It’s a good year to be a great young player in the American League
Until Gunnar Henderson won the Rookie of the Year Award a year ago, it had been more than 30 years since any Orioles player won one of the “big three” BBWAA awards, also including Cy Young (1980, Steve Stone) and MVP (1991, Cal Ripken Jr.) The ROY drought may have been broken, but you know what? It would still be fun to see an Oriole win one of these others some day.
Obviously, the most important drought to end is the franchise’s not having won a World Series within the lifetime of anybody who’s 40 years old or younger. That’s a given. It’s fun to enjoy some intermediate successes along the way, and as we know from the first time Cal won an MVP in 1983, it sure doesn’t hurt to have an MVP to help you get to and win a World Series title.
The last time this happened league-wide was in 2018, when Mookie Betts won the MVP and the Red Sox won the World Series. It happened the two years before that as well, with José Altuve getting a trophy after the trash can-banging Astros won in 2017 and Kris Bryant snagging an MVP when the 2016 Cubs snapped their franchise’s epic World Series drought.
Good news for everyone who wants to see an Orioles MVP: Here on May 1, Gunnar Henderson is absolutely among the top contenders for this year’s award. There’s a lot of baseball left to be played, and so far he’s playing it at a high level and giving plenty of reason to believe that when the dust settles on this regular season, Henderson should be among the league’s top players.
Does he actually have a chance? That depends on how he plays, and also how the competition plays. Below is a little snapshot about the currently top-performing players in the American League.
Gunnar Henderson
- bWAR / fWAR through 4/30: 2.0 / 2.2 (top in AL for fWAR)
- Batting stats through 4/30: .291/.356/.624
- The Narrative: 2023 Rookie of the Year winner took big step forward in his sophomore season as the best player on a (we hope) great Orioles team
Henderson already finished in the top 10 for MVP voting a year ago even while he was winning the ROY. Based on the bWAR numbers, you could argue he actually deserved a top 5 finish. Not bad for a rookie season. He is on track to follow the path that’s been seen by Orioles fans over 40 years ago as Hall of Famer and now part-owner Cal Ripken Jr. went from the AL ROY in 1982 to an even better season and an MVP win in 1983. (Cal should have won two in a row in 1984, but we don’t need to get into that right now.)
It didn’t take orange-colored lenses to think that Henderson could make something of a leap heading into 2024. He was already extremely good last year, and I think you could easily believe that a version of Henderson who played most of his games at shortstop and hit 35+ home runs would be an easy MVP contender after already being a 6-win player the way he was.
Just on Monday, Henderson added the feather to his cap of being the youngest player to ever have 10+ home runs before May 1. He’s hitting for a better average and stealing more bases, too. “On pace for” numbers are still a bit silly at this point in the season, but having said that, he is on pace for the following: 55 home runs, 33 stolen bases, and a 10+ WAR. That’s worth some M-V-P chants.
This leap was not guaranteed to happen for Henderson. Look no farther than the NL ROY winner from last year, Corbin Carroll. The Diamondbacks outfielder, who like Henderson is playing in his age 23 season, has run into a sophomore slump in a big way, batting just .193/.292/.246 through the end of April. The disappearance of Carroll’s power numbers from over a year ago, when he slugged over .500, is particularly notable.
Bobby Witt Jr.
- bWAR / fWAR through 4/30: 2.1 / 1.8 (tied for top in AL for bWAR)
- Batting stats through 4/30: .315/.363/.548
- The Narrative: Young star made strides at the plate and in the field with a resurgent Royals team after signing huge contract to stay with small-market team that drafted him
You can pile on to The Narrative about Witt that he’s one of only two good hitters on his team up to this point, so the value that he provides stands out even more. Should this matter in MVP voting? No, but sometimes the BBWAA voters are people with opinions that should embarrass them professionally and those people would answer that question with yes.
A year older and with an extra season on Henderson, Witt’s got a similar tale of improvement from last year to this one. He was already pretty darn good at a lot of things, with 30 homers and 49 stolen bases in 2023 and with improved defensive numbers compared to his rookie season.
Here in 2024, Witt’s still doing damage with speed, as he’s already stolen nine bases and hit four triples. Unlike Henderson, he’s not on pace for a new career home run record, but he’s boosted his batting average by 29 points and that improvement has kicked him up to an OPS+ of 156. Will it last? Witt does appear to be benefiting from atypical batted ball luck, as he had a .295 BABIP in each of his first two seasons but this year that’s jumped to .372. There’s regression there that the Gunnar boosters can hope for.
