mariners affiliates in 2021. He also starred for the Dominican Republic during the Tokyo Olympics. Still, Rodriguez doesn’t turn 21 until Dec. 29, and right now has reached only Double-A, where he played 46 games this past season. The Mariners will try to contend in 2022, but have decent outfield depth.
Rodriguez might well force his way onto Seattle’s opening day roster, but if not, then he’d start behind the favorites in what is shaping up as a tremendous AL rookie class. How tremendous? Among other top prospects who could play significant roles next season whom we haven’t even mentioned are Baltimore righty Grayson Rodriguez, Detroit hitting prospects Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene, and Kansas City catcher/slugger MJ Melendez.
Moreno has rocketed up the prospect rankings by hitting everywhere he’s gone. Baseball America ranked Moreno as Toronto’s No. 8 prospect before last season and as the Jays’ second-best catching prospect behind Alejandro Kirk. By BA’s midseason rankings, Moreno held the No. 1 overall spot for the Jays. That’ll happen when you hit .367, get a smattering of Triple-A playing time at age 21 and keep on mashing during the Arizona Fall League. He lost development time to a thumb injury in 2021, and the Jays have Danny Jansen and Kirk as a nice combo behind the plate. Nevertheless, Moreno’s trajectory makes him a player to watch.
My pick: Witt. He’s the full package and should get a full season to show it.
It’s much harder to identify classic Rookie of the Year candidates on the NL side, but that’s not to say front-runners won’t emerge. We’ve shied away from listing some likely 2022 rookies as favorites here because of injuries (Padres IF C.J. Abrams) or a lack of consistency (Cardinals IF Nolan Gorman and SP Matthew Liberatore). Any of those players could show up in spring training and become what Jonathan India was for the 2021 Reds.
Bart seems to have the inside edge on succeeding Buster Posey as the Giants’ everyday catcher. He maintains his rookie status despite having 35 big league games under his belt. Posey’s retirement opens up the door of opportunity for him.
Greene is more of a question mark in terms of spending most of next season at the big league level, even though the Reds appear to be in veteran-shedding mode. After missing all of 2019 due to Tommy John surgery, Greene spent 2020 at Cincinnati’s alternate training site, so 2021 was his first game action since 2018. The stuff was still there — Greene will be a darling of anyone dazzled by Statcast readings — but his results tailed off after he ascended to Triple-A. Throwing his name into this mix is a testament to his raw stuff.
Davis is a fast riser in the Cubs’ system after adding more power to his arsenal. The rebuilding Cubs might have everyday at-bats available for a young player of his ilk, though it seems likely he’ll begin 2022 in Triple-A.
Sanchez could have plenty of company in the Marlins’ 2022 rookie class, joining fellow hurlers Max Meyer and Edward Cabrera, and possibly slugging outfielder JJ Bleday. Sanchez is coming off surgery to repair a small tear in his shoulder, and while current reports are that he’ll be good to go in 2022, we have to see that happen before we can truly believe it — any kind of shoulder issue has to be handled delicately. Still, if Sanchez is a full go, we’ve already seen his stuff play in the majors, with an 80-grade fastball (per Baseball America) that earned him two postseason starts in 2020.
Other sleeper candidates include a pair of Cincinnati prospects — SS Jose Barrero and SP Nick Lodolo — as well as suddenly overlooked Braves CF Cristian Pache. Phillies SS Bryson Stott has gotten a lot of recent attention and the Phils do need a long-term shortstop solution.
My pick: Bart. He might not have the most upside of the NL rookie class, but he should be a steady and frequent contributor in a key role for a contending team.
This race looks like it’ll be wide open, with former winners Chris Sale, Shane Bieber and Justin Verlander all in various post-injury stages, and Cole having come back to the pack a little bit after his up-and-down second half last season.
Giolito struggled with some inconsistency in 2021, but he has a history of overcoming those issues with his cerebral, self-aware approach to the game. Also, anyone who is a fixture in the White Sox’s rotation is a contender, so in a subhead to this section, you might as well list Lance Lynn, Dylan Cease and maybe even Michael Kopech. There aren’t many managers who value length from starters like Tony La Russa, and while that might not turn the heads of voters like it once did, it might hold some sway in a tight race.
