Baseball Bytes: How Francisco Lindor Went From Overpaid Bust to MVP Contender
Plus, the past, present and future of great individual seasons on losing teams.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new-ish column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out three two2 byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Lindor Is the Mets’ Savior (Again)
A week ago in this space, I noted that there was a relatively large gulf between the playoff probability of the projected last team in — the Atlanta Braves (then at 76 percent) — and the first team out — the New York Mets (then at 28 percent). But the Mets spent the week making things more interesting, extending their winning streak to 9 games before Sunday’s loss to the Cincinnati Reds, and they’ve emerged from the weekend tied with Atlanta for the NL’s final wild card spot. (As of Sunday, the playoff odds were very nearly even between the two teams.)
The Mets are generally at their best when they feel like a team existing purely on good vibes, and those have been intact with such happenings as Mark Vientos’ walk-off HR (and shirtless celebration) Friday night. But also, the numbers have been on New York’s side recently. They went into Sunday with MLB’s best record in the past 20 games (15-5), to go with the fifth-best OPS differential (+.089) of any club over the previous 28 days. And with a team-high 1.072 OPS in the latter span, no batter has been responsible for the Mets’ recent postseason form than SS Francisco Lindor.
It’s part of a season in which Lindor has a legitimate claim at the NL MVP, even though the competition (Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers) is going for the first 50-50 season in baseball history. According to my JEFFBAGWELL measure of Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Lindor went into Sunday fractionally ahead of Ohtani for the NL lead, on pace for 7.81 WAR to Ohtani’s 7.79.
The Mets have never had an MVP winner before in their history, and only once before have they had a batter lead the league in position-player WAR — when the tragically great David Wright did it in 2007 (but finished just fourth in the voting after New York collapsed down the stretch):
As we saw last year, big round numbers (like Ronald Acuña Jr.’s 40-70 Club) trump any slight edges in nerdier stats like WAR, so I wouldn’t expect Lindor to beat Ohtani even if his Mets go on to make the playoffs and he tops Ohtani on the value leaderboard. It would take a huge shift in the race for Lindor to be favored.
However, he already is a favorite of Mets fans this season, starting with the (uncharacteristically) supportive cheers early in the year and extending through his role in rallying the team’s comeback in the standings. Lindor’s redemption arc with this franchise is another narrative force behind his MVP bid, because he’s already gone through the highs — exuberance from fans as the first splashy star acquisition Steve Cohen made as owner of the team — and the lows — being dogged with a reputation for underachievement ever since a down first season in Queens that included giving the fans thumbs-down with Javy Baez.
You’ll notice that Lindor was on the list above for 2023 as well, but his excellence was lost amidst the Mets dropping from 101 wins to just 75 in one of the most disappointing campaigns the team had ever seen. Before this season, it felt like Lindor was going to play out the string on his 10-year , $341 million contract without ever really being embraced by Mets fans. But on a team that genuinely needed salvation earlier in the season, Lindor has been the savior that the orange-and-blue faithful were waiting for him to become.
⚾ Best on the Worst
One interesting feature of baseball — or a depressing one, depending on how you think about it — is the way that no individual player, even a great one, is capable of single-handedly lifting his team’s fortunes over the course of a 162-game season. You don’t see that as much in other sports such as, say, basketball, and it sets up plenty of situations where a player can have a strong personal performance on a losing team.
That’s what these guys have experienced in 2024 so far, in producing the most WAR/162 for teams forecasted to finish below .500:
We’re in a weird era for great performances on bad teams, though. In the chart above, six players created at least 5 WAR/162 and 17 had at least 3.5; both figures are well below the post-strike averages of 9.7 and 28.9 per season, respectively. And as a matter of fact, the number of players having these kinds of strong seasons on bad teams has generally been decreasing over time:
Why would this be the case? I’m not sure if it is related to general talent consolidation on top teams — think of how many stars are on the Dodgers alone — or a related tendency for bad teams to ship their good players to the clubs that can make the most use of them (either at the trade deadline or in the offseason). Or perhaps rebuilding teams are so committed to the strategy that having even one or two good players feels anathema to the goal of losing. Maybe a trend toward injuries (or load management to prevent them) makes it less possible to stand out for an entire season in general, and teams are more dependent on their stars staying healthy than before.
