Neyer: Where have all the American League’s top rookies gone?
From SABR member Rob Neyer at Baseball Nation on July 2, 2013:
Playing baseball well is hard. All winter long, we salivate over the young prospects who will soon make their way to the major leagues and quickly establish themselves as shining beacons of diamond talent … and then they arrive, and our beacons have dashed themselves upon the perilous Rocks of Reality. Most of our prospects do eventually make names for themselves, but it rarely seems to happen as quickly as we expect, or would like.*
* This website cannot be held responsible for mixed metaphors or any other manifestations of sloppy writing.
But it’s so hard to play baseball well as a rookie that few rookies are even given that chance.
This season, 90 pitchers have thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.
Five of them are rookies.
What’s actually sort of amazing is that four of them have pitched exceptionally well. Jose Fernandez, Shelby Miller, Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Julio Teheran have all been pitching all season, and they’ve combined for a 2.86 ERA. In a normal season, those four would give us the rare experience of four starting pitchers vying for one Rookie of the Year Award, all of them making great case. But this isn’t a normal season (more on that in a moment).
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballnation.com/2013/7/2/4486708/national-american-league-rookie-year-candidates-yasiel-puig
Originally published: July 2, 2013. Last Updated: July 2, 2013.