Juan Soto
- bWAR / fWAR through 4/30: 2.0 / 2.1
- Batting stats through 4/30: .325/.438/.581
- The Narrative: Consistently elite player traded to the big market for last season before free agency and delivered everything the Yankees could have asked and then some
Everyone who is born into Orioles fandom inherits a distaste for the Yankees at birth. Everyone who was born in the early-to-mid 1980s had the Jeffrey Maier incident in the 1996 ALCS to lock in this dislike for life. I mention these things because it is with some figurative pain that I must acknowledge the following: Juan Soto is on the Yankees, and he is very, very good.
Soto is younger than Kyle Stowers and Joey Ortiz. He’s the same age as Heston Kjerstad. Unlike these recent Orioles prospects, Soto has 810 games under his belt at the MLB level, with a career OBP over .400 and SLG over .500. Both of these things are true for his 2024 season to date as well. He already has 30+ WAR for his career and he won’t turn 26 until after this season. Most of the players the Yankees traded to get him are bad so far. Bummer for me.
One other thing that might fuel Soto’s candidacy for MVP is a sense that he probably should have won before. In 2021, Soto had the best bWAR of any NL position player, but he was runner-up in that year’s voting to Bryce Harper, perhaps because that year’s Washington team with Soto on it went 65-97 and greatness is sometimes unappreciated in MVP voting when it comes from bad teams.
Early on, it’s not looking like the 2024 Yankees will have that problem. One can expect some voters to be dazzled by this performance from Soto happening specifically for the Bronx Bombers.
Ronel Blanco
- bWAR / fWAR through 4/30: 1.8 / 1.4
- Pitching stats through 4/30: 5 GS, 1.65 ERA, 3.50 FIP, 0.918 WHIP in 32.2 IP
- The Narrative: Threw a no-hitter in his first start, 2.28 ERA and .570 OPS against even without the no-no included
Fair or not, it’s hard for pitchers to win the MVP award, even when they’re great. It seems like a lot of voters treat the award as for position players only, since pitchers have the separate Cy Young just for them. The last pitchers to win MVPs were Clayton Kershaw in the NL in 2014, and Justin Verlander in the AL in 2011. Those are the only ones in the last 30 years.
If Blanco was going to break that historical pattern, he’s probably going to need more than just having the no-hitter in his favor. He is not looking like one of the game’s top-end strikeout pitchers, with an 8.3 K/9 up to this point. Kershaw and Verlander had gaudy strikeout totals for their wins. Once his absurd batted ball luck evens out (.173 BABIP vs. league average of .288,) Blanco will probably not be up near the top of the WAR charts.
The Kershaw and Verlander seasons each saw the pitcher reach 20 wins, which it’s tough to project for any modern pitcher, given how they are used. With how the 2024 Astros have played so far, it’s even harder to imagine a guy in their rotation reaching that point. It also kind of depends on there not being an overwhelmingly great hitter in the league that year. No NL batter topped 7 WAR for Kershaw’s win a decade ago. It doesn’t seem like the 2024 AL will shake out the same way.
Riley Greene
- bWAR / fWAR through 4/30: 2.1 / 1.4 (tied for top in AL in bWAR)
- Batting stats through 4/30: .257/.388/.524
- The Narrative: Former top 10 prospect breaking out to lead a surprising Tigers team
The list of recent MVP winners consists mostly of players who everyone already knew was good before that season started then going out and doing something even greater than their usual. Of the players already mentioned here, Henderson, Soto, and Witt are following that pattern.
Greene, the 23-year-old Tigers outfielder in his third big league season, doesn’t have the same going for him. He wasn’t bad at all last year, pulling down 1.9 bWAR in 99 games as he missed all of June with a stress fracture in his fibula and most of September after needing Tommy John surgery. That’s not an MVP pace, but it might have been a “this young player is interesting” pace if he’d gotten more of a full season in.
Returning from Tommy John does make for something of a comeback story. The Tigers, like Witt’s Royals are showing some unexpected strength so far this season. That’s the kind of thing that might get a new guy into the conversation in a way that wouldn’t happen if he was on a .400 team.
The Statcast page for Greene shows a guy who’s got a lot of good things going for him. Hitting the ball hard and not swinging outside of the strike zone often are two things that will serve a guy well. This has given him a boost of 108 points to his isolated slugging (SLG – BA) compared to a year ago, which might well be sustainable. I am not sure he will continue to walk in nearly one of every six plate appearances once pitchers adjust their approach to him.
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If Henderson is still near the top of the leaderboard in a month, which we can all hope that he will be, I’ll be back then to see how he’s looking against the competition, and whether there’s any different competition near the top of the bWAR leaderboard, through the end of May.