With Berrios, we also have to mention teammate Robbie Ray, the 2021 AL winner who is a free agent, so it’s hard to say he’s a favorite in either league. Meanwhile, Berrios is an underrated pitcher who combines durability and consistency as well as anyone, and his peripheral numbers have ticked up to the point where it feels like he’s poised for a career season.
As for Cole, he has plenty to prove after his 2021 drop-off, but he is still, after all, Gerrit Cole.
Sleeper: Shohei Ohtani, Angels
Corbin Burnes’ Cy Young win shows that you don’t need to lead the league in innings to win the honor in today’s game. Ohtani has the potential to put up a top-five season just for his pitching alone, and as good as he was on the mound in 2021, there were still some unpolished edges to his game. More than anything, it just feels like if Ohtani sets his sights on building a case for this award and boosting the oft-criticized Angels rotation, he, perhaps more than any player in the game, can get there by sheer will.
My pick: Berrios. A (relatively) new team, a contract extension — things just seem to be coming together for Berrios as he gets into the prime of his career.
The 2021 season was great, as all full baseball seasons are, but it wasn’t as great as it could have been because of major injuries to some of the game’s best players. None of those injuries was as devastating as were the maladies that limited to deGrom to 92 innings. Still, since the start of the 2018 season, here are deGrom’s numbers per 162 games: 12-8, 1.94 ERA and 289 strikeouts.
There is at least some sentiment that Wheeler got jobbed in the 2021 balloting, and if he can repeat his performance in 2022, maybe he gets a closer look next time around. The key question for him is whether there will be a price to pay from his leap in innings from 71 in 2020 to 213 1/3.
I remained convinced that Buehler is going to put it all together some year, post enormous numbers and run away with a Cy Young Award. His numbers were awfully good in 2021, so if he improves on those, look out.
We’ve seen Flaherty enjoy a prolonged stretch when he pitched at an elite level before. Last season, he wasn’t quite at that level, and injuries had something to do with it. He’s at the point in his career where he could become the next career-long Cardinal, or position himself for a major payday in free agency. Next season could be the one in which Flaherty establishes himself over a full season as the ace the Cardinals need.
My pick: DeGrom. There are a lot of ifs for most of the pitchers mentioned in this piece, because that’s the nature of forecasting pitching. For deGrom, there is only one if: If he makes 30 or so starts, he is the front-runner.
AL MVP
My favorites: Shohei Ohtani, Angels; Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Blue Jays; Mike Trout, Angels
For Ohtani, the question has to be whether some minor fatigue develops with the fascination of just how marvelously unique his 2021 season was. He did fall off a bit toward the end of the season at the plate, and if the Angels manage him a little more carefully going forward, that might be enough to open the door for someone else.
That someone else could certainly be Guerrero, whose 2021 numbers (1.002 OPS) were good enough to get him AL MVP honors in many seasons. The sustainability of those numbers, or at least most of them, is made more likely by the fact that they were undergirded by real improvements in approach and plate discipline, the kind of things that are usually sticky. As a reality check, you also think back to the heights of Bryce Harper’s age-22 season (1.109 OPS) and what came next, and you wonder if some regression is almost inevitable.
As for Trout, the only number of his that has declined is games played. Unfortunately, that’s a big one. After missing a total of 16 games from 2013 to 2016, he has missed at least 22 in each full season since. Yet he remains a player for whom a 1.000 OPS is the expectation, not the upside. Literally: His career OPS is 1.002. If he plays a full season of at least 140-145 games, he’ll be part of the MVP conversation.
Franco entered the big leagues with the burden of having been baseball’s top consensus prospect for multiple seasons. With expectations so high, a disappointing debut seemed almost like an inevitability. Indeed, other than homering in his first game, he did get off to a slow start — for all of 15 games, during which he hit .197. After that, he hit .314/.372/.500. He also put up a BABIP of .311, which is kind of low for a player with his contact and line-drive ability. In the minors, he was at .334. So his already-impressive numbers could have been even better.
