Take a deep dive into a four-way NL Rookie of the Year race

By Mike Petriello | 10:55 AM EDT

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There’s been a mistake, we think, in the conversation around the National League Rookie of the Year voting, which requires ballots to be submitted in just four more weeks. It’s long been seen as a two-horse race between JJ Wetherholt of the Cardinals and Sal Stewart of the Reds, and in fact the two of them were indeed tied atop the most recent MLB.com straw poll of writers.

Were it just that, it would be a fascinating discussion between a defensively-elite middle infielder (Wetherholt) and a corner infielder who may end up leading the Majors in runs batted in (Stewart). But it’s not just them, is it? By our count, there are four legitimate candidates who might end up making a case for this one.

(Yes, Logan Henderson, Shane Drohan, Bradgley Rodriguez and Joe Mack, we see you, among others. You’re having strong years, too. The playing-time deficit is far too great to make up. It’s not going to happen.)

The reason why it doesn’t feel like a four-way race is because for most of the season, it wasn’t.

At the end of May, McLean had a 4.21 ERA and Benge had a below-average .677 OPS, which at the time was nearly 100 points behind Wetherholt and more than 150 points of OPS behind Stewart. In early July’s poll, Wetherholt narrowly led Stewart, with McLean in third, and Benge didn’t even place, with Konnor Griffin and TJ Rumfield taking fourth and fifth.

But much has changed in the two months since then. Griffin hasn’t played in nearly two months due to injury, knocking him out of the race, and since June 1, Benge (.836 OPS), thanks to some changes in his setup at the plate, has easily out-hit Stewart (.785) and especially a struggling Wetherholt (.689). Meanwhile, McLean (2.40 ERA) has been one of the best starters in the game, rookie or not.

Since it’s a full-season award, “who was in the lead early” doesn’t matter, and in fact doesn’t really exist outside of these informal straw polls. You can’t lose a lead because there was no lead to be had; the only thing that’s actually factored in will be the votes handed in at the end of the regular season.

So, with a little more than 80% of the season in the books, what does this look like now? It depends what you value.

All stats current entering play on Thursday.

What does Wins Above Replacement say?

WAR isn’t everything, and it never will be, but it’s also the best starting point we have. As of Thursday, the FanGraphs metric says:

The story it’s telling is clear. Wetherholt has a solid (if lesser) bat and elite infield defense. Benge has the most well-rounded combination of hitting, baserunning and defense. Stewart has the best bat, yet lags in baserunning and defense. In broad strokes, those descriptions all fit the scouting reports.

There’s more than one version of WAR, and while the numbers may change a little, the order does not; at Baseball-Reference, which uses an entirely different way of evaluating defense, it’s the same ordering, with Wetherholt (4.8) ahead of Benge (3.1), McLean (2.4), and Stewart (2.0). Decimal points in WAR really don’t matter very much, so what you can say here is that the two most prominent systems agree. You don’t have to treat it as gospel; you also can’t reasonably ignore it, either.

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So it’s Wetherholt’s to win, then?

Not exactly. He had a stellar April (.856 OPS), which has reinforced his numbers all season. But the next four months haven’t really been as kind, as he’s hit just .242/.337/.346 with a .683 OPS. It’s been particularly dire in August, when he’s managed just a .645 OPS. If September is as weak or worse, it might drag him down far enough that he’ll be a below-average bat for the season, at which point we think that no amount of excellent defense will save him, given the strong competition.

As we said: WAR is the right place to start, and it’s also not the entire story. We expect the gap to close over the remaining few weeks, and it will be a harder story to tell if Wetherholt spent the second half not hitting.

Look, Stewart is going to have a billion RBIs, does anything else matter?

Nothing else matters if you only care about the RBIs, in which case you’re also saying nothing else matters, including defense or what happens in plate appearances where a run isn’t driven in.

If Stewart leads the Majors at the end of the season, he’ll be just the third rookie to ever lead the bigs in RBIs, along with Ted Williams (1939), who was Ted Williams, and Walt Dropo (1950), who spent all season hitting fifth in a lineup where Williams was hitting third with a .452 OBP.

It is, no matter how old-school or technologically advanced you are, incredibly impressive. But we also know there’s some nuance to RBIs, too. Benge (50 times) and Wetherholt (125 times) have each hit leadoff for much of the season, guaranteeing at least one bases-empty plate appearance, and relying on the weaker bottom of the order to reach the rest of the time. Stewart has spent the entire year hitting behind Elly De La Cruz, either in a 3-4 or 1-2 combination.

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That follows that Stewart would simply have had more runners to drive in, and that’s undeniably true.

Stewart has had more than 100 additional runners on base than Wetherholt has, and 44% of his plate appearances have come with at least one runner on – far more than Benge’s 37% and Wetherholt’s 32%.

There’s no talking around the opportunity disparity. Of course, you still have to get the runners home, and Stewart has done that quite well. 20% of his runners on base have come around to score, which is one of the better marks in the Majors, and it’s better than Benge (15%) and Wetherholt (14%). Both things can be true: Stewart has done a very good job here, and also he’s been given far more opportunities to do so.

While it’s true that performance with runners in scoring position isn’t “sticky” -- that is, it’s not a repeatable skill from year to year, something shown by the fact that Dropo managed 144 as a rookie and then never touched 100 again for the rest of his career, or that the 2025 leader in runners driven in among those with at least 100 was Miami's Jakob Marsee, hardly an elite hitter -- Stewart doesn’t need to worry about that as much when we’re talking about a single-season award.

