The General Chapter members of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance participated in selecting our chapter's ballot for the Willie Mays Award, which goes to the best rookies in the American and National League for 2014. The General Chapter's ballot will then be added to the rest of the chapters to come up with the official Baseball Bloggers Alliance winners for each category. The Willie Mays Award, like the Connie Mack Award will be announced next week.
The general perception of our generalist writers was that the American League had a strong class of rookies while the National League had a very weak class. Even so, each league produced a clear cut favorite among our voters. Each chapter member voted for his or her top three and the top choice was weighted the highest with the second place votes weighted lower and so forth.
One difficulty facing our voters was that the rookie class included players that played in "major" leagues in other countries before coming to the MLB to play. Such candidates draw concern about their "rookie" status.
And our ballot is:
American League:
- Jose Abreu - 650 pts
- Dellin Betances - 140 pts
- Collin McHugh / Masahiro Tanaka - 130 pts.
Abreu blew away the field after his season as one of the premier offensive stars in the Americna League in 2014. The rest of the field in order of their finish was: Kevin Kiermaier, Matt Shoemaker, Yordano Ventura, Danny Santana, George Springer, Marcus Stroman, Nick Castellanos.
National League:
- Jacob deGrom - 590 pts
- Billy Hamilton - 360 pts
- Joe Panik - 70 pts
deGrom was on nearly every ballot and had the most first place votes by far. Hamilton was on nearly every ballot but only had one first place vote. One other first place vote went to Joe Panik. The rest of the field in order of their finish: Kolten Wong, Ender Inciarte, Kyle Hendricks, Travis d'Arnaud, and David Buchanan.
Much thanks to all the chapter members who voted.
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