{"id":84,"date":"2007-10-05T11:25:31","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T16:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.efsavage.com\/blog\/posts\/rookie_of_the_year_2007\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T23:22:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T03:22:15","slug":"rookie_of_the_year_2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/posts\/rookie_of_the_year_2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Rookie of the Year 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Picking a Rookie of the Year is probably the most subjective of the big baseball awards.  Evaluating a player on such a small sample size is anathema to sabermetricians, and hype can help or hurt the impression a player makes on his new fans.  To me, the best rookies not only perform well, they show potential.  The guy who comes up and has more HR than BB doesn&#8217;t really impress me (though sometimes that&#8217;s all you have), the guy that fields well and has clutch hits or pitches and still manages to put together decent numbers are the real future stars.<\/p>\n<p>National League RoY: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/t\/tulowtr01.shtml\">Troy Tulowitzki<\/a>. Between <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/b\/braunry02.shtml\">Ryan Braun<\/a> and Tulowitzki, I have to Tulowitzki the edge, but I didn&#8217;t really get a chance to see either of these guys play.  Based on what I&#8217;ve read and what little I&#8217;ve seen, Tulowitzki is a talented shortstop who can hit and Braun is a clumsy third baseman who can really hit.  Braun pretty much beats Tulowitzki hands down in terms of production, but I don&#8217;t trust power numbers from rookies (will he be a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/m\/mcgwima01.shtml\">McGwire<\/a> or a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/m\/maaske01.shtml\">Maas<\/a>?) as much as I do fielding and discipline, so Tulowitzki gets it.<\/p>\n<p>American League RoY: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/p\/pedrodu01.shtml\">Dustin Pedroia<\/a>.  Sox fans have been hearing about Pedroia since he was drafted, but always with caveats like &#8220;maybe he&#8217;s too small&#8221; or veiled warnings like &#8220;he plays with heart&#8221;.  He came up early in the season and basically stunk up the joint, but his manager had faith, and eventually something clicked.  Pedroia turned into a hitting machine, fielded like veteran, and always seemed to be fired up.  I think the sox have a solid .300+ hitter for a few years, probably settling into the #2 spot if Ellsbury&#8217;s power is low enough that he becomes the leadoff.  Runner Up: Daisuke Matsuzaka*<\/p>\n<p>*I love the fact that the baseball market is going global, but something just doesn&#8217;t feel right about experienced players winning Rookie of the Year.  Can you imagine Manny Ramirez going to play in Jpan and being considered a rookie?  Even if I didn&#8217;t feel this way I still wouldn&#8217;t have given Dice-K the nod over Pedroia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Picking a Rookie of the Year is probably the most subjective of the big baseball awards. Evaluating a player on such a small sample size is anathema to sabermetricians, and hype can help or hurt the impression a player makes on his new fans. To me, the best rookies not only perform well, they show&hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"simppeli-read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/posts\/rookie_of_the_year_2007\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Rookie of the Year 2007<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[417],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball-sports-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1AkJt-1m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1029,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}