Skenes or Merrill? Breaking Down the Top Two Candidates for the 2024 NL Rookie of the Year Race
As we finish the final month of the MLB season, players are starting to slot themselves into the final positions for the end-of-the-year awards. The National League Rookie of the Year race, however, is one that is still up for grabs. The race is inching ever closer as the year gets closer to finishing. Neither Paul Skenes nor Jackson Merrill have led up since entering the league. Merrill looks to be the first Padre to win the prestigious award since Benito Santiago in 1987 and Skenes looks to be the first since Jason Bay in 2004 as well as the first starting pitcher since Jacob deGrom in 2014.
Jackson Merrill took the league by storm at the beginning of the year. He has been a key piece to that Padres team and is one of the big reasons they have caught up so close to the NL West-leading Dodgers. He is slashing a very solid .292/.322/.490 with the addition of 19 home runs. He has a very similar stat line to Michael Harris II’s Rookie of the Year campaign, edging him by one homerun with still a month left in the season. However, Paul Skenes has not let him run away with the award.
Since entering the league partway through the year, Paul Skenes has been one of the most dominant pitchers not only in the National League but the entire MLB. Skenes has an outstanding 2.23 ERA, 0.95 WHIP, and a .201 BAA, and that’s not to mention those are all after a rough start for his standards. His ERA and WHIP are both lower right now than Blake Snell’s 2023 numbers, in which he won the NL Cy Young Award. So which rookie should get the edge and win this prestigious award? Jackson Merrill has put up a great rookie campaign and might have won the award if he was a rookie in the past five years. The only problem is Paul Skenes is putting up Cy Young-caliber numbers as a rookie and I just don’t think you can get much better than that.
