The Sophomore of the Year Award

January 23, 2013 by Matt Nadel · Leave a Comment

Hey baseball fans!

Today’s blog is about a very interesting award that was only around in the 1950s. It isn’t really that well-known, but if you read my Frank Malzone interview , you should know that he won the Sophomore of the Year Award.

The Sophomore of the Year Award was created in 1953. It was awarded to the best sophomore in each league. In the ten years of its existence, six Hall of Famers were given the award: Eddie Mathews , Al Kaline , Ernie Banks , Frank Robinson , Orlando Cepeda and Ron Santo . Another player famous for winning the Sophomore of the Year Award was (as I implied before) Frank Malzone . Among others to win the award that you might be familiar with are Herb Score and Willie Davis . There are four players who won the Rookie of the Year as well as the Sophomore of the Year: Harvey Kuenn , Score, Robinson and Cepeda. Sadly, the award was discontinued starting with the 1963 season.

So, what can we learn from this? Some things should be remembered even though they aren’t here anymore. Do you know who Old Hoss Radbourn is? You probably don’t (unless you checked out my post about the greatest pitchers you’ve never heard of ). So, remember, just because you don’t know something, doesn’t mean it wasn’t great.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks for reading!

Matt Nadel is a 13 year old baseball history kid blogger from Springfield, NJ who writes two baseball blogs under the name, Baseball with Matt. Matt started his original blog back in April 2012 when he saw that a lot of his friends didn’t know anything about baseball history and he thought that a blog would be a fun way to educate kids and adults about baseball history. After posting nearly 85 times, he was introduced to John Thorn, the official historian for MLB, and John liked Matt’s blog and arranged for Matt to have his own Pro Blog on MLB , making Matt the youngest Pro blogger on MLB.com. You can also follow Matt on Twitter @BaseballwMatt. Baseball with Matt is a member of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.

Filed under General · Tagged with Al Kaline , baseball , Baseball History , Frank Malzone , Frank Robinson , Orlando Cepeda , Ron Santo , sophomore of the year award

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