Franco doesn’t turn 21 until spring training, so maybe we’re jumping the gun. We’ve never had a position player win an MVP award in his age-21 season. Still, Franco is someone who leaped from top prospect status to putting up a consecutive-game on-base streak in the majors that had him listed alongside Mickey Mantle on a daily basis. Special players do special things.
My pick: Trout. This seems like less of an obvious pick than years past, because the mounting injury problems have really started to take over Trout’s narrative. How could they not after a season in which he went down with a calf strain in the middle of May, and then missed the rest of the season? Still, when he did play, he showed zero degradation of his skills. And his skills remain the best in the game.
This is either a great list or a boring list. On one hand, the familiarity it conjures is a reflection of how many generational players there are in the senior circuit right now, and how many of them are either in their primes, or on the ascent. If you wanted to add Bryce Harper to that list, I wouldn’t argue with you. The only reason Ronald Acuna Jr. isn’t there is because we don’t know for sure when he’s coming back from his ACL tear, and we need to see if he has been in any way diminished by the injury.
Among the trio listed as favorites, Betts has the most to prove, though “prove” might not be an appropriate description. It’s simply that he is coming off a down season by his immense standards. He hit .264, matching his career low. The last time Betts hit that number, the following campaign he responded by hitting .346 with an OPS over 1.000 and posted an epic 10.7 bWAR.
Soto will be on the favorites list for the foreseeable future. It’s not just that he’s consistent. It’s that the level at which he produces that consistency is MVP-caliber. His mean expectation is just that high. Coming off his age-22 season, he has a career .981 OPS and has averaged 6.1 bWAR per 162 games. He showed us in the Home Run Derby what his raw power is. Now imagine Soto fully manifesting that raw power in games for a full season, going along with his best-in-the-game combination of strike zone judgment and plate discipline, and elite bat-to-ball skills. Excuse me while I clean up the drool from my keyboard.
And Tatis could hit 50 home runs and steal 40 bases as a shortstop. It’s an awfully exciting time in the National League.
Sleeper:Trea Turner. OK, Turner is a star player and not really the platonic ideal of a sleeper candidate, but I want to throw some attention his way. His power breakout in 2021 is a major development for a player who seems to have established himself as a .330-type hitter during this phase of his career and has some of baseball’s best speed skills. If he ends up moving back to shortstop full time to replace Corey Seager, he’ll have plenty of positional value as well. The competition in the NL is so fierce with elite talents that it is hard to imagine a real sleeper breaking through, so Turner is the best I can come up with.
My pick: Tatis. I see the Padres as having a big bounce-back year under Bob Melvin, not just because of the manager, but because of better injury luck. Tatis is going to produce, but he should put up his numbers in a more high-stakes context next year amid a three-team scrum with the Giants and Dodgers in the NL West. Soto is capable of putting up the kind of monster numbers to overcome that, but he will be handicapped to an extent by the fact that the Nationals aren’t likely to be very good.
NASCAR’s Championship Weekend is headed back to the racetrack it called home for nearly two decades, but it won’t stay long, as the sanctioning body moves to a new rotation scheduling model for its season finale.
On Tuesday, NASCAR announced that Homestead-Miami Speedway, which hosted the conclusion of the NASCAR postseason from 2002 to 2019, will do so once again in 2026, as NASCAR’s three national series – Craftsman Trucks, Xfinity and Cup — crown champions over a three-day weekend, Nov. 6-8.
But the return to South Florida will only be the first year of the annual rotation of NASCAR Championship Weekend, to be held at to-be-determined locations each fall. The move is inspired by so-called “stick-and-ball” title games such as the Super Bowl, College Football Playoff National Championship and NCAA Final Fours.
In recent years, NASCAR has experimented with moving around its two exhibition events, as the preseason Clash went from Daytona International Speedway, its home 1979-2021, to a short track constructed inside the Los Angeles Coliseum in 2022-23 and Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Feb. 2 of this year. Since 2020, the NASCAR All-Star Race has also rotated, leaving its birthplace and longtime home track Charlotte Motor Speedway to race at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Texas Motor Speedway and the resurrected North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina.