Whatever the root cause, we’re seeing less of the Elly De La Cruz-style elite season on a losing squad than we used to. So we should enjoy the phenomenon when it happens — there’s still something sort of neat about going to any ballpark in America and having one great player being worth the price of admission, no matter how lousy his teammates are.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
Sometimes it's better not to know. Until I read this piece, I had absolutely no idea that any serious and thinking person on the planet was talking about Lindor as a potential MVP candidate. Sure, he's had a nice season...a solid uptick in performance. Sure, he plays in New York and has a 1,000-watt smile. But an MVP? Comparable to Shohei Ohtani?
No way.
The problem here isn't Lindor specifically, but why anyone not a provocateur would argue he's even an MVP possibility. A cursory review of the Leader Board at Baseball Reference reveals that Lindor is not leading in a single NL offensive category outside of stats like games played, ABs and plate appearances. In terms of old school counting stats, his greater chances at the plate should give him an edge in leading some counting stat categories if he were truly the MVP.
Yet, somehow, he isn't. Here is where he is at according to my admittedly quick review:
*Hits - 4th.
*Runs scored - 3rd.
*RBI's - 10th.
*HR's - Tied for 5th.
*BBs - Not in the top 10
*SBs - 10th.
*OBP% - Not in the top 10.
*Slugging% - 7th
*OBP + Slugging - 10th
*Total Bases - 3rd
...and so on. In virtually all these same categories, Ohtani is leading...by a solid margin. Yet - inexplicably and disconcertingly - Lindor's MVP case gets worse from here.
When we take the large number of sabermetric measurements that we have come to trust in assessing true or hidden performance for decades - things like Runs Created, OPS, Adjusted OPS+, Adj. Batting Runs, Adj. Batting Wins, Offensive Winning %, RE24, WPA, cWPA etc. - Francisco Lindor's season is somehow even less impressive.
With all these advanced metrics not only is he not leading, but he's routinely absent from even the top 5 in the NL, forget about across the MLB. Meanwhile, Ohtani is yet again, leading these in these measurements by a wide margin.
So, how can we credibly make an argument for Lindor? Has there ever been a player in the MVP conservation in the history of the game with such non-elite numbers in virtually all categories (counting stats and sabermetric measurements) ...while another player is thoroughly dominating them? I can't think of one.
Well, you might reflexively say "defense." He is a shortstop while Ohtani is only a DH this year. Yet, while defensive metrics can be contradictory and vexing, I don't see great defensive performance from him on this dimension either. His Defensive WAR on Baseball Reference is not in the Top 13 in even the NL, and his Defensive Runs Saved (+2) and Fielding Runs Above Average are, well, average. Even his old school Range Factor is below League average. Yet, that doesn't stop people at ESPN and elsewhere from trying to will into existence a false reality by simply repeating over and over "he's had a terrific year defensively."
I get that Ohtani is not given any boost for defense, but neither should Lindor as a pedestrian shortstop.
What this all comes down to it appears is a single metric - WAR - and not even all versions of that measurement either. Baseball Reference's version of WAR has him at #3 with Ohtani again comfortably at #1.
When a boatload of metrics all uniformly scream "nice season but no MVP" except some lonesome and isolated versions of WAR, something is alarmingly wrong with WAR. I never thought I would say this, but I'm starting to see Bill James' point about the inadequacies of WAR. I frequently comment on the need for analysts to explain the "why" behind their numbers - why they make sense - and not simply reveal a number from an algorithm and presume is somehow without debate or justification reflects truth.
Francisco Lindor as an MVP simply makes no sense in the real world of experience or judgment. Imagine you were a passenger on a plane where the pilot looks at their gauges and sees that 15 are in the red, but one dial marked "WAR" says everything couldn't be better. Would you want your pilot to trust only that single dial and ignore the others? Of course you wouldn't. You would immediately be in a full-blown panic that the WAR dial is malfunctioning or inaccurate. That's real-world reactions and analysis.
Yet incredibly, that's exactly what we are doing here - ignoring all the gauges. To be clear, this isn't about the media's annoying "Get Out of Jail Free Card" that I constantly hear, "...well I'm not saying Ohtani isn't going to win...." It's about the larger question of why anyone moderately observant of the game and outside of Queens is even talking about Francisco Lindor as an MVP.
If the entire case is only supported by some puzzling number from a WAR calculator that pays no heed to all the contradictory evidence, I must ask what is WAR good for? Unfortunately, I suspect absolutely nothing...say it again.
Thanks as always for an interesting read.