To the surprise of no one, Pete Alonso won the National League Rookie of the Year Award on Monday night, becoming the sixth Met ever to win the honor — joining Tom Seaver, Jon Matlack, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Jacob deGrom.
The award was the finishing stroke to a masterpiece of a rookie campaign that saw the 24-year-old lead the majors in home runs with 53 while setting an MLB rookie record for most round-trippers in a season. He also led the National League with 85 extra-base hits, drove in 120 runs, and had an OPS of .941.
A loaded statline such as that had most of the baseball world believing that Alonso would be the 13th unanimous NL Rookie of the Year.
That wasn’t the case, however.
Alonso received 29 of the 30 first-place votes as Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic decided to pick Atlanta Braves starter Mike Soroka as his No. 1 choice.
Cue the outrage.
The San Francisco Giants beat writer was vilified, chastised, scolded, berated, thrashed, flogged, reprimanded, chided, admonished; whatever you’d like to call it. Twitter is a weird place and people spend way too much time on it looking to pick virtual fights all too often to bring some sort of twisted validation into their empty lives.
Do I believe that Alonso should have been unanimously selected for the award? Absolutely.
But Baggarly — who was accused of trying to be a story rather than just reporting on it — stated his case instead of going into hiding.
It is a compelling one, based on the fact that Soroka prevented home runs in a season where the ball was flying out of the yard at historic paces.
He brought in advanced stats to back up his case, stating that Soroka eclipsed Alonso in Win Probability Added, Wins Above Average, and Baseball Reference’s Wins Above Replacement calculations that took FIP out of the equation.
If that’s what you’re looking at when casting your vote, that’s cool by me — even though I still think it was the wrong decision.
Alonso being the consummate professional that he is, provided some sanity to all this.
“To just win the award, it doesn’t matter if it’s unanimous or not,” Alonso said. “It’s such a blessing. To just have that title is unbelievable. So whether it’s unanimous or not, to me it doesn’t matter.”
Mets fans: Pete Alonso is the National League Rookie of the Year.
Take it. Enjoy it. And save your whining for the winter when ownership opts not to spend money top-tier roster upgrades.
