Gary Sanchez is the AL Rookie of the Year. Not Michael Fulmer. Gary Sanchez. And it’s not even close.

In an ideal world, there would be one Rookie of the Year for pitching and one for hitting and then this wouldn’t be something to argue and I wouldn’t have to write this story. But this is baseball, where the All-Star Game determines home-field advantage in the World Series, the wild-card game turns a 162-game schedule into a nine-inning game and no one knows for sure what call is going to be made after every review. So complaining about an award that really only benefits the player who wins it, his family, his agent, his bank account and his team’s fans is his team had a bad season seems kind of pointless, unless you fall into one of those categories. For me, I’m a fan of a team that had a bad season and has a player in the AL Rookie of the Year conversation.

When Sanchez got called up for good on Aug. 3, the Yankees were 53-53 and had just given up on the season by trading Andrew Miller, Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman and Ivan Nova. (Ivan Nova really wasn’t part of them giving up, but he was in the majors and still is.) In return, they got an abundance of prospects and Adam Warren back as well as Tyler Clippard in a separate deal. The Yankees traded their best two pitchers, who very well might be the best two relievers in baseball, and their best hitter. They waved the white flag as aggressively as they could and turned to Sanchez to begin the top prospect showcase that Yankees fans had been waited for and what should have been started two or even three years ago. Sanchez gave Yankees fans meaningful baseball up until the final weekend of the season and climbed all the way back into the postseason to at one point trail in the wild-card standings by one game.

This isn’t a knock on Michael Fulmer and it isn’t meant to take away from his season or say he had a bad season. He had a nice season, making 26 starts and going 11-7 with a 3.06 ERA and 1.119 WHIP. Those numbers are solid and good and all that, but they’re not historical like Sanchez’s are.

Sanchez finished the season hitting .299/.376/.657 with 12 doubles, 20 home runs, 42 RBIs and a ridiculous 1.032 OPS. He tied Nomar Mazara for the most home runs by a rookie in the AL in 315 less at-bats, had three multi-home run games and homered in consecutive games seven times. He became the fastest player in history to 20 home runs (along with being the fastest to nearly all of the other home runs totals along the way), hit third in the Yankees’ lineup, forced Brian McCann to the bench and hopefully soon to Atlanta, and did all of this while mostly playing catcher. He made straightaway center at Fenway seem as close as the Pesky Pole, he made the seemingly-impossible-to-hit second deck in left field at Yankee Stadium look like the short porch in right and he turned Safeco Field into Camden Yards with three home runs in 11 at-bats in Seattle. He single-handedly saved the Yankees’ season for two months, turned a lost season into an eventful one with real promise for the future and made every one of his 229 plate appearances must-watch TV.

The idea that Fulmer is more deserving of the award than Sanchez because he was in the majors longer and pitched a “full season” is as ridiculous as someone winning the Cy Young solely based on their wins total or someone winning MVP based on if their team reached the postseason or not. In a game now controlled by analytics, how is it possible that such archaic ways of thinking and reasoning can still be used to decide yearly awards.

There’s a very good chance Sanchez won’t win the award because Fulmer was in the league longer, even if he did only make 26 starts didn’t join the Tigers until one month into the season on April 29. But Joe Girardi said it best (I can’t believe I just said that Joe Girardi said something “best”) when he as nicely and as politically correct as possible said, “I think Fulmer’s had a great year, but if I had a vote, it’d be for Gary,” following Sanchez’s 20th home run in his 185th at-bat. And for someone who has heard nearly every word Girardi has said as manager of the Yankees over the last nine years, he basically said what I said earlier, “Gary Sanchez is the AL Rookie of the Year, and it’s not even close.”

“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.” That’s what Clark Griswold said to himself as he tried to decide whether or not to skinny dip with The Girl in the Ferrari (as if there was anything to decide) and here I am saying the same thing to myself as the Yankees keep winning and keep inching closer to the postseason.

The Yankees weren’t supposed to be here. Not when they were 9-17 on May 5, or 24-28 on June 1, or 44-46 on July 16, or 52-52 at the trade deadline. They weren’t supposed to be here when they traded their closer to the Cubs, or when they traded the best reliever in baseball to the Indians or when they traded their best hitter to the Rangers. They weren’t supposed to be here with the kind of year A-Rod had and Mark Teixeira is having. They weren’t supposed to be here with the kind of year Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury are putting together at the top of the order. They weren’t supposed to be here with Chase Headley and Starlin Castro’s struggles or Brian McCann’s decline in production or all of the wasted at-bats given to Aaron Hicks. They weren’t supposed to be here with the inconsistencies of Michael Pineda and Nathan Eovaldi before his injury and Ivan Nova before he was traded. And they certainly weren’t supposed to be here when they called up three rookies in Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge and Tyler Austin to become everyday players when the three of them had four combined plate appearances (all Sanchez’s) and no hits before Aug. 3. But here they are.

