Brewers Boast Four Vote-Getters in 2025 NL Rookie of the Year Balloting

For a blink or two during midsummer, it looked like the Brewers would have to swallow the slightly bitter pill of a lost year of team control over Jacob Misiorowski. That would have been ok, on balance, because the mechanism by which it menaced them was the new rule whereby a player who finishes first or second in the Rookie of the Year balloting at the end of each season gets a full year of service time for that year, even if they were called up too late to earn that much service time in the usual way. Misiorowski was looking so good, just a month after he debuted, that he made the All-Star team, and he seemed to have the inside track on winning the award and earning that boost to his earning power.

The regular season ended very unevenly for Misiorowski, though, and he became an afterthought in Rookie of the Year voting. He made such a thrilling resurgence in the playoffs that it almost feels like that was the best-case scenario: he remains a potential ace for the Crew beginning in 2026, but they won't lose him via free agency after 2030. Even better, though, they had a whopping four players receive Rookie of the Year votes this season, and while Caleb Durbin was the highest finisher (third) when the winners of each league's newcomer award were announced Monday night, the Brewers feel very much like a collective winner.

Durbin finished third, so he, too, missed out on that extra service time via special incentive. Isaac Collins finished right on Durbin's heels, in fourth. Chad Patrick (who had a semi-star turn of his own in October) appeared on six ballots and finished seventh, while Misiorowski drew just one fourth-place vote. Relatively little was at stake, from the Brewers' perspective, in the finishing places of Durbin and Collins. Durbin will turn 26 in February, and his skill set isn't the kind that normally prompts a team to extend a player into their early or mid-30s. The Crew wouldn't have minded losing the sixth year of service on Durbin, and Collins exceeded one year of service this year, anyway. He's 28 years old, so it's even less likely that he'll be a Brewers regular in the 2030s than it is with Durbin. 

Far more important, rather, is the fact that the Crew had four fairly serious candidates for this award, in a year when they weren't even going out of their way to push prospects into vacant roles. The long-term viability of what is already a regional dynasty hinges on the Brewers' ability to keep getting great production from young, cheap players, and they did that as well as ever in 2025.

Next season, Misiorowski and Patrick figure to play much larger roles for them. It's less clear that the same will be true of Durbin and/or Collins. Better health or a more active winter could displace each of them, not from the roster (in all likelihood) but from the everyday lineup. By the end of the year, each looked a bit worn down by their long season of duty, and the positions they each play are the obvious places where the Brewers have paths to upgrades this offseason. They were fine players, but arguably the worst regulars on a very, very good team.

Milwaukee figures to have better luck wheh the Manager of the Year Award is announced Tuesday night. In the meantime, the team can savor the pleasure of this four-piece affirmation of their scouting and player development, and be glad that they didn't lose any years of team control along the way.