It began the way most bouts of existential dread do.

A pause to consider the inevitable consequences. A creeping sense of inescapability. And then the fetal position.

Our Bay Area BBWAA chapter chair, Eno Sarris, assigned me a National League Rookie of the Year ballot this season. Unlike the MVP, which involves ranking the top 10 players, or the Cy Young Award, which goes five deep, the rookie ballot is usually a simple assignment: just three names and, in a typical year, a minimum of controversy.

There might be some people still incensed about Marty Cordova-over-Garret Anderson or Chris Sabo-over-Mark Grace (hand raised for the latter), but all in all, this is supposed to be a lightweight exercise.

Pete Alonso was great. Pete Alonso hit 53 home runs for the New York Mets. No rookie in baseball history has ever hit more. Pete Alonso seems like a happy guy who likes to take his shirt off and act like a goofball. He has an affinity for polar bears. He cried on the field after breaking the record. His mom loves him. Mets fans adore him. Easy peasy.

Except as I began to do a bit of perfunctory research, ostensibly to decide whether Dakota Hudson or Mike Soroka would get the third spot on my ballot, the scales fell from my eyes.

Soroka didn’t merely have a good season. He had a great one. He was one of the NL’s best pitchers – a clear top-5 NL Cy Young candidate if that had been my ballot assignment. (And how I wish it had been my ballot assignment.)

While Alonso was bashing a record-setting number of homers, Soroka was displaying another skill at an elite level.

He wasn’t giving them up.

Soroka gave up home runs on just 6.5 percent of fly balls allowed, a rate that led the major leagues. (The major league average was 10.9 percent.) He allowed 0.7 home runs per nine innings – half the major-league average of 1.4 – and that rate matched Tampa Bay’s Charlie Morton for the best in both leagues, too.

Soroka gave up zero home runs in April, one in May, three in June (including one to Alonso), two in July, two in August. He hit a bump in September, yielding five homers over a two-start span. That amounted to 36 percent of the home runs he gave up all season. And those two blips came after the Braves already had the NL East all but clinched.

Soroka wasn’t taking the mound in San Francisco or Yellowstone, either. Atlanta’s SunTrust Park plays lively, especially for left-handed hitters. Soroka got bit for a modest yet still impressive nine homers in 13 starts at home. The truly astounding work: in 16 road starts, he yielded only five.

The rest of his stats, not surprisingly, were in line with a remarkable season. Soroka’s 169 ERA+ was fourth in the majors among starting pitchers, behind only Gerrit Cole, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Justin Verlander. His 2.68 ERA was fifth, behind the aforementioned trio and Jacob deGrom.

Sure, Soroka finished just 14th in the majors in in fielding independent pitching, mostly because a 7.45 K/9 rate won’t win you much FIP love. But I always considered FIP more of a predictive stat than one that ranks a performance already delivered. Outs are outs, and Soroka’s special blend of stuff from a 6-foot-5 frame – hard but not overwhelming 93 mph sinker, darting changeup and a heavy slurve that swan dives its way beneath bats – allowed him to finish the season as one of 11 starting pitchers who generated more ground contact than balls in the air.


Rob Friedman
✔
@PitchingNinja
Mike Soroka, 93mph Fastball, 81mph Slider and 82mph Changeup, Overlay.

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3:27 AM - May 21, 2019
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So … a great season. A special season. But better than another rookie who hit 53 home runs? One who hit more rookie homers than Aaron Judge or Mark McGwire did?

I thought the answer would be obvious when I started to break down Alonso and Soroka by their value. Surely, Alonso would trounce Soroka and win the battle and the WAR.

Instead, that’s when things got really interesting.

Soroka ranked ninth in the majors in Win Probability Added (3.7). Alonso ranked 17th (3.5) – not a great way to predict future performance, but a good way to measure the kind of impact a player had on his team.

Wins Above Average? Soroka 4.2 > Alonso 2.9.

Alonso beat Soroka in fWAR (4.8 to 4.0), but Fangraphs utilizes FIP in their formula – again, making their tabulation more applicable as a predictive tool. I gave greater weight to Baseball-Reference.com’s results-oriented version, which uses runs allowed per nine innings rather than FIP. And Soroka was the clear bWAR winner (5.7 to 5.0).

