Los Angeles Dodgers players have won more NL Rookie of the Year Awards than any team in baseball and Cody Bellinger will add to that total this year.
Cody Bellinger is the clear favorite to win the NL Rookie of the Year Award this year. For the sabermetrically-inclined voter, he leads all NL rookies in FanGraphs WAR. The traditional voter will like his 38 homers and 88 RBI. There have been a few other good rookies, like Paul DeJong, Manuel Margot, and the very small sample size production of Rhys Hoskins, but Bellinger is a lock.
When Bellinger is handed the hardware in the offseason, he’ll be the 18th Dodgers player to win the Rookie of the Year (ROY) Award. That’s more than double the number of ROYs of any other team. In the National League, the Reds and Braves each have seven. The Browns/Orioles franchise leads the American league, also with seven. Sadly, the Pittsburgh Pirates have been in the NL since 1887 and have exactly one Rookie of the Year, Jason Bay in 2004.
The Dodgers have dominated the ROY Award voting right from the beginning, when Jackie Robinson won it in his debut season of 1947. Two years later, Don Newcombe took the trophy, and Joe Black and Jim Gilliam won the award in 1952 and 1953. That gave the Dodgers four of the first seven ROY winners. All four of these players were members of the 1955 World Series-winning team that finally won it all after losing in seven previous World Series appearances, most of them to the hated New York Yankees.
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Three Dodgers players won the ROY in the 1960s. Frank Howard won it in 1960, when he led NL rookies with 23 home runs and 77 RBI. Jim Lefebvre won the award in 1965, although he trailed Joe Morgan by more than one Win Above Replacement. Ted Sizemore rounded out the decade with a win of his own in 1969, earning 14 of the 24 first place votes.
Most of the 1970s went by without a Dodger winning the ROY. It was a time of Vietnam War protests, the last few years of the hippie movement, gigantic afros, and disco. Finally, in 1979, Rick Sutcliffe arrived to end the Dodgers’ drought. He was 17-10 with a 3.46 ERA and beat out the “Hackman”, Jeff Leonard, to take the trophy. Sutcliffe’s win opened the floodgates. Dodgers would win the ROY Award in each of the next three years.
Steve Howe was a talented but flawed individual who could never shake a drug habit and it cost him his career. In the beginning, though, he was the 1980 NL Rookie of the Year as a reliever for the Dodgers who had 17 saves and a 2.66 ERA. Statistically, he wasn’t even the best rookie reliever that year, let alone the best rookie overall, but he got the votes.
In 1981, Fernandomania took over the baseball world when Fernando Valenzuela burst upon the scene with a 13-7 record and 2.48 ERA in 192 1/3 innings in a strike-shortened season. The Dodgers played 110 games that year. If you pro-rate Fernando’s innings in 110 games to a 162-game season, he was on pace to pitch 283 innings as a rookie. Those were different times. Not only did he win the ROY, he also won the NL Cy Young Award and finished fifth in the voting for NL MVP.
Steve Sax won the Dodgers’ fourth-straight ROY Award in 1982. He won it by edging past fellow second baseman Johnny Ray by six points in the voting. According to Baseball-Reference, Ray was slightly better than Sax (3.8 WAR to 3.3 WAR), mainly because Ray was better on defense.
This was an interesting time in NL ROY voting. The Dodgers won four straight from 1979 to 1982. Then the Mets won back-to-back ROYs thanks to Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. They were followed by a pair of Cardinals, Vince Coleman and Todd Worrell, who won the award in 1985 and 1986, respectively. That meant just three teams won eight ROY Awards in an eight-year period.
Amazingly, the Dodgers had an even longer stretch of winners in the early 1990s, beginning with Eric Karros in 1992. He won the award because he had 20 homers and 88 RBI, which is what voters loved back in those days. According to Baseball-Reference WAR, he was barely above replacement level. The award should have gone to Moises Alou, Reggie Sanders, or possibly Tim Wakefield.
Mike Piazza won the ROY in 1993 and there was no doubt that he was the best rookie in the NL. He hit .318/.370/.561, with 35 homers and 112 RBI. Along with his ROY Award, he finished ninth in NL MVP voting, but would have been in the top five if more voters considered Wins Above Replacement.
In the strike-shortened 1994 season, Raul Mondesi took the trophy with a .306/.333/.516 season. The forgettable John Hudek finished second that year. Hudek was worth 0.7 WAR in his rookie year and -0.4 WAR over the rest of his career.
Fourteen years after Fernandomania consumed Los Angeles, Nomomania arrived from Japan. Hideo Nomo, with his bendy-twisty windup, was 13-6 with a 2.54 ERA and 236 strikeouts in 191 innings. He was a deserving winner, even with Chipper Jones on the ballot. When he started for the NL in the All-Star Game, he baffled American League hitters through two scoreless innings.
Rounding out this run of five straight ROY Awards for the Dodgers was Todd Hollandsworth in 1996. Both FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference had a handful of rookies worth more than Hollandsworth, including Edger Renteria and F.P Santangelo. After his strong debut, Hollandsworth struggled to stay healthy and productive over the rest of his career. He played 149 games in his rookie season and never reached that total in a season again.
After Dodgers won five straight ROY Awards in the early 1990s and nine ROY Awards in 18 seasons from 1979 to 1996, the team went almost 20 years without another one until Corey Seager got the accolades last season. Seager lapped the field with a huge rookie season that was also good enough to place him third in NL MVP voting. When Cody Bellinger wins this year’s NL ROY Award, it will be the fourth time the Dodgers have had streaks of two or more winners.