Bobby Witt Jr. Is Playing like the New George Brett
We might be seeing the second coming of the best Kansas City Royal ever.
George Brett is the greatest player in Kansas City Royals history — and it isn’t particularly close.
When Brett made his debut late in the 1973 season, the Royals were still less than 5 years old as a franchise, searching for their first postseason appearance.1 But after 21 seasons — which included an MVP, three batting titles, 13 All-Star appearances, 317 home runs and 3,154 hits — Brett had brought K.C. into the spotlight. He sparked a playoff rivalry with the storied New York Yankees, led the Royals to their first-ever pennant in 1980 while coming the closest of any AL player to hitting .400 since Ted Williams, and helped K.C. win the 1985 World Series by hitting .360 with a 1.075 OPS in the playoffs.
Simply put, Brett was Kansas City baseball for two decades. But the Royals never managed to produce another talent on remotely the same level over the seasons that followed. As a consequence, Brett produced 41.4 more Wins Above Replacement2 than any other player in franchise history. Among all teams since 1901, that’s the third-largest gap between Nos. 1 and 2 for a team — and the only two players ahead, Walter Johnson of the Senators/Twins and Ty Cobb of the Tigers, played for teams that have been around that entire timespan. Brett was able to rack up his lead for a franchise that has only existed since 1969.
It probably wasn’t coincidental, then, that Kansas City dropped below .500 within two seasons of Brett’s retirement and made it back to a winning record just once in the following 18 seasons, missing the playoffs every year in that span.
Things turned around in the mid-2010s, as K.C. shocked the world to win the pennant in 2014 and the World Series in 2015. But there’s also a reason those Royals represented one of baseball’s greatest underdog stories. They were less stocked with big superstars than made up of an ensemble cast of good players with a specific playing style, who made the most of their collective potential at exactly the right time.
Of course, it isn’t like K.C. failed to produce any major talents after the days of Brett, Willie Wilson, Frank White, Dan Quisenberry and Hal McRae. The team’s farm system ranked 5th in Baseball America’s 1995 rankings, with No. 9 overall prospect Johnny Damon as its centerpiece, and it produced Carlos Beltran later in the decade. In the 2000s, the Royals’ organization yielded even more future talent, including Zack Greinke, Alex Gordon and Salvador Perez.
But Kansas City didn’t keep all of those rising players: Greinke, Beltran and Damon each produced less than 37% of their career WAR for the Royals. And even among the players they did hang onto, none came close to having a George Brett type of impact. (Gordon, for instance, was the No. 2 pick in the 2005 draft and the top prospect in the game in 2007, but he produced 37% as much WAR in his career as Brett did.)
That might finally be changing, however, with the emergence of 23-year-old shortstop Bobby Witt Jr.
Like Gordon, Witt was the No. 2 overall pick in the draft and baseball’s best prospect before his rookie season. But while Gordon took a while to get going — because of injuries, he didn’t break 3.0 WAR until his fifth season, at age 27 — Witt has gotten off to a fast career start on the same order as Brett, if not even better. Here’s a look at each player’s WAR per 162 team games by age in their career:
Witt Jr., who turns 24 in June, wasn’t quite as good as Brett in his age-23 season last year, but his 5.1 WAR/162 was the most by a Royal at that age since Bret Saberhagen in 1987 — and the most by a K.C. position player since Wilson in 1979. And this year, Witt Jr. has elevated his game even further. By WAR, only Mookie Betts of the Dodgers has been more valuable so far in the season, fueling early +370 AL MVP odds per FanDuel.
Witt Jr.’s defense has been impressive; he’s currently tied for the best fielding SS in the league according to Outs Above Average. Brett won a Gold Glove at 3B, but he never had a season as valuable defensively as the one Witt Jr. is on pace for. Witt Jr. has also been on a hitting tear, with a batting average 34% better than the MLB norm.
(Want to know how much batting averages have changed over the years? Witt Jr. got to his 34% above average mark with a .319 AVG this year; Brett’s AL-leading .333 AVG in 1976 was only 30% better than the league.)
And Witt Jr. has followed up last year’s 30-HR campaign with an improved slugging percentage and isolated power, even if we grant that an MLB-best 5 triples has something to do with that. Brett had a big power leap at age 24, going from 7 to 22 HRs in 1977, the first of his eight 20+ HR campaigns, but Witt Jr.’s power is just as good relative to the league.
Witt Jr. probably won’t play at a 10.9-WAR pace all year — but even if he produces at a level 40% lower than that over the rest of the season, he would have more WAR by year’s end than Brett did at age 24.3
With the performance he had a year ago, Witt Jr. announced his presence as a player who was officially cashing in on his immense potential. But this year looks like something else altogether. Producing at a 10+ WAR pace in the early months of the season, Witt Jr. has arrived as the MVP-type player the Royals were expecting — i.e., the next-generation version of George Brett. While many K.C. players have tried to carry that weight over the years, and none have succeeded, Witt Jr. has the best chance to pull it off of anybody since the man himself.
Filed under: Baseball
In that era, only the top team in each of MLB’s four divisions made the playoffs, so 85 to 90 wins were not typically enough to buy you a postseason ticket.
According to my JEFFBAGWELL version of WAR — aka the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
Btw, how good was Wilson early in his career? He actually holds the K.C. record for most WAR at age 24, not Brett, for the 7.8 wins he produced in 1980. It’s unfortunate that he got caught up in MLB’s cocaine scandals of the ‘80s and was never really an elite player again after the age of 26 or so.