The Yankees have gone 21-13 since they “gave up on the season” and traded their three best assets not named Masahiro Tanaka. They have closed the gap in the division to four games in the loss column and the gap in the wild card to two games in the loss column. They have kept Yankees fans interested and intrigued into the second week of September when Yankees fans were supposed to turn to their NFL teams and start to countdown the days until the NHL and NBA seasons start. In a season in which nearly every preseason concern and question mark didn’t work out the way they did a year ago, the Yankees should have been buried long ago. But despite being a .500 team through 104 games and a team that hasn’t seen a positive run differential since the eighth game of the season, they are still in it.

I have given up on this team countless times this season only to be pulled back in and devastated only to be in on a potential playoff race again and again and again. It’s a vicious cycle that coupled with last season’s one-game playoff loss, the two postseason-less seasons in 2013 and 2014, the way the 2012 season ended and the recent retirements of Number 2, Number 42 and A-Rod has certainly deteriorated my health. Two nights ago, I was ready to be out on this Yankees team once again when Joe Girardi tried to manage the team to a loss with his bullpen decisions, only to have them come back on a Tyler Austin oppositie-field bomb, only to have to Dellin Betances nearly rip my heart out, only to have Blake Parker and Brett Gardner save the season.

Save the season. That’s been my motto all year. Carlos Beltran was the leader of the “Save the Season” campaign along with the Big Three in the bullpen and Didi Gregorius for a while. But with Beltran and two-thirds of the Big Three gone and Didi coming back down to earth somewhat, “Save the Season” has become a team effort. It was all Gary Sanchez for a couple of weeks. It has included Masahiro Tanaka for his last six starts (the Yankees are undefeated over those six starts). Luis Cessa and Bryan Mitchell have contributed, as have Tyler Clippard and Luis Severino. Starlin Castro has been involved when he isn’t swinging at pitches in the other batter’s box and Brian McCann has showed up from time to time. Even Jacoby Ellsbury, The Thief himself, and Chase Headley, The Bum himself, have had their moments. This Yankees team has gone from the most hated in my lifetime to one worth rooting for in a little over a month.

If the Yankees fall short of the postseason now, it will suck, but it won’t be lock-myself-in-my-room-for-the-offseason depressing like it would have been last season if they had (and they almost did). I have grown somewhat immune to bad seasons thanks to 2013 and 2014 and the majority of this one. This was supposed to be a lost season before it started and many times it was nearly finally lost, but each time, the Yankees came storming back. They aren’t in win-now mode the way most of the division is, and making the postseason this year would be a shock, but it would also be a bonus. (That’s a sentence I never envisioned myself writing four years ago.) The Yankees are playing with house money and as long as Joe Girardi doesn’t hit stay on a 16 with the dealer showing a 10 the way he did the other night with his bullpen management, the Yankees can’t lose.

Everyone knew the Yankees were going to do everything possible to sign CC Sabathia after the 2008 season. Once they missed the playoffs for the first time since 1993, they were going to sign him no matter what. So they offered him the most money for any pitcher in history and when he waited and waited for more because it was going to cost a lot to pry him from going home to the West Coast, they offered him even more. They did so because they needed an ace.

For the three seasons before Sabathia became a Yankee, Chien-Ming Wang was the Yankees’ No. 1 starter. Whether or not he was an “ace” was debated each and every start even though he won 19 games in both 2006 and 2007 and had started the Yankees’ only win in the 2006 ALDS against Detroit in Game 1. But in the 2007 ALDS, Wang gave the “not an ace” crowd all the fuel they would need in any debate when he got rocked in Game 1 of the ALDS and again in Game 4 with a chance to send the series back to Cleveland for Game 5.

The following season, Wang’s career would never be the same when in the middle of a five-inning shutout of the Astros, he hurt his foot running the bases. The Yankees were forced to put Darrell Rasner and Sidney Ponson(!) into the rotation for the rest of the season and missed the playoffs and Sabathia got his seven-year contract and $161 million.

