Well, it’s official. Julio Rodriguez and Michael Harris are your 2022 AL and NL Rookies of the Year, beating out catcher Adley Rutschman of the Orioles and starter Spencer Strider of the Braves, respectively. This wasn’t a particularly shocking RoY voting, even though I had Strider beating out his Atlanta teammate, but it does speak to the types of players that the BBWAA voters want to see succeed beyond their rookie seasons. This is the first time in what seems like forever that both Rookies of the Year have been locked into long-term, biggish-money contracts (J-Rod’s contract is obviously larger and longer, but Harris’s is just as impressive), and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Let’s dive into the details.
The “five-tool player” model has long been used by baseball scouts to determine the positive assets a hitter can provide to a team: hitting, hitting for power, running, fielding, and throwing. Putting the archaic nature of this rubric aside, the players that are truly “five-toolers” (ew, not using that phrase again) are the ones that take baseball by storm. Based on pure stats alone, five-tool players, no matter their overall skill, are the All-Stars, the Hall of Famers, and the legends because all their five key skills can be augmented by one another, limiting the risk of overall diminishing talent. You can’t hit for power anymore? You probably have some semblance of a contact swing that just requires a few easy adjustments. You can’t field ground balls anymore? Let’s move you to the outfield then, where you’ll have a cannon of an arm. The margin of decline year-over-year for all-around players is much smaller than for the average one-dimensional hitter. What that means is that the five-tool players have the greatest chance of being the “face of baseball,” a phrase I hate, but understand. The gist of this logic is that with more great and long-lasting players in the league, the greater the fan experience is. You can say that this goes into the category of “bad for baseball” talk, but I prefer to plainly say that I agree with the idea. I want a lot of good players for the sake of the narrative of the game, a lot of five-tool players, or a lot more J-Rod or MH2 types.
Julio Rodriguez finished his rookie campaign with the Seattle Mariners with 28 homers and 25 steals, making him the third rookie in MLB history to put up a 25-25 inaugural season. He also batted .284 with an .853 OPS and made his first All-Star Game as a center fielder. Harris, unlike J-Rod, was a late-May call-up, yet still managed to finish his 114-game season with 123 hits, 19 homers, 20 stolen bases, a .297 batting average, and an .853 OPS (not sure if both RoYs have ever finished their rookie seasons with the same OPS). Both Rodriguez and Harris ranked in the top ten in baseball in outs above average (OAA) and arm strength among center fielders, so to say that both of these youngsters are five-tool players would be an understatement. In fact, you could say that J-Rod and Harris are the epitome of the five-tool model in an era when most of the league has turned into glorified DHs. Their numbers stand out, sure, but they also give off a nostalgic sentiment that baseball hopes to see soon with their rule changes. Was it a conspiracy among the BBWAA voters to give these two gentlemen the award to show how “the real game of baseball” should be played? I mean, that would be really funny, but it’s more than that.
What do end-of-season awards represent? Like, I understand the debates are fun to dissect and the awards help legitimize player milestones in terms of their legacies and Hall of Fame consideration, but they’re also meant to contextualize baseball’s eras numerically. As I said before, baseball is going to see a lot of changes as the rulebook gets rewritten in future years. What will these new stars look like in a game driven by player research and analytics? How will players evolve in an ever-changing environment? When the chips are down in a future of no shifts and bigger bases, who’s going to clutch up? The voters, and baseball fans alike, hope that this future is full of replicas of the rookie seasons of Julio Rodriguez and Michael Harris, the five-tool phenoms whose skillsets will only make them stronger as baseball grows. This was no statement vote from the BBWAA, but take note of how the vote ended up and what that says to future hitters who are only three or four-tool players. These rookies aren't just the "future of baseball" because they're young. It's because they play like they're from the future.
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