Awards season always comes with a little blind spot. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America has already settled on its three finalists for each of the five major honors - Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year, Relief Pitcher of the Year, Cy Young and MVP - but there are still a few names that deserve a nod even if they missed the cut.
The finalists are all worthy. Still, once the winners are announced next week and the full vote totals come out, it’ll be worth remembering the players and managers who were left just outside the spotlight. Here’s one snub in each category that stands out.
TJ Rumfield belongs in the Rookie of the Year conversation for the Rockies, even with the usual caveat that playing in Colorado can boost offensive numbers at home. Rumfield still put together a season that’s hard to brush aside.
He led the National League with a .390 OBP, and that matters. Getting on base is the point, after all, and he did it better than anyone else in the league.
What makes the season even more striking is that Rumfield is the first rookie in 100 years to lead his league in OBP. And before anyone points to the altitude, his road OBP was actually higher than his home mark, .395 to .390. That’s a pretty strong case for a rookie who should have gotten more finalist love.
In the Manager of the Year race, Oliver Marmol of the Cardinals is the name that jumps out. The Cardinals finished fourth and won one fewer game in 2026 than they did in 2025, so the surface-level argument against him is easy enough to make. But that leaves out the bigger picture.
St. Louis spent the offseason trading away Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray, Brendan Donovan and Willson Contreras and made it clear the organization was thinking more about the future than the present.
Even so, the Cardinals stayed in the Wild Card chase all season. Their 9-15 September, after they dealt Dustin May, JoJo Romero and Lars Nootbaar at the Deadline, is what dragged down the final record.
They also managed to keep building for what comes next. Thirteen players made their MLB debuts, including JJ Wetherholt, Joshua Báez and Leo Bernal, who are expected to be mainstays in the lineup for a long time. Add in the progress from Jordan Walker and Alec Burleson, and Marmol’s year looks a lot more impressive than the standings alone suggest.
Josh Hader is the obvious omission in Relief Pitcher of the Year. It’s easy to forget about a six-time All-Star who has spent years being one of the most dominant closers in baseball, but that’s the danger of missing the first two months of the season. Hader didn’t debut until June 2.
After that, though, he was ridiculous. In 45 appearances, he allowed exactly five earned runs.
Five. He finished with a 1.01 ERA over 44 2/3 innings, and even with the limited workload, there’s a real argument that 2026 was the best season of his 10-year career on a pound-for-pound basis.
The Astros may not have been the flashiest team, but Hader was impossible to overlook once he got rolling.
Drew Rasmussen of the Rays is the Cy Young snub worth circling. He wasn’t always front and center nationally during the regular season, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t dealing all year. Rasmussen went 16-5 with a 2.67 ERA in 30 starts and logged 172 innings, the most he has ever thrown in a season.
The Rays were careful with him, often giving him extra days between starts, but he still led the American League in WHIP at 0.91 and K/BB ratio at 5.44. Those are the kinds of numbers that tell you a pitcher was in command from start to finish. He was an ace hiding in plain sight.
And then there’s Kevin McGonigle of the Tigers, who has a strong case for being more than just the obvious Rookie of the Year favorite. He’ll almost certainly take that award, and he deserves it. But he also made a real MVP case, even if that won’t be the result.
McGonigle led the American League in Baseball Reference WAR at 7.1, finished sixth in OBP at .376, and led the league with 707 plate appearances. He handled a premium defensive position well and emerged as the clear face of a Tigers team loaded with young talent. Only Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 and Fred Lynn in 1975 have won both Rookie of the Year and MVP, and McGonigle may be headed toward that kind of company sooner rather than later.
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