Sal Stewart is your 2026 National League Rookie of the Year, and the voters got it wrong. Carson Benge had the better season, and 20 of the 30 writers who filled out a first-place ballot decided that didn't matter.
Start with the result, because it wasn't close on paper. Stewart took 20 of 30 first-place votes and was the only rookie in the NL field to land in the top five on every ballot, finishing with 170 points to Benge's 107 and JJ Wetherholt's 99. That's a landslide, and it's built almost entirely on two numbers: 32 home runs and 112 RBI.
Those two numbers are shaped as much by playing time and lineup spot as by hitting. RBI depend on who's on base in front of you and how many at-bats you get. Stewart led NL rookies in plate appearances and played a full season, so the counting stats piled up. He hit .263/.330/.457, a good year, but a worse one than the guy who finished second.
Benge, the Mets' rookie right fielder, hit .282/.346/.430 with 20 home runs and 22 steals. His average and on-base numbers were better than Stewart's, and his wRC+ topped Stewart's too, 118 to 112. By win value it isn't close: Benge finished around 4.3 WAR, more than double Stewart's roughly 2.0, a number dragged down by defense that graded out badly at first base. A ballot sorted by WAR would have started with Wetherholt, then Benge, and only reached Stewart well down the list. Strip away the homers and the RBI and Benge's season is clearly the better one. It finished a distant second anyway.
The case for Stewart is real. He hit 32 home runs, far more than any other NL rookie, and drove in nearly 40 more runs than anyone else in the class while playing every day. If you believe power and durability are the point of this award, Stewart is your guy, and plenty of voters clearly agree. It's the wrong read. The same electorate that keeps telling us it values on-base skill and all-around value looked at a player who beat Stewart in both and ranked him first anyway on 20 ballots.
This isn't new. In 2016, Rick Porcello won the AL Cy Young over Justin Verlander despite trailing him in first-place votes, winning on the point total, 137 to 132, a result a lot of smart people flagged as wrong the moment it landed. The mechanics here are different; Porcello snuck through on points, Stewart won in a rout. But it's the same instinct underneath, voters rewarding the flashier stat line, and it ages the same way.
None of this is on Stewart. He did what a rookie is supposed to do: hit for power, drive in runs, play every day. He's the ninth player in Cincinnati history to win the award, and there's a nice bit of franchise luck in how he got there at all. The pick that became Stewart, No. 32 overall in 2022, came to the Reds as compensation after Nick Castellanos left for Philadelphia in free agency. Castellanos walking out the door bought them a Rookie of the Year. Good for them.
The responsibility sits with the 20 writers who put Stewart first. They had Benge's better average, better wRC+ and better WAR sitting right in front of them, and they voted for the home runs anyway. Nobody got robbed of a ring over it. It's the kind of call that gets quietly re-filed as a mistake a few years from now, once the counting stats stop doing the talking. Carson Benge had the better rookie season. The ballot didn't notice.
