Through the first half of the season, the Red Sox have three guys who, if they had identical second halves, would be very serious contenders for AL Rookie of the Year.  They are SP Daisuke Matsuzaka (10-5, 3.53, 1.195 WHIP), RP Hideki Okajima (2-0, 0.88, 0.780 WHIP), and 2B Dustin Pedroia (.316 BA, .398 OBP, 20 2B, 33 R and 25RBI, batting mainly from the 8th or 9th spot all year).

Matsuzaka has performed very closely in line with expectations, mainly very similar to his performance in Japan. Some of his early struggles and reversals were predicted, and again as predicted he has evened out (into a dominant pitcher) when the weather got warm.

Okajima has been a major surprise. His performance so far has been far, far better than anything he ever did in Japan (and that's saying something, because his stats in Japan were excellent.) He's on pace to have perhaps the best ever season for a non-closing reliever. And you know what his salary is? Just $1.2 million. Theo Epstein comes up aces (no pun intended) on this one.

Pedroia has also been a bit of a surprise. He had been a good hitter in the minors but, especially after a dreadful September call-up last year, was expected to simply hit enough to hold down the starting job. The thinking was that he'd hit enough to keep Alex Cora on the bench as a backup. (As it turns out, Cora is going to have to fill in for Julio Lugo, who has fallen off the face of the baseball earth this year.)

Anyway, all of this was a long-winded way of saying that all three of these guys are going to get a ton of votes for Rookie of the Year. Often, when a team has multiple candidates for the major awards, they hurt each other because they split up votes. (See, for example, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz both losing out on AL MVP in recent deserving years because they split the votes. For example, this is why A-rod won the MVP in 2005.)

I was trying to remember the last time a team had multiple players rank highly in the Rookie of the Year voting. The only example that popped into my head was in the 1989 NL voting:

                           1st           Max       |       Season Results 
 Rk Name             Team Place Points Points Share|   AB  H  HR   BA    OPS  SB|  W-L   IP  ERA   WHIP  SO SV
+--+----------------+----+-----+------+------+-----+-----+---+--+-----+-----+---+------+---+-----+-----+---+--+
  1 Jerome Walton     CHC   22    116    120  0.97 |  475 139  5  .293  .720  24|                            
  2 Dwight Smith      CHC    2     68    120  0.57 |  343 111  9  .324  .875   9|                            
  3 Gregg Jefferies   NYM    0     18    120  0.15 |  508 131 12  .258  .706  21|                            
  4 Derek Lilliquist  ATL    0      6    120  0.05 |   63  12  0  .190  .396   0|  8-10 166  3.97  1.42  79   
  5 Andy Benes        SDP    0      3    120  0.02 |   24   6  1  .250  .625   0|  6-3   67  3.51  1.23  66   
  5 Charlie Hayes     TOT    0      3    120  0.02 | +304  78  8  .257  .671   3|                            
  7 Greg Harris       SDP    0      2    120  0.02 |   19   1  0  .053  .196   0|  8-9  135  2.60  1.17 106  6

Here, Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith (both of the Cubs) finished 1-2 in the voting. (Incidentally, both then proceeded to have mainly forgettable major league careers.)

Can you think of any other examples of multiple players from one team having getting significant ROY votes?

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