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.

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Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes

1. Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.

2. We traded a Baseball Byte for an extra QB U item this week.