Adding that to NASCAR’s frequent shuffling of its first nine playoff races, it all feels as if it were one big test session for this, an overhaul of the biggest weekend of NASCAR’s year, when its three national champions are crowned.
“Yes, mixing it up, and I think you are going to see different teams and different drivers as we move this championship around,” said Ben Kennedy in a phone conversation with ESPN. He is NASCAR EVP, chief venue & racing innovation officer, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France, and a former racer in Trucks and Xfinity. “Some are going to rise to the occasion, and others aren’t. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out. We still want to keep the playoff schedule. We want to keep a lot of that intact. But you’ve seen over the past few years some small nuances and changes we’ve met, we’ve created in it, just to keep that level of unpredictability high.”
This marks a significant departure from NASCAR’s long-established regular-season stock car racing scheduling model. In 2020, the finale weekend was moved from 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami Speedway to the flat, quirky 1-mile Phoenix Raceway amid NASCAR’s fan-driven push toward shorter tracks. It has resided there ever since, slated for this year’s Championship Weekend Oct. 31-Nov. 2.
But before Homestead-Miami’s 18-year stint as Championship Weekend host, Atlanta Motor Speedway was home to the season’s last race for 14 years, the only exception being 2001, when New Hampshire Motor Speedway had its fall date pushed to the end of the Cup Series calendar due to the attacks of 9/11. From 1974 to 1986, the season always ended in Southern California, either on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway clone of Ontario or on the road course of Riverside two racetracks that no longer exist.
Kennedy explained that the details of how tracks will be selected to host Championship Weekend in the post-2026 rotation are being sorted out by a NASCAR industry working group. But he also listed criteria that included a warm weather climate in late fall, adjacency to a large metro area, updated facilities prepared to handle the sport’s crowning events and established racetracks instead of unfamiliar wild cards where teams don’t have at least some history. He also said he did not foresee the roulette wheel-style “plate racing” of Daytona International Speedway or Talladega Superspeedway having a place in the finale, even after they have had previous turns in the postseason, including crucial cutoff races.
There are 28 tracks that host Cup Series events. NASCAR wholly owns 11, including Homestead-Miami and Phoenix. Speedway Motorsports Incorporated owns a dozen facilities. The remaining five are independently owned or are operated by NASCAR in conjunction with other entities. Based on Kennedy’s description of what constitutes warm weather climate (“You could draw a line just a little bit north of the Rockingham [North Carolina] Speedway”) then roughly a quarter of those tracks would seem to be in play for a future Championship Weekend.
“A big part of this is also hearing feedback from the industry, be it teams, drivers, broadcast partners, industry partners and, importantly, the fans,” Kennedy said. “It was the fans who ranked Homestead-Miami Speedway as the No. 1 track that they would like to see the championship at.”
As for Phoenix Raceway, which Kennedy says received $100 million in capital improvements to bolster its role as the championship anchor, will continue to host two Cup Series events, as it has since 2005. It will be included in the Round of 8, essentially the semifinals, of the 2026 NASCAR playoffs, the specific date to be announced with the remainder of next year’s schedule at a later date.
“Phoenix set the bar really high since that weekend moved from here to there,” Homestead-Miami Speedway president Guillermo Santa Cruz said. “But now to kick off this rotation, to be the first one up in this in this new format and, you know, set the pace for it. It’s an honor for us to have it back and to kick it off.”
ARLINGTON, Texas — The Rangers recalled utility man Ezequiel Duran from Triple-A Round Rock on Thursday to fill the 26-man roster spot vacated by outfielder Kevin Pillar.
Pillar was placed on the 10-day injured list with lower back inflammation, retroactive to Sunday, before Wednesday’s game at Boston.
Duran will be in his third stint with the Rangers this season. He hit .345 with four home runs, six doubles, four RBIs and 13 runs scored in 14 games with Round Rock since being optioned by Texas on April 20. He has made 10 starts at shortstop and four starts at third base with Round Rock.