What about the rest of being on offense? Does it matter if you play in a hitter’s park or not?

It definitely does, and that’s important here. You’d never look at a Rockies hitter or pitcher without park-adjusting, and that’s one of the beauties of baseball – the parks are different, and we have a pretty good understanding of how.

In this case, Wetherholt’s home stadium is the most difficult in baseball for a lefty to homer in, while Stewart plays in a top-five homer park for righties. There’s more to life than just homers, as some of those Cincinnati homers mean non-homer extra-base hits aren’t happening, but overall, you’d rather be a hitter in Cincinnati than St. Louis. (The Mets players are in a roughly average park, as Citi hasn’t been the pitcher’s paradise it’s been known as for some time.)

That’s reflected in the performances of Stewart and Wetherholt, too. At home, Stewart is 30 points of OPS better than he is on the road; at home, Wetherholt is 160 points of OPS worse than he is on the road. So that needs to be accounted for, plus there’s the 50% to 70% of plate appearances that don’t come with runners on to talk about.

The best way to do that is with OPS+, or its related cousin, wRC+, which both put 100 as league average

Both tell you the same story, which is that A) Stewart is the best hitter even with his home field accounted for, and B) it’s by not a whole lot over Benge, who's been on a tear for months.

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Doesn’t defense matter here, too?

Sure does. Looking at Statcast’s team defense rankings, the top nine teams are still in playoff contention, and every single one of the bottom nine teams are at least four games under .500.

You don't have to have a great defense to win, but it's nearly impossible to win with bad defense. Defense always matters.

Is it measured accurately?

That’s up to you, but at least in this case, the stories defensive metrics are telling should match the eye test. Statcast thinks Wetherholt is the best second baseman in the game, at +20 runs of Fielding Value, and Defensive Runs Saved thinks he’s one of the dozen best players at any position – both unrelated systems consider him nearly the equal of Pete Crow-Armstrong.

Stewart rates as average-to-mildly-below (-3 runs via Statcast), and Benge rates as above-average (+5 runs), thanks in part to a truly elite throwing arm. None of this, yet, is adjusted for what position they play. It’s simply the raw totals.

None of those figures should be that controversial, we think. Wetherholt would likely be playing shortstop if St. Louis didn’t have Masyn Winn, and in fact he’s been seamlessly playing short with Winn out injured. Benge is garnering a growing reputation in the outfield, and Stewart is perfectly adequate yet not more with the glove. Hard to argue.

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Does Stewart get hurt for playing first base?

Kind of, but not by as much as you’d think.

Yes, Wins Above Replacement has a positional adjustment, as it should – a .900 OPS player who can handle shortstop is more valuable than one who is limited to left field or designated hitter. (Imagine what kind of player Yordan Alvarez would be if he could play a strong shortstop, rather than being mostly a DH.) First base is a less valuable spot than third, which is less valuable than second, short, center, and catcher, and so on. In Stewart’s case, only about two-thirds of his time is at first base, so that’s all considered.

There’s something of a myth, we think, that a poor third baseman would be ‘more valuable’ than a good first baseman, and that’s not really accurate. Matt Olson, for example, remains more valuable on defense in WAR than Nick Gonzales does, even after accounting for the relative value of first base vs. third base – because Olson is very good there, and Gonzales rates poorly at the hot corner.

Put another way: an elite middle infielder shouldn’t be the same as a plus corner outfielder shouldn’t be the same as an adequate corner infielder -- and they’re not.

So how is that WAR number put together?

Offense matters a ton, and defense somewhat less so, and baserunning less than that -- but it all matters. We can show you the breakdown here. Everything expressed here is in runs, the currency of baseball, and includes the positional adjustment. Since they're all in the same league at the same time, we'll spare you the math of adding for replacement level.

As we said above: Stewart is the best hitter, Wetherholt the best defender, Benge the most well-rounded. Stewart plays the least valuable defense of the three, at the least valuable position. It's all just putting numbers to what you know.

What about the pitcher?

Right! There’s a fourth name here.

All this talk about the three position players, and not nearly enough about McLean, who had a 2.06 ERA in eight late-season starts last year and was selected to start for Team USA in the finals of the World Baseball Classic before his rookie season had even officially began. This might be a different conversation entirely if not for McLean’s May, which should be pretty visible in this monthly split.

You can’t handwave that away and say “it doesn’t count,” because it does, just like Benge’s slow start, just like Wetherholt’s recent slide. It all counts. But he’s also been excellent for three months now, to the point that he’s got the sixth-best ERA (2.37) since May 31, on a list where the top five are Jasob Misiorowski, Troy Melton, Dylan Cease, Robbie Ray, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

Going back three decades to the start of the Wild Card era, he's one of a relatively small handful of pitchers who has pitched as many innings as he has in his first 34 career starts with an ERA under 3.00 -- and most of them went on to very meaningful careers.

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So where does this leave us?

With a lot of “ifs.”

If Wetherholt’s bat continues to slide, he can play himself out of the conversation entirely.
If McLean continues to look like an ace, then a starter with 170 innings of sub-3.00 ERA ball has a great case.
If Benge continues to rake, then a 20/20 outfielder with a cannon arm is a fine choice.
If Stewart ends up with 125 RBIs, then maybe that’s enough that no one will care about anything else.

It should be, at the least, a fantastically interesting case. The only wrong opinion to have is that it’s over now, or that it’s between just two players. It most definitely is not. It’s wide-open.

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