2021 MLB Season Baseball • Page 28

i dont understand any of these reports. i get that teams and agents will negotiate and find compromise, but if youre willing to spend $300m why not just offer it? You KNOW the number is going to have to start with a 3.

 

I dunno I believe little that either of the Jons ever report about extension/free agent negotiations because one tends to shill for agents and the other tends to shill for ownership.

 

hes gonna have a 10 WAR season, half and half hitting and pitching (no jinx plz)

 

if Shohei plays to his full potential then the Angels have no excuse to not win with 3 perennial MVPs lol

 

idk your second-best pitcher being bundy is a pretty good excuse haha

 

ehhh I actually think they’re being overlooked lol

Bundy-Heaney-Ohtani isn’t anything to scoff at
Quintana added another decent arm and idk who their #5 is

((((they’ll still probably suck))))

 

That sound

 

I knew Keston Hiura had a bad year but I had no idea how bad

Four Bold(ish) Predictions for the National League

In 2020, Hiura couldn’t maintain his premium results on contact. He kept his enviable barrel rate, but everything else fell apart. He hit fewer line drives and more grounders. He pulled more of those grounders, which depressed his BABIP. His intermediate contact — hard-hit but not barreled — fell off; he hit 39.6% of his batted balls 95 mph or harder, down from 48.1% in 2019.

In addition, his contact rate fell to a scary level. Do you know what it looks like to make contact on 59.4% of your swings? It looks like the lowest contact rate among qualified hitters, worse than Miguel Sanó and Luis Robert, just to name two free swingers off the top of my head. The culprit? Pitches over the heart of the plate, where his whiff rate climbed from 21.8% to 35.8%, the worst mark in baseball by more than five percentage points.

What does this all mean? Frankly, I have no idea. That’s hole-in-the-bat level ineptitude, and while Hiura’s swing has always been violent, this is something else entirely. You can’t swing through more than a third of pitches down the middle and be an above-average hitter, regardless of what you do when you happen to run into one.

Not good

 

Reminds me of that crazy Mookie stat where, I don't remember if it was last year or the year before, at one point he had swung at like 140 pitches in the strike zone and missed contact ONCE

 

Doesn't Lindor want well over 300M though? Like...really well over?

At least, that was the case in Cleveland.

 

yeah it's been 'reported' that he's asking for way more than $300, so assuming he and his agent know the negotiation game will take place as well, i just don't understand why Sandy would even start at a number under $300. Sandy think Sandy is much smarter than Sandy is, and i'm afraid all this is gonna do is create awkward bad faith with Lindor and a deal isn't gonna get done and he's gonna walk right out the door in November.

He's a top 5 player in the sport. Maybe top 3. Sign him.

 

Definitely should sign him and would be big dumb if they didn't. Definitely not top 3 sorry murph. I wanna believe he's top 5 but he needs another really strong offensive season for me to buy in

 

yeah, lindor is top 10 but not yet in the top 5 at the moment. if he can recapture 2018 then he's there for sure

still worth the money obviously

 

someone not the Rockies should give Trevor Story 200M

 

Has there ever been a better group of SS & 3B than what we have right now? Left side of the infield is unbelievably stacked all across the league

 

Now I just miss Beltre again

 

Washington fans gonna lose Soto too huh

 

I feel like people forget how good beltre was. first ballot, should be unanimous imo but probably won't be because voters are dumb

dude was so good for so long, had some occasional slightly down years in between (but not many!), but 9.6 bWAR in his age-25 season then 6.7 bWAR in his age-37 season. not a lot of people do that!!

 

The league has an abundance of truly excellent 3B/SS. On the other hand, 1B isn't what it used to be, it seems

In last year’s positional rankings, Jay Jaffe wrote that first base just “ain’t what it used to be.” The diminished status of what was once one of baseball’s premier positions went unchanged in 2020. Even worse, one of the few young players near the top of those rankings, Pete Alonso, took a step back. First base has almost become baseball’s oldies station, chock-full of memories of the early hits of Albert Pujols or Joey Votto or Miguel Cabrera, but never airing their newest singles.

So what’s caused the collapse in the Q Score of the game’s first basemen? Offense is still sexy, but the truth of the matter is that home runs are cheap and plentiful. In baseball’s last full season, 135 players qualified for a batting title, and only five of them failed to finish with double-digits home runs. In 2009, there were 31 such players. There were 27 single-digit sluggers in 1999; in 1989, before the early-90s offensive explosion, there were 47. There aren’t just more home runs in baseball, they’re spread more widely among its players. Teams finding more guys who could play shortstop and hit home runs didn’t magically result in the game’s first basemen also thumping more round-trippers.

What’s more, it sometimes seems like there aren’t any actual first base prospects anymore, just prospects at other positions that teams eventually settle for playing first. The Jays haven’t totally given up on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at the hot corner, and one of the few genuine phenom first basemen to come up in recent years, Cody Bellinger, has turned out to be a dynamite center fielder instead. The Tigers have made no secret of the fact that they would prefer that last year’s number one overall pick, Spencer Torkelson, play at third, a position he didn’t even play in college. It makes one wonder whether Jim Thome and Pujols, both third basemen in the minors, would have been moved to first so quickly if they had been born later.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that baseball fell out of love with the position, but I’d highlight November 28, 2016 as a key date in the story. That was when reports came out that the Milwaukee Brewers weren’t going to tender Chris Carter, the National League’s home run leader, a contract for the 2017 season. And no one seemed especially shocked! The AL’s home run leader, Mark Trumbo, was also a free agent that offseason and neither he nor Carter attracted significant interest in free agency. Trumbo eventually settled for going back to the Orioles in late January; Carter signed a one-year deal with the Yankees and was done as a major leaguer by midseason.


Will first basemen ever return to prominence? Not everything is cyclical after all, and I think you’d need a change in how the numbers work in baseball to make first basemen desirable again. Perhaps a deadened ball will hurt the less-impressive power hitters at some point, resulting in first basemen reemerging as the game’s princes of power. Or maybe ball or rule changes will result in more balls in play for first basemen to field, giving a top player at the position the potential to post truly significant value on defense. But for 2021 at least, look for more of the same, with lots of familiar names and only a few players who excel enough at every aspect of the game, like Freddie Freeman, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with baseball’s elites.

2021 Positional Power Rankings: First Base

 

I think Beltre gets in first ballot. For as dumb as BBWAA writers/voters are at times, they are getting smarter and will continue to as more analytically-based writers start being able to vote on the HOF.

 

I dunno I'm still afraid that dumb shit like no ring and no MVP will keep enough voters from checking the box on him first time on the ballot. We'll see in a couple years

 

This rules