5 Dodgers Receive Rookie of the Year Votes in Early Experts Poll

The Los Angeles Dodgers have collected more Rookie of the Year awards than any major league franchise, with 18. No Dodgers rookie is the favorite to win the National League award this year, but it's too early to count them all out.

Five Dodgers rookies — Roki Sasaki, Hyeseong Kim, Ben Casparius, Jack Dreyer and Dalton Rushing — received votes in MLB.com's staff poll of the award favorites in each league.

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Sasaki has gotten off to a slow start in his first season since leaving Japan. Before going on the 15-day injured list with a shoulder injury, the right-hander was 1-1 with a 4.72 ERA in eight starts. Yet Sasaki managed to garner one first-place vote in the MLB.com poll.

The favorite is Atlanta Braves pitcher A.J. Smith-Shawver, according to MLB.com, but the lone vote for Sasaki (and the four other Dodgers who are in the conversation) speaks to the relative weakness among this year's crop.

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Smith-Shawver is 3-2 with a 2.33 ERA in seven starts. He'll be hard to catch in the Rookie of the Year award voting if he can maintain that pace, but the 22-year-old righty could have some competition.

Kim, 26, did not arrive with nearly the same degree of hype as Sasaki when the Dodgers signed him to a three-year, $12.5 million contract in January. He did not even make the Dodgers' major league roster out of spring training.

But a torrid stretch of hitting, combined with the injuries to Tommy Edman and Teoscar Hernández, gave Kim a long runway to playing time in recent weeks. When Edman was activated from the injured list Sunday, it was veteran Chris Taylor — not Kim — who lost his roster spot.

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Kim is hitting .378 with a .410 on-base percentage and .897 OPS in 37 at-bats. He won't maintain those numbers over a full season, but manager Dave Roberts has been unafraid to plug the rookie in to the bottom of the lineup so long as he does.

Casparius and Dreyer have taken turns opening and relieving this season with encouraging results. Dreyer is 2-2 with a 3.38 ERA. Casparius is 4-0 with a 3.23 ERA. They will likely be underdogs in the Rookie of the Year race unless either moves into the starting rotation, or takes over a high-leverage relief role.

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Rushing is perhaps the longest of the Rookie of the Year longshots. His role as a backup catcher and a left-handed bench bat seems unlikely to yield the plate appearances necessary to win the award.

Regardless of how the voting goes in November, it's encouraging to see so many rookies making the most of their early playing time. That bodes well for the Dodgers in the long run.

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