The Orioles shortstop is still in contention for the Rookie of the Year -> MVP the next year progression
Roughly one month ago, I surveyed the field of the top contenders for the AL’s Most Valuable Player award for this season based on their performance up to that point. Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson had already established himself as one of the better players in baseball through the first month. Here we are in early June and he’s taken himself to another level: Henderson is, at least according to Baseball Reference WAR, the best player in all of MLB up to this point in the season. He’s the only one above 4.0 WAR.
For Orioles fans, it’s been fun to see what Henderson does on a daily basis all season. He’s a fun player just on his own. It’s exciting that his performance is helping a great Orioles team as it tries to repeat as AL East champions or at least repeat having an unquestionably amazing regular season record. I am also excited because maybe Henderson can be the player to break the Orioles drought without having a Most Valuable Player win, a streak stretching back to Cal Ripken Jr.’s second of these awards from 1991.
If Henderson is able to go on to win the MVP Award this season, he’ll be following in Cal’s footsteps from the first MVP of his career. Cal went from Rookie of the Year winner for 1982 to MVP in 1983. (He should have won back-to-back in 1984, but we don’t need to get into that right now.)
The 1983 Orioles won the World Series in the same season Cal won that MVP. Having an MVP winner on your team certainly doesn’t hurt your postseason chances. The last decade saw three different players win MVP awards in the season their team won the trophy. Kris Bryant started this trend as the Cubs broke their title drought in 2016. Jose Altuve continued it when the Astros banged trash cans to a 2017 win. Mookie Betts made it three in a row with an MVP title in the same 2018 season where the Red Sox won the World Series.
Can Gunnar follow either the ROY to MVP trend or the MVP to team World Series trend? Both parts would require him winning the MVP. He sits atop one WAR leaderboard for now. Here’s how the competition looks with just less than four months of the regular season to be played.
Gunnar Henderson
- bWAR / fWAR through 6/3: 4.1 / 3.7 (leads all MLB players in bWAR)
- Batting stats through 6/3: .267/.365/.587, including 19 home runs
- The Narrative: 2023 Rookie of the Year winner was great already and took another step forward as the best player on a great Orioles team
I’m going to say one bad thing about Henderson before I talk about how great he is so I’m not a complete homer in this article: You don’t have to look very hard to find defensive plays that he just weirdly doesn’t make. One of them happened last night. If these things blind you to his greatness, you’re missing out. He’s great, he’s fun, and for this season and the next four after it, he’s ours.
It’s 35.8% of the way into the 2024 season and the Orioles have the best player in all of baseball (as long as you only look at bWAR) on their team. That’s exciting! For a while, Henderson led the league in homers. His 19 in 58 games are still impressive, putting him on pace to tie Chris Davis’s single-season Orioles home run record at 53.
Henderson walks more than 10% of the time, he’s a perfect 8-8 in stolen bases, and even with the last paragraph’s note of occasional defensive miscues he should still be a strong Gold Glove contender because that’s how good he regularly is. Is all of that going to be enough for the first Orioles MVP since 1991? It’s going to depend as much on Henderson’s play and health as it does on whether the current other contenders can be as good or better than they have been. This is a stacked field.
A closer target: Henderson making it as the starting shortstop for the AL All-Star team. Competition will be tough even just for that, as another prime contender will make an appearance on this top five list.
Aaron Judge
- bWAR / fWAR through 6/3: 3.9 / 4.0 (fWAR leader)
- Batting stats through 6/3: .288/.417/.658, including MLB-leading 21 home runs
- The Narrative: His OPS+ is 200 and he plays for a Yankees team that’s returned to the upper echelon of MLB (excuse me while I go puke)
At the end of April, Judge was OPSing just .754 for the season to date. He’d struck out in 27% of his plate appearances, grounded into ten double plays, and was batting just .207. The righteous ranks of Yankee haters could start to gleefully imagine Judge dropping into the ranks of pedestrian players in just the second year of a nine-year, $360 million contract. Maybe the toe injury that had Yankees personnel saying sort of ominously “he’ll have to manage it for the rest of his career” was sapping the greatness from him.
Reality is not so kind to us, because starting one month ago, Judge broke out big time. Since May 4, he’s slugging over 1.000 thanks to 15 home runs and another 12 doubles. A guy who hit 62 home runs just two years ago isn’t exactly coming out of nowhere to lead MLB in homers again this year, but that was quite a turnaround from April. The GIDP shame has faded; he’s only added one more since April. He also leads the AL in walks, and is tied with his teammate, who we’ll be discussing momentarily, for the AL lead in OBP at .417.
