Kevin McGonigle got his name called first, and about a minute later Sal Stewart got his. That is how baseball's awards week opened Monday night, with the Detroit Tigers shortstop taking American League Rookie of the Year and the Cincinnati Reds first baseman following him up for the National League trophy. Same age, 22 and 22. Different coasts of the sport, same stage, same night.
The timing is the whole story here. MLB stacks its hardware announcements into one televised week every November, and the rookies always go first, the appetizer before the Cy Youngs and MVPs roll out later in the week. McGonigle and Stewart earning their awards back to back was a scheduling quirk, not a coincidence of talent, but it made for a tidy split screen: a middle infielder who held down short for a rebuilding Tigers club standing next to a corner bat who anchored the middle of a young Reds lineup.
What happens next for both of them is the more interesting question than the plaque itself. Rookie of the Year is a nice line on a resume, but it is also a marker, not a guarantee. The history of the award is littered with players who peaked the year they won it and plenty who used it as a launching pad. The league does not hand out a second trophy for proving the first one wasn't a fluke, that part is on them, starting next spring.
checked the almanac: the Rookie of the Year award itself dates back to 1947, when Jackie Robinson won the very first one as a Brooklyn Dodger, before the league even bothered to split it into separate American and National League honors. Eighty years later, it is still the award that tells you the least about what comes after, and the most about who just arrived.
For now, McGonigle and Stewart are the answer to a trivia question that will get asked for years: who swept rookie of the year the same November. What they do with their second seasons in Detroit and Cincinnati is the part nobody hands out in a ceremony.
