Rutschman finishes as ROY runner-up
Finishing in 2nd place means 24-year-old catcher is credited with full year of MLB service
Much of Adley Rutschman’s Orioles tenure has, in some way, involved being first. He became Mike Elias’ first draftee as Baltimore’s executive vice president and general manager when he was selected with the first pick of 2019’s first round, then developed into a player ranked first among baseball’s top prospects.
But even in finishing second to Seattle Mariners outfielder Julio Rodríguez in American League Rookie of the Year voting,
Rutschman managed another first. By virtue of placing in the top two, the Orioles’ 24-yearold catcher will be credited with a full year of major league service time despite coming weeks short of the requirements for one, becoming the first player to have his career timeline altered thanks to the league’s new collective bargaining agreement. Rutschman is now due to reach free agency after the 2027 season, rather than 2028. He appeared on 28 of 30 ballots, receiving the lone first-place vote that did not go to Rodríguez, 18 votes for second place and nine for third.
During CBA negotiations amid the MLB-enforced lockout, the Major League Baseball Players Association sought to curb service time manipulation, where teams delay calling up top prospects to ensure they finish just short of the requisite 172 days to earn a year of service, thus delaying when those players reach free agency and the salary increases of the arbitration system. The agreed-upon solution was to award well-regarded players who finish in the top two of each league’s Rookie of the Year voting, performed by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, with a full year of service if they didn’t spend enough time in the majors to receive one, while top prospects who begin the year in the majors can earn their organizations extra draft picks by performing well in award voting early in their careers.
Rutschman ended 2022 with 138 days of service time, not reaching the majors
female referees in the men’s World Cup’s 92-year history, with six women among the 129 officials.
Zooming in on the 69 assistant referees, she saw the listing: “NESBITT Kathryn. USA.”
“I just got jaw dropped, stared at it, couldn’t even believe that this was happening,” Nesbitt recalled. “Then I probably jumped around the room for the next 20 minutes.”
Nesbitt prides herself, as a referee or a chemist, in processing the information at her disposal and arriving at the right conclusion. But in calculating her path to a men’s World Cup assignment, she shortchanged herself — by four years, in fact.
“She certainly achieves the highest standard in everything that she does,” said Mark Geiger, a former MLS, Olympic and World Cup referee who serves as the director of senior match officials at the U.S.based Professional Referee Organization. “Because she doesn’t settle for anything. She sets goals for herself and she does everything that she possibly can to achieve those goals, whether it’s in the science field or whether it’s on the soccer field.”
A soccer player in her youth, Nesbitt was a restless 14-year-old sitting through her little brother’s games in Rochester, New York, when she first volunteered to be an assistant referee (commonly known as a linesman). The role typically involves making throw-in, goal kick, corner kick, foul and offside calls, but as a teen volunteer with a familial conflict of interest, Nesbitt was simply asked to wave the flag when the ball went out of bounds and leave the rest to the paid referee.
“Then one of the guys actually asked me, ‘Hey, would you like to make money doing this?’ ” Nesbitt said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ ”
A senior-level figure skater and a volleyball player who competed for St. John Fisher University in Rochester, Nesbitt divided her time among no shortage of athletic exploits. Around the time she was wrapping up her college career, she began serving as a fourth official — a largely administrative role stationed between the two benches — for games involving Rochester’s minor league men’s team. Before long, Nesbitt landed a spot in a now-defunct U.S. Soccer program for fast-tracking top officiating prospects. In 2013, she became an assistant referee for the NWSL. Felisha Mariscal broke through as the first female official in MLS a year later, and Nesbitt made her MLS debut in 2015.
But even as she rose up the ranks, soccer remained a side hustle. After studying chemistry as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh and completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at Michigan, Nesbitt joined the faculty at Towson, a public university in Maryland, in 2017. For the better part of two years, she did some 50 hours of lab research a week. Most Friday nights, Nesbitt would then crawl to the airport through Baltimore rush-hour traffic and hop on a plane — to Los Angeles, Minnesota or wherever else her MLS assignments took her. After officiating a match over the weekend, she’d fly back on Sunday nights and do it all again.
“She managed those competing responsibilities exceptionally well,” said John Sivey, a professor who worked with Nesbitt in Towson’s chemistry department. “I don’t know how she did it, to be very honest, because the demands of both of those careers can be pretty substantial.”
After those long days of lab research, Nesbitt would flip on MLS games or devour film of the teams she’d be officiating that weekend. Deeply understanding each club’s players and tactics allows her to better anticipate the flow of the game, she reasoned, and helps her parlay her strengths in academia to the soccer pitch.
“One of the characteristics that I think strongly overlaps between a very good sports official and a very good analytical chemist is precision,” said Sivey, himself a former high school baseball and softball umpire and basketball referee. “For precision in analytical chemistry, we basically mean: How repeatable or reproducible is a particular experiment? In the sports officiating world, I think that looks a lot like consistency.”
To Geiger, who officiated alongside Nesbitt before retiring as a referee in 2019, that precision is just one of Nesbitt’s strengths. As a 6-foot-tall former college athlete, she has no problem acing refereeing fitness standards designed for men. And Geiger can’t recall seeing her rattled, even in games that threatened to spiral out of the referee crew’s control.
“She not only can analyze what the correct decision should be, but she also knows from a feeling aspect what the best decision for the game would be,” Geiger said. “And they’re not always the same. Sometimes you need to really feel the game and know what the best decision is at that particular moment and what’s going to help the referee group maintain control of the game. She understands that.”
Although MLS recently completed its eighth season using female referees, Nesbitt last year became the first woman to officiate a Concacaf men’s World Cup qualifying game. She remembered getting plenty of stares from players, especially in those first couple of matches. Nesbitt said match coordinators also tended to mistakenly assume she was just the fourth official, there to help with substitutions and timekeeping but not roam the pitch.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned in my career — and this has been in chemistry too, both being very male-heavy areas — is the best way to impress is to do your job well,” Nesbitt said. “But it would always be funny the first time I would do a sprint with one of the players down to the corner flag, and he’d look over and I’d be keeping up with him. I think that had a really big effect just gaining some respect.”
Within months of her first men’s qualifier, Nesbitt had gained enough respect to book her ticket to Qatar. On that May morning when FIFA unveiled the World Cup officials, Sivey went door to door through the Towson chemistry department to excitedly share the news of their former colleague’s new assignment.
Eventually, Nesbitt figures she will hang up her cleats, stash away her flag and return to chemistry. For now, though, she understands her status as a soccer trailblazer — even if hearing that label prompts her to let out an embarrassed groan. As she prepares to make World Cup history, Nesbitt revels, appropriately enough, in the satisfaction that she made the right call back in 2019.
“This was an impossible dream for me, and just being able to witness females at this event now makes this realistic for all women,” Nesbitt said. “Whether it be in refereeing, whether it be in a different sport, whether it be in something completely different — sometimes just having a visual like that can make something actually be real. If I get to play even a small role in that, that’s really cool.”