Earlier today, Cubs catcher Geovany Soto was named NL Rookie of the Year for 2008. In the long history of this award, Soto is the fifth Cub to win the award. Here are the 4 past winners:
1961 Billy Williams
1962 Kenny Hubbs
1989 Jerome Walton
1998 Kerry Wood
The 25 year old Cub catcher had an outstanding season taking over for Jason Kendall, who caught the second half of 2007 for the Cubs. Geo’s season had several highlights including: an inside the park homerun in Houston, an All Star Game start in NYC, he caught Z’s no hitter in Milwaukee against the Astros and that same week hit a three run bomb with two outs in the bottom of the ninth in a Cubs dramatic 12 inning win over the Brewers. Soto played a very important role in getting the Cubs back to the playoffs.
Let’s hope his career path is closer to Billy Williams’ than Hubbs, for any number of reasons…
I have always wondered uncle dave, how different the late 60’s would have been for the cubulas had Hubbs lived. I guess that is one of those unanswered questions. Could Hubbs or Glenn Beckert have played CF? We may have never had the Don Young fiasco.
Billy Williams was an absolute monster at the plate.
Yeah, I often wonder how bad the Cubs’ luck was back then. I mean, nobody’s going to deny that the Cubs lost the Brock trade, but how many folks remember that Ernie Broglio was third in the Cy Young voting a couple of years before he came over, and that he subsequently put up ERA+ numbers of 143 and 120? Or that neither Williams nor Brock could really play anything but left field, and you can make a (very) compelling argument that Williams was a better player?
Nah, the Cubs just ‘lost’ the trade. I’ve had a lifetime of Cardinal fans try to hang that on my neck as our equivalent of the Ruth trade. Whatever.
Hubbs would have hit his prime right about when the Cubs got their great pitching staffs in line in the late 60s. Kid was only 20 in ‘62 when he won the ROY. Add that to a team that had 90+ pythagorean wins three times around the turn of that decade (including a -10 in 1970) and they may just have had enough to go over the top.
I wasn’t alive for any of this, of course, but it would have been nice to have one less thing to be hassled about growing up downstate with all them beautiful Redbird fans. I mean, I’ll cop to having worn jorts back in the day, but those cats *wore* jorts. You know.