Major League Baseball Rookie of The Year Award

Major League Baseball Rookie Of The Year Award

In Major League Baseball, the Rookie of the Year Award is annually given to one player from each league as voted on by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). The award was established in 1940 by the Chicago chapter of the BBWAA, which selected an annual winner from 1940 through 1946. The award became national in 1947; Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers' second baseman, won the inaugural award. One award was presented for both leagues in 1947 and 1948; since 1949, the honor has been given to one player each in the National and American League. Originally, the award was known as the J. Louis Comiskey Memorial Award, named after the Chicago White Sox owner of the 1930s. The award was renamed the Jackie Robinson Award in July 1987, 40 years after Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line.

Of the 128 players named Rookie of the Year, 14 have been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame—Jackie Robinson, five American League players, and eight others from the National League. The award has been shared twice: once by Butch Metzger and Pat Zachry of the National League in 1976; and once by John Castino and Alfredo Griffin of the American League in 1979. Members of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers have won the most awards of any franchise (with 16), twice the total of the New York Yankees (eight), who have produced the most in the American League. Fred Lynn and Ichiro Suzuki are the only two players who have been named Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player in the same year, and Fernando Valenzuela is the only player to have won Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award in the same year. Sam Jethroe is the oldest player to have won the award, at age 32, 33 days older than 2000 winner Kazuhiro Sasaki (also 32). Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals are the most recent winners.

Read more about Major League Baseball Rookie Of The Year Award:  Qualifications and Voting

Famous quotes containing the words major, league, baseball, year and/or award:

    No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    Half a league, half a league,
    Half a league onward,
    All in the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.
    “Forward the Light Brigade!
    Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)

    When Dad can’t get the diaper on straight, we laugh at him as though he were trying to walk around in high-heel shoes. Do we ever assist him by pointing out that all you have to do is lay out the diaper like a baseball diamond, put the kid’s butt on the pitcher’s mound, bring home plate up, then fasten the tapes at first and third base?
    Michael K. Meyerhoff (20th century)

    Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.
    Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)

    The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
    Robert Graves (1895–1985)