Five Cubs were named “finalists” for 2025 Rawlings Gold Gloves, announced Wednesday morning.
I put “finalists” in quotes because there’s not another election after this announcement. The three players revealed
today for each position in each league are simply the top three vote-getters in voting that was completed before the season ended. The winners will be announced in a one-hour show on ESPN Sunday, Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. CT.
Pete Crow-Armstrong, Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner, Matt Shaw, Carson Kelly and Matthew Boyd are the Cubs finalists.
Happ has won three Gold Gloves and should be a favorite to win a fourth. Hoerner was a Gold Glove winner in 2023 and could very well win another one this year.
PCA should not only win his first Gold Glove, he should be a strong candidate for the Platinum Glove, given to the overall best fielder in MLB.
Neither Boyd nor Kelly has previously won a Gold Glove. Boyd set a Cubs franchise record for pickoffs this year and led MLB with 11. The Cubs staff led MLB with 27 pickoffs.
Shaw played very good defense at third base in his first full MLB season, though some of the defensive metrics don’t acknowledge that.
To determine the winners of the 18 defensive position Gold Glove Awards, each team’s manager and up to six coaches on his staff vote from a pool of qualified players in their League and cannot vote for players from their own team. In 2013, Rawlings added the SABR Defensive Index™ (SDI) to the Rawlings Gold Glove Award selection process, which comprises approximately 25 percent of the overall selection total, with the managers’ and coaches’ votes continuing to carry the majority.
Congratulations to the Cubs finalists and we look forward to some of them being awarded Gold Gloves on the ESPN show next month.
