It is the time of year when baseball writers look back on their preseason predictions and review all the things they got wrong about the coming season.
I enjoy making these annual predictions and checking on them, but I don’t pretend that they have any relevance for the upcoming season. I don’t spend much time trying to get them right: I’m mostly just making guesses about players that interest me. I’d hazard that’s what most of these columns are: fun little efforts at imagining a cloudy future.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I had something of an epiphany. While these kinds of predictions don’t tell us anything significant about the baseball season to come, and they probably shouldn’t be taken seriously as evidence of which writers you should pay attention to and which ones you should ignore, these predictions have the potential to tell us a great deal about how the person making them thinks about the game.
And these articles have the capacity, too, to reveal gaps and prejudices in one’s thinking; the errors they are habitually make and the obsessions they cannot shake.
So that’s what this review is about. I’m going to skip telling you whether I was right or wrong, and instead attempt a deeper dive towards what I was thinking, and what it might mean.
1. Victor Robles will be this year’s Ronald Acuna.
In projecting the future of players, I have always preferred offensive players who have a diverse range of skills, and Victor Robles is – like Acuna – a player who can do a lot of different things pretty well. He’s a good defensive player. He’s fast. He’s hit effectively at every level in the minors, showing good power and a more generalized ability to be a decent offensive player. He doesn’t have a troublesome strikeout rate. His walk rate, at least in the minors was perfectly serviceable.
What I like about players like Robles…and he merits further discussion in another space…is that you can look at his minor league track record and see multiple path forward for success. He could become a Carl Crawford-type player and turn into an elite, speed-first player…a top of the order guy who sometimes sneaks in a bunt and annoys the opposing starter every time he reaches first. Or he could come into his power and figure out the strike zone a bit and turn into Carlos Beltran. He could do that and be a little less than Carlos Beltran: Victor Robles could have a Chris Young-type career: a perennial 20-20 guy whose skills don’t ever develop to an elite level, but who is nevertheless a net positive for a team.
There are a lot of interesting potential outcomes for Robles’ career, and my favoring him reflects a very obvious and safe bias for players with multiple talents. This reflects a thinking that is neither new nor particularly interesting.
2. Jakob Junis is a pitcher you don’t know now, but will know by season’s end.
I have taken a little bit of a break from writing about baseball. Partially, that break has come because I’ve been focused on other things, and partially it’s happened because I felt that I’d gotten in a kind of rut with writing about baseball, and I wanted to take time off to think about how to write about the game in a different way than I have written about it previously.
That thinking is guiding this article, at least a little bit: I didn’t want to write an article telling you that Jacob Junis had a crappy year: you either know that already or you can look it up, or you don’t care. What does it matter?
What I want to understand is why I was so interested in Junis last year. What is it that fascinated me about him?
It was his decision, late in 2018, to just stop walking batters. During his last seven starts, Junis walked three hitters over 44.2 innings, and I hoped that he had turned a corner and decided to just do that in 2019: just not walk hitters.
That is obviously a naïve expectation for what is a complex, multi-faceted event: a pitcher cannot just decided to not walk batters, because if it were purely in their control all of them would have decided to do that, and Moneyball would be a very different book and movie.
That said, there are underlying thoughts to Junis’ performance that made me curious about his 2019 season. I am not a professional pitcher, of course, but I have always imagined that control and velocity exist in relation to one another: that is, the harder you throw, the more difficult it is to control a pitch. There is a third axis, which is the number of types of pitches you throw: it is, I expect, tougher to master four pitches than it is to master one or two.
That’s a simplification, but I’ve wondered why more pitchers don’t experiment with approaches that are less velocity-centered, and more control-centered. Mariano made a career with one pitch, after all, and Warren Spahn’s late career was mostly built on upsetting a hitter’s timing. Why don’t we see modern pitchers going outside the box a little more frequently?
I know there are many different answers to that question, all of which open new layers and avenues for thinking. What excited me about Junis was that he seemed to have figured something out at the end of 2018, and I was curious to see what it was.
And I should have known better. One of the notes out of spring training was that Junis had gained a few ticks on his fastball. Not surprisingly, what he gained in that department he lost in the control side of the paradigm, and the end-result was a lackluster season.
3. Yasiel Puig will receive some MVP votes.
4. Billy Hamilton will finally break out and steal 75 bases.
I am going to combine these two because they reflect a parallel bias, which is my belief that some players, through the vagaries of fate, just end up on the wrong goddamned team at the start of their careers, and those vagaries can severely limit their careers.
I like Yasiel Puig. Understanding the counter-opinions about him, I very much enjoy players who a) can do amazing things on a baseball field, and b) play with a lot of enthusiasm.
I never felt that Puig was a great fit with the culture of the Dodgers or the city of Los Angeles, and I hoped that under the lesser lights of Cincinnati he’d enjoy a breakout performance. He didn’t, of course.
As for Billy Hamilton: I have an almost ridiculous love for him, because I miss stolen bases and like the way that speed has the capacity to disrupt the game. I like Hamilton, too, because his career really is a miracle of sorts: here is a man who learned how to hit left-handed in Double-A, and how to play centerfield in the majors, whose been at least somewhat productive in the first effort, and extremely excellent at the second one. I like to root for underdogs, for idiosyncratic players, and Hamilton has felt, throughout his career, as both.
