Vladimir's Pooin'
I'm so sorry about the title. Here's my brief and far-from-comprehensive contribution to the (ugh) Vlad Discourse.
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Bo Bichette woke up on the morning of August 21, 2022, barely more than a league average hitter. For the year he was sitting at a 104 wRC+ through 511 plate appearances.
Here on Wednesday night, when he takes the field in Kansas City, he'll be playing in his 200th game since then. That's just a season-and-a-quarter's worth of appearances, but it's been enough to change the narrative about him just about entirely—to the point where his struggles out of the gate here in 2024 seem like an afterthought compared to other issues among the Jays' hitters. Except among the biggest cranks in the fan base, it’s understood that Bo will get his hits.
Back in August of 2022 that notion didn’t seem nearly as easy to believe. Since the start of 2020, Bo by then had managed just a 115 wRC+—a decent enough mark but a far cry from the 143 he put up over 212 PA when he exploded onto the scene in 2019 like nothing Jays fans had witnessed since Brett Lawrie nearly a decade earlier. Bichette by mid-2022 was nearly as maligned for his bat as he was for his glove. Speculation ran rampant about his focus, his mentality, his family life. He was chasing too much! He wasn't good enough to play shortstop! We'd been sold a bill of goods!
When I used FanGraphs’ trade value rankings to compare Bichette (ranked 21st) to Austin Riley (22nd) that summer, after the Atlanta third baseman signed a 10-year, $212 million contract, I felt the need to hand-hold readers all the way through the idea that it was an apt one.
“The sense I get from Twitter—particularly among the most profoundly Leaf-Brained denizens thereof—is that a lot of people think the Jays would be better off without Bichette at all, and would laugh at the idea of handing him anything even approaching a $200 million deal,” I wrote.
Over 3,000 words later I concluded the piece with a reminder that “while so many are groaning at their TVs every time he does something wrong, wondering why he can’t just snap his fingers and become the guy they’ve always wanted him to, there are a whole lot of very smart people out there wishing they could get their hands on a player like this—or maybe even Bo himself.”
Then he got hot for a month and finished with a 130 wRC+. His defence took a step forward. He had another strong season at the plate in 2023. Suddenly we all should wish the Jays had given him $212 million those 20 months ago. Suddenly he seems like such a model of consistency that fans are less worried about his poor start to this season than they are about whether the Jays will ever be able to extend him—and whether the club’s once wide-open window of contention will close if they let him get to free agency.
I don’t bring this up to crow about it, I just think there’s a lesson in there.
As a 16-year-old undrafted high schooler, Bryce Harper was the subject of a 2009 Sports Illustrated story, Baseball's LeBron by Tom Verducci. The cover blared that he was “Baseball's Chosen One.” The greatest prospect in at least a decade. “More advanced than A-Rod and Junior were at the same age,” the subhead of Verducci's piece boasted.
A generational hitter, you might say.
The next summer he would become the number one overall draft pick by the Washington Nationals.
Now let’s fast forward a bit. By the time Harper finished the 2016 season he was just about to turn 24. He'd stepped to the plate 2,770 times in the majors, producing a 137 OPS+/139 wRC+ and had smashed 121 homers in his career. However, a lot of that success was the result of one massive season—his 42 HR, 197 wRC+, NL-MVP year in 2015. He'd slumped in 2016, down to a 111 wRC+ with just 24 home runs, and even though it would be suggested that winter that there was “an issue” he'd played through, he was healthy enough make 627 PA over 147 games.
Questions about where the hype-machine had gone wrong were loud, even among the smartest folks in the game.
“We all figured that Harper’s 2015 dramatically changed his own baseline,” wrote Jeff Sullivan, then of FanGraphs and now a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ baseball operations department. “What if it shouldn’t have?”
Well, fast forward again and, heading into this year, all Harper had done since then is produce a 147 OPS+/144 wRC+. He's been a top 10 hitter in baseball over that span. He's won another MVP award. He's signed a $330 million contract and so far lived up to it.
His numbers have ebbed and flowed over the course of his career. Injuries have played their part in keeping some of them from being quite as loud as they might have otherwise been. And that 2015 season turned out not to have set a new baseline. But he has still been a very good hitter. Extremely good. And even though there were bad stretches and underwhelming years in his early career, his full body of work and his pedigree as a prospect was telling us more about who he was and what he was going to be than any of those.
There’s a lesson in there too.
When Vladimir Guerrero Jr. finished the 2023 season he had been 24 for about six months. He'd stepped to the plate 2,843 times in the majors, producing a 131 OPS+/130 wRC+ and had smashed 130 homers in his career. However, a lot of that success was the result of one massive season—his 48 HR, 166 wRC+, AL-MVP runner-up year in 2021. He'd slumped in 2023, down to a 118 wRC+ with just 26 home runs, and even though it would be suggested during the winter that he'd played hurt throughout, he was healthy enough to make 682 PA over 156 games.
Now, Vlad was a touch older than Harper over this span. He was not quite as good, either overall or in his peak, and obviously didn’t provide nearly the same value on the bases or in the field. He also walks less and is more contact-oriented. But looked at purely as hitters, their stories and results are remarkably similar.
Does that mean Vlad will continue along Harper’s path and go on to have a great career at the plate? Obviously not. Is the lesson of Bo’s turnaround that Vlad will definitely do the same? No.
But the pedigree and body of work still mean a hell of a lot. Smart industry types would absolutely still jump at the chance to get him on their teams.
And so, when so many fans are choosing to crank the negativity about this guy up to 11—and make no mistake, it is absolutely a choice—to the point where plenty would rather have little tantrums in Chris Black’s replies than actually engage with information that might potentially make their whole-hog red-assed certainty that he’s clearly a bust look foolish, I think it’s worth remembering how long it takes for stories in this sport to be written and how often we what we think we know—even what we think we’ve seen more than enough of to be certain about—turns out to be wrong.
There is still plenty of time to make a different choice here.
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If you were the Front Office, would you ink him to a lucrative long-term contract at first opportunity?
It would be easier to put up with the divergent results if the attitude was better. I think that's a big part of it. Not entirely his fault, seems cultural more than anything, but it's a thing.