To me, Wang was a No. 1, but he wasn’t an ace. When his bowling-bowl sinker wasn’t working, he wasn’t working. He couldn’t adjust on the fly and grind through a start without his best stuff and we saw it on the biggest stage in the 2007 ALDS when he allowed 12 earned runs in 5 2/3 innings over those two disastrous starts. Yes, his 2006 and 2007 seasons were underrated and underappreciated with back-to-back 19-win seasons, but he was given an average of 5.70 runs per start in 2006 (from a team that should have won the World Series) and an average of 6.47 runs per start in 2007. Kei Igawa might have won 19 games in 2007 if he had gotten that type of run support, or if he had actually been on the team and not in Triple-A.

But when it came to the Yankees’ expensive left-hander, it was the opposite. Sabathia and “ace” were synonymous for his first four seasons with the Yankees. From 2009-2012, Sabathia went 74-29 with a 3.22 ERA in the regular season and 7-2 with a 3.50 ERA in the postseason. In 2013, all of those regular-season and postseason innings finally started to catch up with Sabathia, his velocity began to diminish and he went 14-13 with a 4.78 ERA. The Yankees missed the postseason for the first time since they signed Sabathia and that coupled with the Red Sox winning the World Series destroyed the Yankees’ payroll plans. They once again needed an ace, so they turned turned to the free-agent market and gave Masahiro Tanaka and his zero career major league starts a seven-year, $155 million deal, which was nearly identical to Sabathia’s originial Yankees deal.

On Jan. 23, 2014, I wrote The Mystery of Mashiro Tanaka to pump the brakes on everyone who assumed Tanaka’s success in Japan would translate to the majors. With more than two months until Tanaka would actually pitch in a regular-season game, I said:

I’m not ready to give Tanaka the potential “ace” status that so many other people are willing to even without knowing what will happen when he pitches in the majors.

For now, I’ll have to spend the next 10 weeks imagining how Tanaka will pitch for the Yankees because for now, it’s the best anyone can do.

I was right to take a wait-and-see approach with Tanaka, but everyone who assumed greatness all along had a headstart on falling in love with Tanaka. Through Tanaka’s first 16 starts, he was 11-3 with a 2.10 ERA and the Yankees were 12-4 in his starts. But then after getting hit around by Minnesota and Cleveland in July, he landed on the disabled list with an elbow injury that took nearly every orthopedic surgeon’s opinion to come to the conclusion that he needed rest and rehab over surgery.

In 2015, we saw what life was like post-elbow injury for Tanaka with a drop in velocity and strikeouts and with another early-season trip to the disabled list for an elbow injury. I spent every day waiting to find out that Tanaka would be out for a year-plus due to needing Tommy John surgery. The old New York media tried to play doctor and suggest that Tanaka should just get it over with and get surgery, which was still not recommended by doctors, acting as if getting Tommy John surgery has been 100 percent successful for all pitchers who have undergone it.

Tanaka finished the season 12-7 with a 3.51 ERA in 24 starts and though at times it seemed like he would never be an “ace” or a real No. 1 again, he was given the ball for the one-game playoff and he turned a solid start: 5 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 3 BB, 3 K, 2 HR. It was good, but not good enough, though in reality, nothing would have been good enough. It didn’t matter if Tanaka pitched nine shutout innings, gave the start he did or got rocked, that Yankees team wasn’t going to score that game.

This season, Tanaka has learned how to pitch in his post-elbow injury career and with his elbow problem, if it’s even a problem anymore. He’s 12-4 (and has no-decisions in five starts in which he pitched at least six innings and gave up two earned runs or less) with a 3.11 ERA and the Yankees are 21-7 in his starts and 50-58 in all other games. In his 28 starts, he has allowed two earned runs or less in 21 and has pitched at least six innings in 22. He has one loss since July 27, and in the middle of this late-season postseason push, the Yankees have won his last six starts. He’s already thrown a career-high 179 1/3 innings and has at least five starts left if he stays healthy. (Knock on all the wood in your house.) If Masahiro Tanaka isn’t an ace, then the term shouldn’t exist. If Masahiro Tanaka isn’t an ace then who is?

There’s one Clayton Kershaw and he isn’t just an ace, he’s on pace to be the best pitcher in the history of baseball. The history of baseball. Everyone else who is considered an ace is in a tier below him and that includes Madison Bumgarner and Jake Arrieta and Chris Sale and Jose Fernandez and Max Scherzer, and it includes David Price and Felix Hernandez when they were still great, and it includes pre-2013 CC Sabathia. Tanaka is in that tier.

Tanaka has a career 3.14 ERA and .698 winning percentage in 72 starts, in which the Yankees are 50-22 (they are 192-196 in all other games since Tanaka joined the team). He has been their best pitcher for nearly three seasons and has lived up to his $155 million deal. He’s not just a front-end starter, he’s not just an elite starting pitcher and he’s not just a No. 1. He’s an ace.