At the All-Star break, the one award race that seemed like it might be over was for National League Rookie of the Year.
Not so fast.
A terrific month of August has helped San Diego’s Jackson Merrill emerge as the new favorite for the honor, displacing Pittsburgh right-hander Paul Skenes. The flip in the betting odds has been dramatic. Skenes was a -1200 favorite at the break, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. Now it’s Merrill who is the pick at -800.
It’s not as though Skenes has done anything to lose the award. The 2023 No. 1 overall draft pick is 8-2 with a 2.23 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP. The last-place Pirates aren’t pushing him overly hard, but they haven’t shut him down either, and it was perfectly reasonable to consider him a huge favorite for Rookie of the Year back in mid-July.
But Merrill, who unlike Skenes has spent the whole season in the big leagues, has made a huge push for a surging San Diego team that is now in wild-card position. In August, he hit .303 with seven home runs and a .969 OPS. After homering again on the first day of September, Merrill is batting .289 with 21 home runs and 79 RBIs.
Skenes still has a solid lead over Merrill in Baseball Reference’s version of wins above replacement, but Merrill is ahead in the FanGraphs version.
What’s remarkable is that the other major awards basically have held to form. The favorites at the All-Star break — Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani for MVP, Tarik Skubal and Chris Sale for Cy Young — are still the favorites now. In fact, all four of them have shorter odds now than they did then.
Trivia Time
Who was the most recent San Diego player to win Rookie of the Year?
Line of the Week
Houston’s Yordan Alvarez hit three home runs in a 10-0 win over Philadelphia on Wednesday. Alvarez also had a single, which gives him the nod over Lawrence Butler’s three-homer game the following day for Oakland.
If those were the best statistical lines of the week, the most unusual one went to catcher Danny Jansen, who on Monday became the first player in big league history to play for both teams in the same game. Boston and Toronto resumed a game that had been suspended in June. Jansen was actually at the plate for the Blue Jays when the game was halted by rain. He was traded to Boston in late July.
When the game finally resumed at Fenway Park, the Red Sox put Jansen in at catcher — as the Blue Jays sent a replacement hitter to finish the plate appearance Jansen had started a couple of months earlier. Jansen went 1 for 4 for the Red Sox in their 4-1 loss.
Comeback of the Week
Skenes pitched five innings Wednesday against the Cubs and exited with his team ahead 10-3. Then Chicago came storming back. Christian Bethancourt hit a two-run homer in the seventh and a two-run double in the eighth. Then he scored on Ian Happ’s single to make it 10-8.
After Dansby Swanson’s bases-loaded grounder in the ninth brought in another run, Chicago trailed by just one but was down to its last out. After an intentional walk re-loaded the bases, Bethancourt came through again, hitting a two-run single that gave the Cubs the lead. After three more RBI singles in the inning, Chicago closed out a 14-10 victory. The Pirates had a win probability of 99.4% at one point, according to Baseball Savant.
Chicago has won nine of its last 10, scoring 99 runs in that span. The Cubs began Monday just three games out of a playoff spot.
Trivia Answer
Benito Santiago in 1987. It’s the longest current drought of any NL team for that award.
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