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The Rookie of the Year is maybe my favorite of baseball’s yearly awards. Not only is it cool to honor the people who get to the highest level of their profession and immediately crush it, but looking back at the list of winners is like being in a time machine. We remember that some players who went on to fruitful careers with a certain team didn’t even begin their career there.
We see that the award can be a decent predictor of future success (by my count, one of these guys is already in the Hall of Fame, three more are locks, and maybe three to four others could get there one day), but also sometimes rookies benefitted from just debuting at the right time. It’s pretty hard to completely forget about someone who won an MVP or Cy Young, but extremely likely that you’ll go to your grave without any memories of the A’s closer in 2009.
This quiz asks you to name the last 30 winners of the American League Rookie of the Year. 30 years is a long time, long enough ago that young people were still going by Bob, Marty, Chuck, and Pat, and the Brewers were in the American League. Oakland checks in with the most winners (four), while Baltimore and Cleveland are the only teams with zero.