The odd part about Acuna and Ohtani is that there were, if I recall correctly, some prolonged lulls in their rookie seasons, around May or June, where they either were injured or just weren't playing up in the majors, that I thought would be taken into account by voters. However, enough of a case couldn't be made for either Andujar or Torres, which is fair, and apparently not enough people voted for Juan Soto, who would have been my ROY pick in the NL.
Still, looking at these two, I'm not seeing a ton of fluke-ish quality from either. I measure that by simply looking at Chris Coghlan's Rookie season, and going 'did they do better than that?' This game can be played with Bob Hamelin or Joe Charboneau as well, depending on age. You just look at everything they accomplished, and go 'are they just lucky? Or can they do some more of that next year?' And I look at both Ronald Acuna and Shohei Ohtani, and I think 'yeah, they can stick around for a bit'. I do think the Angels are going to figure out that keeping Ohtani at DH might be the better idea than having him pitch and risk injury (and this will have to be the case for 2019), but Acuna, along with Albies, could be a perennial star in Atlanta.
Overall, no complaints. These are the rookies of the year.
Tomorrow...we break for Manager awards, and then Wednesday we get our Cy Youngs.
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