The Rookie of the Year is about performance, not potential.
Geovany Soto can finish ahead of Joey Votto, and Chris Coghlan can win in a year when Andrew McCutchen was also eligible. It happens.
But here's what is happening a lot more often in recent years: The kid who wins the Rookie of the Year jumps on the fast track to winning a Most Valuable Player Award.
Buster Posey (2010 ROY, 2012 MVP) did it, and so did Mike Trout (2012 ROY, 2014 MVP). Ryan Howard (2006) and Dustin Pedroia (2008) won the MVP the year after winning the Rookie of the Year. Justin Verlander (2006 ROY, 2011 MVP) and Albert Pujols (2001 ROY, 2005 MVP) took a little longer.
With Bryce Harper (2012 ROY) expected to become the National League MVP this week, eight of the last 22 MVPs will have been ex-ROYs (and if Trout pulls an upset over Josh Donaldson in the American League, it'll be nine out of 22).
That's how it works when performance and potential come together. No one will be surprised if that's how it ends up working for Kris Bryant.
Bryant will be named the National League's 2015 Rookie of the Year on Monday night, and the vote isn't expected to be particularly close. Matt Duffy of the San Francisco Giants and Jung Ho Kang of the Pittsburgh Pirates are the other two finalists, and in a less crowded year for talented rookies, either one would have been a deserving winner.
Perhaps one of them will even be an MVP one day, but if you had to pick one NL rookie who might follow the Posey/Howard/Pedroia track, you'd take Bryant, the power-hitting third baseman from the Chicago Cubs.
"Start naming the best third basemen in baseball, and you don't get very far before you take him," one rival scout said over the weekend. "The same way we used to argue Harper and Trout, we'll be arguing Bryant and [Manny] Machado at third base."
The similarity with those guys is that Bryant entered his rookie season carrying huge expectations and then lived up to them. Baseball America had Bryant as the best prospect in the game last winter, just as Harper was in 2012 (with Trout not far behind him). Everyone had Bryant as a preseason top rookie pick, especially after he hit nine home runs in just 40 at-bats in spring training.
Remember, the argument in March wasn't whether Bryant was ready for the major leagues, but rather whether it was within the Cubs' rights to have him begin the season in the minors and thus push his free agency back by a year. They did send him back to Triple-A Iowa—for all of seven games.
Bryant was in Chicago by the middle of April, with all eyes on him. He wasn't great right from the start (it took 21 games before he hit his first home run), and he wasn't great right through to the finish (he hit .168 in July).
But by the end of the season, he had a Cubs rookie record for home runs (26, one more than 1961 ROY Billy Williams). In fact, the Cubs figured out that Bryant's combination of 26 homers, 99 RBI, 31 doubles, 87 runs and 77 walks matched only one rookie in major league history: Ted Williams in 1939.
And when the season was over and the Bill James Handbook came out with its projections for 2016 (per Bleed Cubbie Blue), the Bryant numbers were stunning: 37 home runs, 120 RBI, 112 runs scored, 17 steals and a .969 OPS.
The only players to do that over the last decade were Alex Rodriguez in 2005 and 2007 (MVP both years) and Matt Kemp in 2011 (probably should have been MVP).
The point, whether Bryant does it next year or not, is that you could realistically see him doing it sometime. Remember, he's still just 23.
He's already a star. Just last week, the Chicago Tribune did a story on his marketing opportunities. The headline asked whether Bryant wants "to be the next LeBron." Already, according to Danny Ecker of Crain's Chicago Business, a jersey Bryant wore in the division series against the Cardinals sold for $15,512.76 in an online auction.
Now he's going to be the Rookie of the Year. And he's just getting started.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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