MLB: AL Rookie of the Year candidates

There’s a chance this season that Aaron Judge becomes the first player since Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 – and just the third player ever (Fred Lynn, 1977) – to win the Rookie of the Year Award and MVP in the same year. Judge has 22 homers, is leading all hitters (not just rookies) in fWAR by over half a win, and has captured the collective imagination of baseball in a way no other player has in a long time.

But enough has been written about Judge. He’s good at the sport of baseball – we get it. What happens if he goes down tomorrow with a season-ending injury (*knocking on wood that this doesn’t happen, of course), or what happens if the swing-and-miss portion of his game starts to regress back to where it was last season and his production begins to fall off a cliff? He certainly would be passed in the AL MVP discussion, but could he fall off far enough to make the AL Rookie of the Year Award a real race as well?

It’s hard to imagine anything other than a long-term injury making this a race, but there are a few quiet candidates out there who could make this thing a real race if Judge does pick up a nick or begins to suffer some serious regression.

Let’s meet the six candidates who are likely cursing each and every Aaron Judge post they see, as it just means more and more of an uphill battle to claim the recognition they would have a far better chance of winning in just about any other season. The six candidates will go in order from least likely to most likely to upset Judge, culminating with the man who has the best chance of stealing the AL RoY crown out from under Judge.