Because I root for him, I’ve been a longtime critic of the many decisions the Reds have made about Hamilton, and I was excited to see what a team like the Royals – a team with a decent track record of turning track stars into All-Stars - would do with Hamilton. The result was more of the same. It’s unlikely that Hamilton will ever hit enough to justify a starting position.
Is this a problematic bias? Probably, it is. I love to be astonished by what a player does on the field, and Hamilton and Puig are astonishing players: off the cuff, I can think of numerous things they’ve done on the baseball field that have made my jaw drop.
But having the capacity to score from third on an infield pop-up or throw a baseball 300 feet while flat-footed makes for compelling visuals, those instances don’t always make a career. It isn’t fair to pin the failures of each player to turn significant gifts into good careers on the franchise that signed them.
5. The best catcher in the NL will be a rookie in San Diego.
After a crummy first half, Francisco Mejia posted a triple-slash of .305/.355/.511 during the second half, which is a nice positive for a 23-year-old catcher in San Diego. I didn’t get this one right, but I’d probably run it back next year. I like catchers who can him, and Mejia can hit.
I will make another point, which is broader: all of these predictions except one are optimistic predictions, and the one negative prediction comes in at #8…it took me seven predictions to realize that I was anticipating a very rosy season.
I very much struggle to make negative predictions, a trait that I don’t fully understand. But this lends another interesting avenue for consideration: is my thinking clearer when I am being optimistic, or is it cleared when I am being pessimistic? If my natural inclination is towards the positive, does that cloud my judgements?
Maybe I will force myself to write exclusively negative predictions next year. Or maybe I’ll write ten positives and ten negatives and see what the outcomes reveal. Am I a better thinking playing to a default optimism, or is my thinking clearer when I force myself towards pessimism?
6. Brandon Nimmo will pace the NL in on-base percentage.
I said earlier that I like players with a wide base of skill sets. The coin-flip is that I also like players who have very narrow and somewhat obscure skill sets. Nimmo fits this later group: he is not fleet of foot nor gold of glove, and he doesn’t mash homeruns or chase batting titles. All he does is avoid making outs, a skill that is masked further by his home park in Queens.
He had an off year. I still like him: if I were a GM, I’d be calling the Mets and seeing what the price is.
7. Cody Bellinger will lead the NL in home runs.
This prediction looked not-very-bold before the season reached April: Bellinger swatted four homeruns during the Dodgers early-season series against Arizona and had an MVP-level season.
But this prediction was a little bolder considering his 2018 sophomore campaign, which saw the LA outfielder’s homerun output slip from 39 to just 25, in more plate appearances.
The thinking for this is simple enough: my view is that any hitter who does exceptionally well at a young age will likely do better at some point down the track. Entering the season, I was high on Bellinger for the same reason I was high on the futures of Rafael Devers and Ozzie Albies: each of them had been extremely productive as very young players, and it is rare for someone who can play competitively at 20 or 21 years of age to not get better later on.
I think we’ve lost sight, at least a little, in the ways that baseball players tend to experience the game. A generation ago the notion of the sophomore slump was a part of the baseball lexicon: a mythology that was built around the very reasonable idea that a hitter having a strong rookie season might struggle the next year, as the league figures him out and starts passing along notes.
This is perhaps underappreciated right now. It shouldn’t surprise us when a good young hitter has a season of growing pains before figuring things out, and we should remain optimistic about their future.
That’s a long preamble to saying that Andrew Benintendi is still going to be great, folks.
8. Josh Donaldson will not bounce back.
I am skeptical about the sustainability of the current fixation on launch angle: I think it is a trend that is begging for a counter-trend to bottom it out, and because Donaldson is the poster boy for avoid ground balls like the plague, I decided to go with him. I hope the N.L. Comeback Player of the Year Award is a decent compensation for my skepticism.
And I remain skeptical. At some point baseball will put into play oblong balls or pitchers will re-remember how to upset a hitter’s timing, and the generation of players swinging for the moon will give way to another trend.
I also think I am still confusing Donaldson with the guy who played third before him and was (I think) traded for him…the guy with lots of arm tattoos and a great glove who played like he was on the run from the police after robbing a bank.
Brett Lawrie…I had to look it up. Lawrie is actually four years younger than Donaldson, which surprised me.
9. The Red Sox will repeat as 100-game winners. And they’ll lose the AL East.
I continue to ruminate on the Red Sox of last year, a team that seemed to win in every permutation that the game allowed. Someday I would like to really dive into that notion, and find out if that sense holds any truth, or if I’m just imagining something.
I thought the Red Sox were going to be a great team again, and they were merely good, and they ended up trailing a very great team (the Yankees) and a good one (Tampa Bay). I don’t know that there’s much to unpack here.
10. Andrew McCutchen will eclipse his single-season bests in at least two of these: homeruns, runs scored, and on-base percentage.
Hell, I’m not going to dive any deeper into this one than I really like McCutchen, and thought he was going to be hitting at the top of a very dynamic offense. His season numbers, adjusted to a full year, project to 27 HR, 119 runs scored, and a .378 on-base percentage.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here. He very occasionally tweets at DavidFlemingJ1.