In other words … using the most respected current statistical measures that allow us to make the least dodgy comparison between a right-handed pitcher and a slugging first baseman, yes, you can make a clear case that Soroka’s season was every bit as valuable if not more so than Alonso’s.

But I wasn’t out to determine the most valuable rookie. That’s not how I define the award (although the winner usually ends up being the most valuable).

To my thinking, the rookie of the year is this: the most impressive player in his first season.

And as impressive as Alonso was, as much as he captivated all of Queens, as swell a guy as he is, as compelling as his personal narrative might be, I just couldn’t get past this basic conclusion:

What Soroka did was more impressive.

What could be harder in today’s major-league climate with its Top Flite balls and 30-homer 7-hole hitters than to be a rookie pitcher? And what skill is more rare and valuable than the ability to keep the ball in the ballpark?

What Alonso did was magnificent. What Soroka did was harder.

With a week remaining in the season, I came to the realization that I was leaning hard for Soroka. And that made those final two series agonizing to watch.

Because Alonso kept hitting more and more homers. He broke the record on the final weekend. I reached out to a few of my The Athletic colleagues on Slack: “If I’m the only voter who keeps Alonso from being a unanimous winner, will Mets fans mildly torch me? Or will I be incinerated beyond recognition?”

It will be bad, they told me. Very, very bad. Mets Twitter is a special flavor of Twitter.

I asked one of my colleagues in jest if they would like to trade their AL Rookie ballot for mine. I regretted that conversation because it resulted in a barrage of screen shots every time Alonso hit a homer and tweets with links to every gusher piece about how great he is.


Joon Lee
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@joonlee
the earnest passion for the game is so endearing.

baseball needs more of this. https://twitter.com/SNYtv/status/1178102443370061825 …

SNY
✔
@SNYtv
Pete Alonso feeling all the emotions after breaking the record

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Deesha
@DeeshaThosar
Pete's mom Michelle, who was just interviewed by @jonmorosi, said she was bawling her eyes out at her Citi Field seat after Alonso hit the record-setting home run. Of course, her son cried too.

"It was a family cry fest," she said.

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This next one was appended with, “hm yeah, you might be in some trouble.”


Tim Healey
✔
@timbhealey
Pete Alonso's season:

* won the first base job
* became an All-Star
* won the Home Run Derby
* said "the boys are hot"
* set the Mets' single-season homer record
* organized a 9/11 tribute
* set the major-league rookie homer record
* is the no-doubt NL Rookie of the Year

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“I’m a horrible person,” I texted.

“You should go to jail now,” a colleague texted back.

It might be safer in there.

And then I scrolled upon this, and I can report, dear reader, that it takes roughly 45 minutes for your keyboard to dry out and function again after it gets hit with an atomized mouthful of Diet Coke.


Bob Nightengale
✔
@BNightengale
Pete Alonso, who’ll be the unanimous NL rookie of the year winner, ties #MLB rookie record with 52nd homer

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3:41 PM - Sep 27, 2019
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I knew I wasn’t going to cave and vote for Alonso just to spare myself the grief. But, honestly, I did give thought to begging out and asking Eno to give my ballot to someone else. Life is too short to deal with online abuse from people who get hacked off when their player won Rookie of the Year but only got 29 out of 30 first-place votes. I don’t mind the passion. It’s the misplaced anger that has become so, so exhausting to me. Especially when there are thousands of legitimate reasons to express outrage in the world.

But then I realized that giving up my vote would be cowardly, too. No, I would vote my conscience. It might not be popular, but it made sense to me. (And maybe it helped to know I’d be out of the country when the award was announced.)

So the day after the regular-season finale (in which Soroka struck out Alonso twice and held him to a single, for what it’s worth), I filled out my online ballot – Soroka-Alonso-Fernando Tatís, Jr. – and hit send and sealed my fate. At least I can feel good about it. For now, anyway.

Maybe someone else voted for Soroka, I thought. (Ed. note: Alonso got 29 of 30 first-place votes.) Maybe the backlash won’t be so bad.

Either way, a Hall of Fame ballot should land in my mailbox in another couple of weeks, so it’ll be on to the next manufactured crisis.

When the time comes, I’m pretty sure I’ll vote for Justin Verlander. Pretty sure.


Bob Nightengale
✔
@BNightengale
Congratulations to future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, who just became the 18th member of the 3,000 strikeout club. #Astros