This year's race for the Ben McDonald Award seems to have everything for everyone. If you like strikeouts, you'll love this year's field. If you like workhorse starters that put up W's and log innings, there's that too. Even relievers had extraordinary seasons.
Liam Hendriks ran away with the 2021 Eck Award, winning by one of the widest margins in recent memory and quietly putting together one of the highest Eck's scores in almost a decade.
Trevor Bauer walked 6 but struck out 12, gave up 1 run but not hits as Blue Ridge defeated Hopatcong, 5-1 at home on Thursday night for the second no-hitter in DMBL this season, only weeks after the first.
On the same night that Sardine City's Kwang Hyun Kim notched his league-leading 15th win (15-3) and Race Point's Griffin Canning lost his league-high 15th (0-15), Dinelson Lamet threw the first no-hitter for Poovey Farms, blanking Hopatcong 15-0 on Thursday.
Rafael Devers of Arkansas went 5-for-5 and hit for the cycle on Friday night, the 2nd time in franchise history and the first in the DMBL since 2017.
Now that we've taken our trip down memory lane through the 1st Round of the 2011 DMBL draft, let's have a laugh and cry about some of the other studs and quirky picks a decade later.
Drafts are often graded almost immediately but everyone knows you can't truly grade a draft completely for a few years. So, in honor of the 2021 draft on Saturday, here's a look back at the 2011 DMBL draft.
Christian Yelich secured a triple crown of sorts in 2020, leading the league in batting, on-base percentage and slugging, along with a number of other categories. The offensive explosion in his seventh DMBL season was enough to win the 2020 Kevin Mitchell Award as the league's top batter, comfortably outdistancing teammate Cody Bellinger.
Before this past season, Lance Lynn had registered double-digit losses in five of his six DMBL seasons, including a brutal 15-43 record over three years. The four-time draftee broke out in 2020 after latching on with Sardine City, going 24-6 to help the Straphangers to a 104-win campaign and the commissioner's cup.
Pete Alonso slugged 60 home runs and drove in a league-high 139 RBI on his way to the Pat Listach Award, honoring the DMBL's top rookie. It's a league-record fourth Listach Award for the Hillsborough franchise.
In some years, relievers play a huge part, saving gobs of games or logging massive innings -- and strikeouts -- coming out of the bullpen. This was not necessarily one of those seasons.