This year's MLB Rookies of the Year show why teams playing their best young players benefits everyone

The success this season of newly crowned Rookies of the Year Corbin Carroll and Gunnar Henderson had a pretty obvious benefit for their respective teams: It made the teams better at winning baseball games.

That both Carroll’s Arizona Diamondbacks and Henderson’s Baltimore Orioles snapped brief postseason droughts in those players’ first full seasons is not a coincidence. Among all position players, Carroll was ninth and Henderson 25th in the comprehensive fWAR. In the best rookie class Major League Baseball has seen since 1900, they were first and second.

In fact, Carroll’s production — he was a 6.0-win player in the regular season — accounted for 30% of the D-backs’ overall position player WAR this season. That’s a metric that can be misleading sometimes — the best player on the Colorado Rockies was worth more than 300% of his team’s total WAR because so many of the hitters had negative values — but among teams that made the postseason, Carroll’s 30% was second only to Luis Arraez of the Miami Marlins (34%) for an individual player’s outsized contribution. Even though he was further down the list, Henderson’s 4.6 WAR was 19.9% of the Orioles’ position player value.

Both teams have ample reason to appreciate every win the wunderkinds were responsible for this season. The Orioles’ 101 wins were a hell of a turnaround for a team that lost 110 games just two years ago and still were just barely enough to finish ahead of the 99-win Tampa Bay Rays in the division to secure a bye through the wild-card round (granted, both teams were ultimately swept by the Texas Rangers, but at least the Orioles were well-rested for the fight. And, hey, Henderson hit .500 in that series.)

Meanwhile, the D-backs finished just one game ahead of the Chicago Cubs for the final wild-card berth and wound up winning the National League pennant.

The point is, every win — whether it comes in April or in August — counts when you’re chasing a spot in the playoffs. And from Opening Day through ultimately getting eliminated in the postseason, Carroll and Henderson made their teams better. Fielding future Rookie of the Year winners was a reward in and of itself.

And now, with the awards officially won, the Orioles and D-backs get an additional advantage. It’s either an example of the most recent collective bargaining agreement working or of teams figuring out how to make the new policies work for their purposes.

Baseball players are under team control — meaning their salaries are either pre-set or the result of an artificially extremely limited negotiation — for the first six seasons of their big-league careers. After that, they’re free to leave for the highest bidder. And the best players suddenly get much much more expensive. Historically, this has inspired teams to keep their most promising prospects in the minor leagues at the start of what could be their first season just long enough for it to not qualify as a full year of service time. It’s an explicitly illegal process that can be hard to prove — even in egregious cases such as that of Kris Bryant.

And so, as part of the most recent collective bargaining agreement that came out of an arduous, 100-day lockout last year, MLB and the players' association implemented a series of policies designed to disincentivize service time manipulation, with carrots for the teams and compensation for the players.

For the players, a top-two finish in Rookie of the Year earns them a year of service regardless of how many games they played. Last season, Orioles star catcher Adley Rutschman was the beneficiary of this policy after he missed the early part of the season due to injury — that saved the Orioles from scrutiny around how they handled his call-up — but finished second in the award voting. On the flip side, teams that do put their top prospects on the Opening Day roster earn a bonus draft pick after the first round if that player goes on to win Rookie of the Year or finish top-three in MVP voting or top-three in Cy Young voting at any point before reaching arbitration.

Carroll and Henderson winning this year's awards means their teams benefit from that policy. But how exactly it impacted their career trajectories is a little tricky to parse. Both players debuted at the end of last season, each playing just more than 30 games while retaining their rookie eligibility.

Henderson debuted on the last day of August for an Orioles team that looked poised to contend a year ahead of schedule. By the time he got called up, the front office had already signaled by selling at the trade deadline that they were content to wait until 2023. Still, the team was just three games back in the wild-card race at the time. By then, Henderson had played 112 games across Double-A and Triple-A to a .946 OPS. Somewhere along the way, he had proven he was ready to contribute to a big-league club if it was truly doing everything it could to make the postseason. But the front office didn’t need to field the best team possible at the time, and had he played 60 big-league games, Henderson would no longer qualify in 2023 as a rookie who could garner an extra draft pick for his team.

So instead, the Orioles gave him just enough experience to go into this season with a good shot at Rookie of the Year. And now they’re reaping the results of that calculation.

Carroll was called up at the end of August for a D-backs team that was already well out of the running. Even with the success he had in the minors to that point, there wasn’t as much of an imperative to have him in the majors. Still, the calculation around a cup of coffee applies. Carroll could've won Rookie of the Year this season even without an extra month of major-league experience. And the contract extension he signed in spring training likely ensured that he would've been on the Opening Day roster in 2023. But probably part of the value the team projected for him when considering committing $111 million to a first-year player was the chance that he could also net them a high-level draft pick.

That doesn’t mean the policy has backfired. Putting team, player and fan interest in alignment is a success — and a rare one at that. Give teams an attractive incentive such as a draft pick, and they’ll figure out a way to give themselves the best chance of obtaining it.

A better testament to the new CBA inspiring a holistic shift in service time came back in March as spring training was winding down. Announcements that the Yankees’ young shortstop, Anthony Volpe, and the Cardinals’ Jordan Walker would crack their teams’ Opening Day rosters at just 21 and 20 years old, respectively, were seen as a triumph for the new CBA. That’s true even after both players’ inconsistent rookie seasons accompanied their teams’ disappointing years. The point of the policies is to change behavior; the extra draft pick is merely a mechanism for doing so.

Young players are better than ever, even as MLB gets increasingly advanced. Perhaps they would be pushing their way onto big-league rosters regardless of the CBA. Certainly, their own personal progress deserves the bulk of the credit. If hard-won service time protections are contributing to seeing more of these talented players sooner, that’s something to celebrate. But the real reward remains — and should prove sufficiently motivating for well-intentioned teams — the possibility that a rookie could be a catalyst or key contributor on the field.

Put the best players available on the roster, and the team could win 101 games in a historically tough division — or go all the way to the World Series after no one saw them coming. Carroll and Henderson are true testaments to that.