It tells you something about how dang good Henderson has been that all of this is true about Judge and he’s still trailing Henderson for the bWAR lead. This is still a slim margin, the kind that could be swung the other way if Henderson has a night where he goes 0-5 while Judge hits three more homers. If Judge has a June as great as his May, he’ll be comfortably atop the WAR leaderboard by the time the All-Star break rolls around.
Kyle Tucker
- bWAR / fWAR through 6/3: 3.6 / 3.3
- Batting stats through 6/3: .266/.395/.584
- The Narrative: One of the AL’s best-hitting outfielders for each of the last three years found a new power stroke in 2024; also, he’s 10-10 in stolen bases; also also, he’s walked more than he’s struck out
There was a time where it was an uphill battle to win the MVP award if you were on a team that wasn’t very good, with the dimmer among the BBWAA voters concocting justifications for why performance is only valuable if it comes for an already-good team. The perpetual Angels mediocrity even while Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani were there winning five MVPs between them has made it a more even fight, though most of those wins happened when second place was not a close finisher in bWAR. The Astros are 27-34.
This is impressive performance any way you slice it. Look at this Statcast page. That’s a lot of red. Red is good. The only thing that’s really not good is “baserunning run value” – which surprises me since, again, he’s gone 10-10 in stealing bases. He’s 99th percentile in walk rate, 97th in expected slugging percentage, and so on down the line. Tucker is unquestionably one of the AL’s elite players through two months (and change) of the season.
Bobby Witt Jr.
- bWAR / fWAR through 6/3: 3.6 / 3.7
- Batting stats through 6/3: .313/.367/.539
- The Narrative: Young star who is the best player on a resurgent Royals team, contributing in every aspect of the game in the season after signing a big contract extension to possibly stick with a small-market team for his whole career
In contrast to the other four of the top five players we will be discussing here, Witt is not doing a ton with home run power, and he’s not walking at an elite rate either. He’s yet to get to double digits in homers. He’s still getting in his extra-base hits, using power and speed to collect 16 doubles and an impressive six triples. The guy’s stealing a bunch of bases, too, though at 17 steals in 24 tries, he’s below the break-even percentage.
A lot of this was true a year ago about Witt as well, whose sophomore MLB season had him finish at 4.4 bWAR. The big difference between then and now is that his batting average has jumped by nearly 40 points – this even as offense has dropped MLB-wide. Hitting over .300 gives him a lot of chances to make things happen with his speed, and he’s making the most of that.
Juan Soto
- bWAR / fWAR through 6/3: 3.5 / 3.9
- Batting stats through 6/3: .322/.417/.614
- The Narrative: The game’s most accomplished young outfielder got traded to the Yankees, is hitting for more power than ever before while still doing everything else
I already had to stop to barf from writing good things about one Yankees player and now I have to do it again? Sheesh. Soto is just ridiculous. Maybe he’ll be with them for this one year before going to get paid big dollars by a team whose owner is either more aggressive with his using own wealth or his dad’s wealth on the baseball team he owns than is current Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner about his inherited franchise.
Soto is 25 years old, he already has seven MLB seasons under his belt, and he has a career OBP over .400 in those seasons. It’s absurd. He is basically doing exactly what you might expect would happen if you take a lefty power hitter and move him out of San Diego and into Yankee Stadium. He is on pace to hit 45 home runs, ten above his previous career high.
Soto OPSed 1.026 on the road a year ago but only .827 at home; now, he’s still OPSing over 1.000 on the road and is also doing the same at home. If there’s a “Yankee vote,” all we can do is hope that Judge and Soto split it. These two guys carried the Yankees offense to a 23-7 record since the start of May. That’s also ridiculous.
**
Not only are these the top five players in the AL in bWAR, they’re also the top five in fWAR. Oh, and they’re also the top five in both bWAR and fWAR in all of MLB. The National League has no entrants right now. Although Mookie Betts of the Dodgers built a big lead with LA’s early Korea start and continued strong performance beyond that, he’s been passed by all of these players now. (OK, he’s tied with Soto in bWAR at 3.5.)
Two months into the season, this is the cream of the crop. If Henderson can keep playing at least as well as the rest of these guys and keep himself to where he should be at the top of the MVP conversation, that will be a great sign for the rest of the Orioles season.