Duran was on Texas’ Opening Day roster for the third straight season and has played all four infield positions over seven games for the Rangers this year. He was 0-for-14 with one RBI. Duran is a .253 career hitter with 22 home runs and 92 RBIs in 279 games across four major league seasons, all with Texas.
The Pirates have fired manager Derek Shelton following a rocky opening month to the season that saw Pittsburgh quickly slip into last place in the National League Central.
General manager Ben Cherington made the announcement Thursday. Bench coach Don Kelly will take over for Shelton, who is the first manager fired across Major League Baseball this season.
The decision comes with Pittsburgh riding a seven-game losing streak that saw its record fall to 12-26 and the team drop 10 games back of the Chicago Cubs in the NL Central. Shelton, hired by Cherington in November 2019 as part of a franchise-wide reset by owner Bob Nutting, went 306-440 in five-plus seasons with the Pirates.
“Derek worked incredibly hard and sacrificed a lot over five-plus years,” Cherington said in a statement. “His family became a big part of the Pirates family, and we will miss that. He’s an incredibly smart, curious, and driven baseball leader. I believe he was the right person for the job when he was hired. I also believe that a change is now necessary. I wish Derek and his family all the best in their next chapter.”
Noting there is “a lot of baseball left to be played,” Nutting said the team needed to “act with a sense of urgency and take the steps necessary to fix this now to get back on track as a team and organization.” He said the first quarter of the season had been “frustrating and painful for all of us.”
The Pirates, ranked 26th out of 30 MLB teams in Opening Day payroll, began the season hoping to contend behind reigning NL Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes. Though the 22-year-old Skenes has been solid and the starting rotation in general has been steady, Pittsburgh’s offense has languished near the bottom of the NL all season, sitting ahead of only the Colorado Rockies in batting average and runs scored.
Pittsburgh is in the middle of a difficult stretch that began with the team getting swept by both San Diego and St. Louis. Pittsburgh’s next nine games are against NL powers Atlanta, the New York Mets and Philadelphia.
Kelly, a former major league player who entered the big leagues with Pittsburgh and is a native of the city, had served in his previous role with the Pirates since 2020.
“Donnie is as respected as any person in our clubhouse and throughout our organization,” Nutting said. “He is a Pirate. He bleeds black and gold. No one is more committed, and no one loves this team or city more than Donnie. He is the right person to manage our team and help get us back on track.”
The Pirates haven’t made the postseason since 2015. That is the second-longest active postseason drought in baseball, ahead of only the Los Angeles Angels, who haven’t reached the playoffs since 2014.
The Pirates gave Shelton, a former minor league catcher, his first major league managing job after he served as a coach in various capacities in Tampa Bay, Toronto and Minnesota.
Cherington tasked him with setting a new foundation for a club that has been an also-ran for the past three decades, save for a brief three-year stretch from 2013 to 2015 in which the Pirates returned to prominence.
The consistently upbeat Shelton oversaw a clubhouse with an incredible amount of churn during his first four seasons as Cherington traded away most of the established major leaguers on the roster — Joe Musgrove, Josh Bell, Jameson Taillon to name a few — to restock the club’s prospect pool.
Pittsburgh won less than 40% of its games in Shelton’s first three seasons before taking a step forward in 2023 when it won 76 games. Skenes’ arrival last May gave the franchise another jolt, and the Pirates were in playoff contention until an August swoon.
The club’s lack of offense in 2024 was its biggest issue. Rather than invest in proven major league talent — the team’s biggest offseason pickups were acquiring first baseman Spencer Horwitz (who is still rehabbing from wrist surgery over the winter) and signing Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier — Cherington instead retooled parts of the coaching staff and scouting department, including firing hitting coach Andy Haines and replacing him with Matt Hague.
Results have not followed. Pittsburgh is near the bottom of the majors in runs (29th), OPS (29th), home runs (28th) and average (27th) with no signs of improvement. The Pirates have scored a total of five runs in their past five games while getting shut out twice.
They are even struggling when Skenes is on the hill. The top pick in the 2023 first-year player draft has a respectable 2.77 ERA in eight starts in 2025, but the Pirates are 3-5 in those games, including a 2-1 loss to St. Louis on Tuesday.
