FanSided MLB 2012 Awards: AL Rookie of the Year: Mike Trout

For many fans, the end-of-season player awards are one of the biggest highlights of the long MLB offseason. There’s just one problem: the most deserving players don’t always win. Though the BBWAA generally does a better job with the MVP and the Cy Young than with, say, the Hall of Fame, their picks for the coveted hardware are often questionable, if not dumbfounding.

So at FanSided, we decided to put our money where our collective mouth is. At the end of the 2012 MLB season, 52 FanSided writers representing 28 different sites from around the MLB network cast their ballots for Most Valuable Player, Cy Young, Manager of the Year, and Rookie of the Year. Over the next two weeks we’ll be releasing the results of our voting—starting today with the American League Rookie of the Year award.

A couple notes on the voting: Balloting opened on October 1 (when each team had three games left to play) and closed on October 5 before the first playoff game stared. Each voter named three players on his or her ballot, with votes scored on a 5-3-1 basis.

Without further ado, here are the results:

It almost wasn’t worth making a chart for this. Fifty FanSided writers cast ballots for this race, and Angels outfielder Mike Trout was ranked first on every single one. Yoenis Cespedes comes in second while Yu Darvish takes home the bronze. Jarrod Parker comes in fourth, Matt Moore and Wei-Yin Chen tie for fifth, Will Middlebrooks places seventh, and Chis Carter, Scott Diamond, Felix Doubront, Tommy Milone, Jesus Montero, and Tom Wilhelmsen all tied for eighth.

What’s striking is just how clear-cut this race was. Beyond our unanimous support for Trout, Cespedes, Darvish and Parker were the only candidates to be named on more than two ballots. Of the 450 total points allotted, the top four candidates combined for 434 of them.

What do you think? Did we make the right choice?