Tyler O'Neill Wins MLBPA's AL Comeback Player of the Year Award

On Saturday, the Major League Baseball Players Association announced the winners of its 2024 Players Choice Awards Comeback Players of the Year. The Red Sox organization must be bursting with pride, as both winners were on the team’s payroll. Tyler O’Neill won in the American League and Chris Sale won in the National League. Both players bounced back from injury-shortened 2023 seasons; O’Neill led the Red Sox in homers, while the Red Sox paid Sale $17 million to win the NL’s pitching Triple Crown and single-handedly drag the injury-riddled Atlanta Braves into the playoffs.

To be clear, although the MLBPA’s award is prestigious – and maybe even more meaningful to its winners, as it’s voted on by their peers – it is different from MLB’s official Comeback Player of the Year Awards. Those awards are voted on by the 30 MLB.com beat writers, and the winners will be announced on November 14. To make matters even more confusing, The Sporting News has been handing out its own Comeback Player of the Year Award since 1965. The Sporting News gave its NL award to Sale and its AL award to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who bounced back from a 2023 season in which he suffered from a debilitating case of bad BABIP luck.

Jokes aside, the award is a great honor for O’Neill, who has battled injuries throughout his entire career. O’Neill has never surpassed 138 games in a season, and in 2023, foot and lower back strains hampered his performance and limited him to just 72 games. Even in his award-winning 2024 season, O’Neill played in just 113 games thanks to a leg infection, right knee inflammation, and a concussion. When he was on the field, though, he was a force. His 31 home runs led the team and tied for 10th in the AL (all nine of the players ahead of him made at least 140 more plate appearances). O’Neill slashed .241/.336/.511 for a 131 wRC+, and according to Baseball Prospectus, he was worth 3.8 wins above replacement. Both by performance and by sheer number of games played, this was the second-best season of the Canadian slugger’s career. The award is also a boon for O’Neill as he enters free agency, and he has signaled that he is open to returning to Boston in 2025.

The MLBPA announced three finalists for the AL award last week: O’Neill, Chad Green, and Garrett Crochet. Crochet, who missed the entire 2022 season due to Tommy John surgery and was limited to 13 starts in 2023 by shoulder inflammation, is still the likely favorite for the MLB award. In 2024, he was one of the best and most consistent pitchers in baseball, making 32 starts and running a 3.29 ERA and 2.84 FIP. The MLBPA announced the award on Twitter in a promotional video with quotes from O’Neill and players around the league. “I wanted to be on the field and competing and staying in uniform with my fellow teammates and being out there and grinding every day,” said O’Neill. “Just trying to show up, you know, I want to make a good impression, especially with my new club in Boston here this year….to be recognized for that and all the hard effort, you know, it really means a lot. It’s really good for my confidence.”

The Red Sox also boast one of 2023’s winners in Liam Hendriks. Hendriks was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in January 2023, underwent chemotherapy and immunotherapy, and returned to pitch for the White Sox on May 29. He won the MLB and the MLBPA awards, but not the Sporting News award, because apparently there’s just no pleasing some people. As Hendriks missed the entire 2024 season to Tommy John Surgery, he looks like an early favorite to take the award home for the Red Sox in 2024.