So by now (late October 2024), all votes are in for 2024 AL and NL Rookies of the Year, so at this point anything I say in this article is me ranting and complaining about something that I think has already happened, but won’t know for certain has happened until three weeks from now. Nothing I can do to change it now!

But if you read articles like this one, you get the idea that Colton Cowser is the consensus pick to be AL Rookie of the Year for 2024. Or at least it’s down to him and Luis Gil.

Then there’s this betting odds line from when there were 5 days left in the season. It had Luis Gil with a greater than 50% chance to win, with Colton Cowser and Austin Wells also having good chances, and Wilyer Abreu being an extreme longshot, with a less than 2% chance to win it.

Luis Gil and Colton Cowser. Why these two? It seemed to me like there was a crowded field of top candidates in this race.

Well, someone in that article mentioned WAR as part of their reasoning. And though WAR isn’t the be-all end-all criterion for choosing Rookies of the Year and MVPs, I think it’s a great first step in creating a pool of top candidates to ponder and consider, to compare and contrast. So I considered it. I considered it in 16 different ways, in fact.

So it was interesting to learn in this assessment of the WARs that AL rookies accumulated in 2024, that Gil maybe shouldn’t even be in the mix. I have him as just outside the 6 strong contenders, who are, in alphabetical order:

Wilyer Abreu
Colton Cowser
Wyatt Langford
Mason Miller
Cade Smith
Austin Wells

How did I come to that conclusion? Well let’s start by looking at the top WARs of AL players. Note that there are two different commonly used ways of calculating WAR, that are scaled to be a similar size, but can produce quite different answers for individuals. One of these ways comes from Baseball-Reference.com, and it is often labeled bWAR for clarity. Here are the AL rookies with the highest bWARs for 2024:

There are Gil and Cowser, but they’re in the third and fourth spots. Yet they’re both within 1 WAR of the leaders, Wyatt Langford and Wilyer Abreu, which is not considered a truly significant difference.

What does the other WAR look like? It is calculated by FanGraphs.com, and it is often labeled fWAR for short. Here are the AL rookies with the highest fWARs for 2024:

Ah, there’s Cowser at the top. But Gil is in 7th place? And of the 8 players appearing on both lists, none of them are in the same place as before. Also, as with bWAR, a lot of guys are within 1 fWAR of each other.

Some of these differences are surely indicative of the inherent inaccuracies of estimating the value of a player’s performance. That said, WAR is our best current tool for objectively attempting to measure the overall value of a player’s performance. We just must recognize the approximate size of those inaccuracies, and as others have said before me, we must use WAR as a conversation starter, not a conversation ender.

But hey, maybe we can squeeze a little more accuracy out by averaging the bWAR and the fWAR? That looks like this:

Colton Cowser on top again (thanks to his high fWAR), but the top 6 guys all within one WAR of each other! And a new top 2. This makes things look even tighter.

But maybe it would be better to look at each player’s peak assessment – their highest WAR attained between the two systems?

The same top 4 and top 5 as with the average WAR, though a different top 3. But no … maximum can be completely influenced by one system having a very inaccurate high assessment. Having a high minimum WAR between the two systems only happens if both systems rate you highly – we should therefore have more confidence in a high minimum WAR than a high maximum WAR. Here’s what that looks like:

Well that shook things up a bit! A new name on top.

But looking over all five lists, there are four names always hanging out near the top – (alphabetically) these are Wilyer Abreu, Colton Cowser, Wyatt Langford, and Austin Wells. Perhaps we should declare these four in a dead heat as far as WAR is concerned, and focus on these four in determining, using other measures, which one should be AL Rookie of the Year. But Luis Gil is not part of that group. Why is he such a frontrunner for Rookie of the Year, then? I’ll share some thoughts on that later.

But hang on. There’s an important factor we haven’t considered here: playing time. Among the highest performers, WAR acts like a counting statistic – the more you play, the more WAR you accumulate. So in comparing top players, it may be more appropriate to turn WAR into a rate stat by dividing it by some measure of playing time. So let’s do that.

For position players, I like to use plate appearances as the measure of playing time, as plate performance has an outsized effect on overall WAR.

