The Worst Players in Baseball Might Be Pretty Good (Or They Used to Be, At Least)
Baseball's worst performers are not always the worst players. Sometimes they're just the ones with enough track record to be allowed to fail spectacularly.
Next week is all about baseball’s best players — with the All-Star Game descending upon my favorite city, Philadelphia — but let’s take a moment at the end of this week to celebrate the worst players in baseball, because, as it turns out, you have to be pretty good to be that bad.
For instance, the least valuable player in baseball this season (at least, as of early this week) is Salvador Pérez of the Kansas City Royals. Pérez only recently dragged his batting average north of .200 — he’s still hitting .212 — his power is mid at best,1 he swings at everything, never walks, can’t run and his defense behind the plate is totally shot.
Oh, and btw, Pérez is also one of the best catchers of his generation, a nine-time All-Star who once held the all-time record for most single-season home runs by a catcher. He may well make the Hall of Fame someday.
Scan the list of the worst players by Wins Above Replacement in MLB for this (or any) season, and you’ll see a lot of names like Salvador Pérez, Nick Castellanos or Max Scherzer — recognizable stars late in their careers, falling on hard times — or perhaps you’ll see ones like Lawrence Butler, who just a few years ago was an electrifying young talent on the rise. Or a pitcher like Kodai Senga, formerly an All-Star before injuries and this year’s sudden downturn took their toll. The common thread in many cases is that these players get chances to turn their slumps around, ones that regular low-tier players don’t.
Paradoxically, this leads to a strange phenomenon: The absolute worst WAR-rated players in a given season are actually a lot better — or, at least, have accomplished a lot more — than neutral old zero-WAR players. Like, a lot better.
Looking back to the start of the Divisional Era in 1969, here’s a breakdown of previous career WAR for players who ranked among the Bottom 10 in WAR in a given season, compared with the same number for players between -0.1 and 0.1 WAR in those same seasons:
Despite doing less damage in the present, the replacement-level group also did much less good than the worst players in the years leading up to their bottom-ranked seasons. Career-wise, you’d much rather be the worst players in baseball.
Going forward, it’s more complicated than that. Both groups have nearly identical — and identically bad — outlooks going forward, whether they were glued to the replacement level or one of baseball’s worst players. The latter group was slightly more likely to produce 5-10 more WAR; the former was a bit more likely to have more than 10 future WAR.
But if we mix the timeframes in an “either/or” fashion — taking the max of either past or future WAR, capturing either late-career greats like Pérez or potential future talents like Butler — we see that Bottom-10 players tend to either have much better pasts or brighter futures than our regular replacement-level cohort:
In fact, to find a comparable group to our worst-in-baseball contingent, we have to look to players who posted between 0.5 and 1.0 WAR in a season instead:
In other words, in terms of past or future career quality, the absolute worst players in MLB in a particular season have almost exactly the same distribution of outcomes as those who were garden-variety to halfway-decent contributors.
Which makes sense, in a backwards kind of way. Being the least valuable player in baseball isn’t just about playing badly; it’s about playing badly and still being allowed to keep playing.
To rack up enough negative WAR to land at the very bottom of the league ranking, a player usually needs some combination of prior track-record, organizational faith, contract status or prospect pedigree… something, some kind of reason for a team to keep betting on a turnaround. The truly anonymous replacement-level guys don’t get that chance: they get replaced before they could ever become the very worst.
Pérez’s place at the tail-end of the value list, then, isn’t a testament to his failure as much as one to his greatness — or at least to the reservoir of greatness he built up before this season.
Filed under: Baseball
Despite going deep against — who else? — Philly (Cristopher Sánchez, no less!!) earlier this week.
I was curious as to where recently DFA'd "righty specialist PH" Jahmai Jones was on the list. I knew it was low. I was not expecting 1296th out of 1296. Oof.