On Opening Day, the heavy favorites for Rookie of the Year included a coveted ace from Japan, a second-overall pick with across-the-board tools, a touted third-baseman who’d just won his first big league job, and a 22-year-old kid so otherworldly he was nicknamed The Martian.
Roki Sasaki, Dylan Crews, Matt Shaw and Jasson Domínguez were, at the time, the leading candidates on BetMGM to take home the hardware. Today, not one of them ranks in the top 20 in FanGraphs WAR among rookies. Among the players who were nowhere to be found among the start-of-season rookie front runners: Athletics first baseman Nick Kurtz, Brewers left fielder Isaac Collins and Red Sox catcher Carlos Narváez — the actual WAR leaders among MLB rookies this season.
We present this bit of hindsight without judgment, because we at The Athletic did little better. On Opening Day, our staff predicted 15 different Rookie of the Year possibilities, and again, not one of us came up with Kurtz or Collins or Narváez (or Royals starter Noah Cameron or Brewers third baseman Caleb Durbin or Marlins outfielder Jakob Marsee).
It’s been a weird year for rookies. The game is trending younger, and more attention than ever is paid to each new wave of prospects, yet this rookie class has caught everyone by surprise, especially compared to the high-profile, high-impact debuts of recent seasons. Expected standouts have been hurt (Jackson Jobe) or inconsistent (Shaw, Domínguez, Kristian Campbell) or both (Sasaki, Crews, Kumar Rocker), and into that void, true unknowns have emerged from obscurity. It’s a throwback to the major league arrivals of 30 years ago before the internet made minor league prospects famous.
Current BetMGM AL ROY favorites
The Rookie of the Year favorite in the American League is Kurtz, a slugger with immense potential who arrived earlier than expected. Kurtz was drafted just last summer and blew through the minor leagues in only 33 games. He did almost nothing his first month in the majors but had a home run binge in late May, and he’s been neck-and-neck with MVP candidate Cal Raleigh for the game’s highest fWAR ever since. He has surpassed teammate Jacob Wilson — the season’s best rookie through the All-Star break — as the top newcomer in the sport.
The WAR leader among NL rookies is Collins, a minor league Rule 5 pick — the minor league phase of the Rule 5 is reserved for the longest of long shots — who’s become one of the most productive players on the sport’s best team. The league-leading Brewers have a rookie in left field, a rookie at third base, two rookies on the bench, a rookie in the rotation, and they’ve been shuttling a few other rookie pitchers back and forth from Triple A, one of whom kept the rotation afloat with a 3.51 ERA in the first half and just struck out seven Giants over the weekend.
How many of those useful Brewers rookies made The Athletic’s preseason Top 100 prospects? One: starter Jacob Misiorowski. The rest — including Collins, Durbin, and up-and-down starter Chad Patrick, he of the aforementioned Giants game — didn’t even make our Brewers top 20. And again, we weren’t alone. Collins, Durbin and Patrick weren’t on Baseball America’s top Brewers prospects list either, yet all three rank top 15 in rookie WAR this season.
Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski had some prospect hype, but exceeded that when he made the All-Star team in his first season. (John Fisher / Getty Images)
So too does Narváez, a fringe prospect and backup on Opening Day who’s become a top 10 Major League catcher by WAR. And Cameron, a seventh-round pick who was called up in late April and has been basically as good as All-Star Kris Bubic ever since. And most recently there’s Marsee, whose prospect status was trending down after a bad 2024 season, but the Marlins called him up after the trade deadline, and he has the second-highest WAR in the Majors since.
There are versions of those stories for Yankees starter Will Warren, Dodgers long man Ben Casparius, Nationals swingman Brad Lord, White Sox infielder Chase Meidroth, and Rays outfielder Jake Mangum. All have matched or outproduced more highly touted teammates to deliver eye-opening rookie seasons. They are perhaps not stars, but they are reminders that a player need not be a Top 100 prospect to have an impact. That’s been the story of this rookie class.
Compare that to last season when Paul Skenes, Jackson Merrill and Jackson Chourio arrived with massive prospect hype and finished top three in NL Rookie of the Year voting, establishing the rookie narrative for last season. In 2023, the top rookies were Corbin Carroll and Gunnar Henderson, who began the season as the top two prospects on Keith Law’s Top 100 and immediately lived up to that billing. The rookie WAR leaders in 2022 were Julio Rodríguez and Adley Rutschman, each a top 10 prospect in the sport and projected superstar.
Current Bet MGM NL ROY favorites
This season could have been more of the same. Law’s preseason Top 25 included Campbell, Crews, Shaw and Domínguez, all of whom made Opening Day rosters (as did No. 27 Drake Baldwin of the Braves and No. 43 Cam Smith of the Astros), but of that group, only Baldwin has been consistently productive this season. Law’s top-ranked pitcher was Jobe at No. 11, but Jobe made just 10 starts for the Tigers before undergoing Tommy John surgery.
No. 1 on Law’s preseason list was Red Sox outfielder Roman Anthony, who’s been tremendous but didn’t debut until June 9. Orioles catcher Samuel Basallo, Rays infielder Carson Williams, and Pirates starter Bubba Chandler were also top 20 on Law’s list but didn’t reach the majors until this month.
That’s left the door open for lesser-known prospects to surprise us, but it has perhaps closed the door on the massive impact we’ve come to expect from recent rookie classes.
According to FanGraphs, rookie position players have been worth 22.8 WAR this season, on pace for just over 28 WAR for the year. That would be the second-lowest rookie position player WAR since 2005 (not counting 2020). Rookie position players accumulated 48.9 WAR in 2024, 67.7 WAR in 2023, and 53 WAR in 2022. This year’s rookie pitchers are on pace to have their third-lowest collective WAR since 2005.
Just don’t tell the Brewers, Red Sox or Athletics that this rookie class has been a disappointment. Since Anthony’s debut on June 6, Kurtz has the highest fWAR in the Majors, Anthony ranks 16th, Collins is in the top 30, and Marsee is just outside the top 50 (with the game’s third-highest OPS). Cubs rookie starter Cade Horton has the Major’s lowest ERA since July 1, Cameron is in the top 20 the past two months, helping keep the Royals relevant in the wild card race. Cam Schlittler has been a rotation savior for the Yankees the past month.
This rookie class is having an impact, just not in the way we might have expected, or with the prospects any of us could have predicted.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Top photos: Nic Antaya, Jason Miller, John Fisher/Getty Images)