For pitchers, I like to use batters faced instead of innings pitched, because it’s the number that is most relatable to the position player’s plate appearances. In fact, if you add up all players’ plate appearances over all of MLB for an entire year, you get exactly the same number as you get when totaling batters faced in the same way.

But pitchers as a whole don’t get as much WAR as position players do. Probably rightly so, because position players can add to the run values of their batting contributions with their defense and/or baserunning; pitchers can only add value by reducing the run contributions of the batter. Because major league players collectively will do better than replacement-level players at baserunning and fielding, on average these will add a positive amount of WAR on top of their batting contributions. Pitchers only have access to the run values available in the pitcher/batter interaction.

So since there’s less WAR to go around for pitchers, to assess how good their play was against position players, we must grant them more opportunity by allowing them to accumulate WAR over a larger number of batter/pitcher interactions. Looking at the numbers from 2023 and 2024, I found a pretty consistent trend: position players get a little over 40% more fWAR per batter/pitcher interaction than pitchers do, and a little over 50% more bWAR. To be a little conservative about it, I used the 40% and 50% adjustments. So we calculate WAR per 500 plate appearances for position players, fWAR per 700 batters faced for pitchers, and bWAR per 750 batters faced for pitchers. These numbers were chosen to get into the vicinity of one season’s worth of plate appearances.

The results of this adjustment for all five tables we made before can be found below.

Now you may object to my adjustment, and insist that position players and pitchers should be evaluated based on equal numbers of batter/pitcher interactions. Okay, to humor you, I also did the same five tables as before that way – WAR per 500 PA for position players, and WAR per 500 BF for pitchers. So now we have 10 new tables to show you.

But before we do, we have one more adjustment to make. Because we’re dealing with rate stats now, players with a lower number of chances will be able to ride a “hot streak” of good luck to achieve higher rates than a player with more chances is able to access. So we insist on a minimum number of chances – 400 for each. If a player has below 400 PA or BF, we divide their WAR total by 400 instead of by their actual, lower number. It’s like we’re assuming that a player with 300 PA would have accumulated 0 WAR over their next 100 PA.

With that adjustment, now we’re ready. Here are the five tables using WAR per 500 PA and WAR per 700 or 750 BF:

Wow, Cade Smith and Mason Miller completely took over the top of the lists!

But here are the five tables using WAR per 500p PA/BF. Will they stay atop those?

They’re not atop these, but still placing higher than before, as are David Hamilton and Parker Meadows. But the new dominant pair on these five lists are Wilyer Abreu and Austin Wells. And Luis Gil has nearly disappeared from them!

All these lists, all 15 of them looked at collectively, tell a tale of ambiguity. These 15 lists have 14 different top 3s. There are nine different players occupying top 3 positions. There are five different players occupying the top position of a list. There is no clear cut frontrunner here!

But surely some are appearing near the top moreso than others. Here’s one thing we can do to sort those out: for each player, find their highest position on any list, and their lowest position on any list. Here is what that looks like:

And there we see the two runaway favorites to win AL Rookie of the Year coming in behind five other guys. And looking at their numbers, I can see that a good case could be made to vote for Wilyer Abreu, Cade Smith, or Wyatt Langford over Colton Cowser or Luis Gil. Maybe even Austin Wells too.

So why are Cowser and Gil so favored to win?

Is it because they’re from major markets? No, because Wilyer Abreu is from a major market.

Is it because most of the others played less? I think that is a factor, especially for Cade Smith, who as a reliever doesn’t face nearly as many batters as starting pitchers do. And a little bit for Wilyer Abreu, who missed part of the middle of the season due to injury.

But I think the biggest factor is that Colton Cowser and Luis Gil played for playoff contenders, and except for Cade Smith and Austin Wells, most of the rest didn’t. And the fact that that’s probably true really makes me sad.

Why should otherwise equal players be judged differently based on the performance of the other players on their teams? That makes no sense, and should not factor at all into the voting. But I fear it does. It’s looking like Wilyer Abreu and Wyatt Langford will be cheated of Rookie of the Year votes due to not playing on contenders, and Cade Smith will be cheated out of votes for lack of playing time.

Here’s hoping the prognosticators got it wrong, and we see Cade Smith, Wilyer Abreu, and Wyatt Langford finish with strong scores in the Rookie of the Year voting.