Rookie of the Year winners by year

Rookie of the Year entries in this database begin in 1947. There are 158 of them through 2025. A season before 1947 has no winner listed here because the award did not exist, not because the year was skipped — and no Negro Leagues season has one either, since Black baseball had none of these awards at all. Where a year in the list below is empty, the record itself is empty.

For 2 of those years there is one winner, not one per league. The award was given across both leagues at once in that period rather than separately in the American and the National, so a single name on those rows is the complete record for the year. Rows marked for both leagues are that case; rows naming one league are the later arrangement.

2 years ended in a tie. Two players share the award in that case and both are listed. A leaderboard that assumes one winner per league per year quietly drops one of them, so this one does not assume it.

Every name links to that player's career. Most open a full page of season lines; the rest open a summary screen built from the same files on demand. Seasons, awards and league rankings are identical on either address.

Nothing on this page is calculated. Every name here comes straight from the source database, unlike the leaderboards elsewhere on this site, which are arithmetic we do on the season lines published here. The site keeps the two apart on purpose: an award is something somebody else decided and recorded, and a ranking is our reading of the files. Drawing them the same way would let our estimates borrow the authority of the record.

Each season links back to the year it belongs to. That page carries the rest of the story — who led each league in every category worth ranking that season, how long the schedule was, and what the qualifying line came to. An award tells you who a vote picked; the leaderboard tells you what happened on the field, and they disagree more often than either side likes to admit.