Sal Stewart is the National League Rookie of the Year, giving the Reds first baseman the top honor after a season built around impact power.
Stewart collected 20 first-place votes and 170 total points to beat out Cardinals second baseman J.J. Wetherholt and Mets right fielder Carson Benge, the other two finalists.
His profile was the classic power bat: not the flashiest all-around line, but one that kept showing up on the scoreboard. He finished eighth in the NL with 32 home runs and second with 112 RBIs, even though his 2.0 bWAR was modest compared with some of the other rookies in the mix.
Benge landed in second with 107 points, and his case was the kind that comes from doing a little bit of everything well. He posted a 118 OPS+, added a +1 DRS, and turned in a 20/20 season while improving as the year moved along.
His arm stood out most of all, and he finished with 10 outfield assists. One of them came on August 17 and was clocked at 103.9 mph.
Wetherholt finished third with 99 points and brought a different kind of résumé to the race. He led all NL rookies with 4.6 bWAR despite producing roughly league-average offense with a .704 OPS and 102 OPS+. His glove carried a huge share of the value, with +25 outs above average and +23 fielding run value, both good for second in the majors behind only Pete Crow-Armstrong.
Milwaukee, meanwhile, came up empty after having a trio of rookies help fuel its title run. Logan Henderson, Cooper Pratt and Luis Lara all played roles for the Brewers, but none made the finalist cut.
Henderson did receive some recognition on the ballot, picking up one second-place vote, one third-place vote and three fifth-place votes. The right-hander finished with 3.3 bWAR, 1.3 more than Stewart, and he never allowed more than three runs in any start during the regular season.
The NL result followed a run of recent Brewers finalists: Jackson Chourio was among the league’s three finalists in 2024 when Paul Skenes won, and Caleb Durbin made it back-to-back years with a Brewers finalist in 2025 when Drake Baldwin took the award.
In the American League, Kevin McGonigle won in a landslide, taking 28 of 30 first-place votes. In his first season as a big-leaguer, McGonigle led the entire AL with 7.1 bWAR, a number that underscored just how quickly he made his mark.
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