The top two MLB prospects heading into the 2023 season are now the Rookies of the Year. Baltimore Orioles infielder Gunnar Henderson and Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Corbin Carroll unanimously took home the honors Monday night.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Henderson, 22, won the American League ROY award after batting .255 with 82 RBIs and 28 home runs in 150 regular-season games. He hit .500 in three postseason games.
- Carroll, 23, won the National League award after leading the NL in triples (10), earning an All-Star selection and hitting .285 with 76 RBIs and 25 home runs.
- Carroll was an integral piece of the Diamondbacks’ postseason run, batting .273 in 17 playoff games. Arizona reached the World Series but fell to the Texas Rangers.
- Before the 2023 season started, The Athletic ranked Carroll as the No. 1 MLB prospect and Henderson at No. 2.
Any surprises here?
This year’s Rookie of the Year awards had about as much tension as a downed power line, as the preseason favorite in each league pretty much went pole-to-pole and sailed to easy victories in their respective balloting.
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Carroll was the easy call in the NL, producing across the board from day one — even going back to the end of 2022 — while posting the second-best OBP and third-best slugging percentage among all NL rookies (Colorado’s Nolan Jones, who had the benefit of playing half his games at altitude where the ball doesn’t break as much, was ahead of him in both categories). Carroll also led all NL rookies in steals with 54 and success rate at 92 percent (minimum 10 attempts), tied for the NL rookie lead in homers with 25 and was ninth among NL rookies in Outs Above Average at +4. (Three of the guys ahead of him were outfielders for the Milwaukee Brewers — Joey Wiemer, Sal Frelick and Blake Perkins, each of whom came out at +7 OAA).
Nobody was within 1 WAR of Carroll by either Baseball Reference’s or Fangraphs’ versions of the metric. The 16th pick in 2019, Carroll truly blew away the rest of the NL field, even with strong rookie seasons from runners-up James Outman and Kodai Senga as well as Cincinnati’s Matt McLain, who was third on my personal ballot after Carroll and Outman.
The 2023 Jackie Robinson NL Rookie of the Year Award goes to Corbin Carroll of the @Dbacks! pic.twitter.com/QC549n5EkZ
— MLB (@MLB) November 13, 2023
Henderson actually started 2023 a little slowly, not that anyone remembers given how he finished; when he woke up on June 1, he was hitting .203/.330/.386, which was an improvement from where he’d been a month prior. He took off from there and ended up leading rookies in homers with 28 while coming in second among AL rookies in doubles to 30-year-old Boston outfielder/DH Masataka Yoshida, who ended the year at 0.6 fWAR.
Henderson did all of this while splitting his time almost evenly between shortstop and third base, with Statcast rating his performance at both positions at average (0 OAA). This kind of offensive performance from a shortstop is incredibly valuable, and his 4.6 fWAR easily led the AL by more than a win, while Baseball Reference had him at over 6 WAR because they use an older defensive metric that I think is less accurate than OAA is. — Keith Law, senior baseball writer
The 2023 Jackie Robinson AL Rookie of the Year Award winner is Gunnar Henderson of the @Orioles! pic.twitter.com/rEcM84OKwK
— MLB (@MLB) November 13, 2023
How important is Carroll to the Diamondbacks?
There are a lot of young, talented players on the Diamondbacks — Gabriel Moreno, Alek Thomas, Andrew Saalfrank, etc. — who will likely have a massive role in this organization remaining successful for years to come. But then there’s Carroll, a rookie in a different class than all the rest.
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His tenure with the team represents a shift from losing to winning. He is the fastest player on a team with great speed. He hits for power and has great defensive range. Carroll has become the face of the franchise. If you ask any of his teammates, they’ll tell you just how serious he is about everything. Even at just 23 years old, he’s not much of a jokester. And he doesn’t seem satisfied with just being in the majors. This is a guy who appreciates the burden of being his team’s best player. The Diamondbacks are expected to be good for quite a while. And Carroll’s rising status as a superstar is the central reason for those expectations. — Sam Blum, MLB staff writer
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(Photos: Raymond Carlin III and Tommy Gilligan / USA Today)
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