Kris Bryant Setting Records Straight

I’ve stopped biting my tongue over the past couple of days. Sure, opinions are one thing, but this is long past opinion, especially when there is actual, hard evidence that proves an opinion to be baseless, ignorant, and has no basis in reality.

Let’s face it, there is a ton of issues with Chicago Cubs baseball these days. There isn’t a single player I feel comfortable with up at the dish, in any situation. When an offense is performing as bad as this is, there’s more pressure on the pitching staff to perform. When there’s more pressure on a pitcher, they may grip a ball just a little much or try and get a little more break on a slider or another couple MPH, and it almost always ends poorly.

If pitchers press and the offense can’t get out of their own way, it doesn’t bode well for team success.

While the entire Cubs offense seems broken and continues to break down late in the seasons (like the past three seasons), but there is one name that constantly gets brought up as the reason why.

Kris Bryant

Kris Bryant was drafted second overall in the 2013 draft. When that happened, most baseball people and pundits declared that the Chicago Cubs would be World Series contenders in the next five to six years. Bryant was the signal to the rest of baseball that the Cubs would win a World Series.

…and he didn’t disappoint.

Coming off his 2013 Golden Spikes Award, Bryant went on to win the MiLB Player of the Year (the only Cub to ever win the award) in 2014, then the NL Rookie of the Year (fifth Cub to do so) in 2015, and NL MVP in 2016 (11th Cub in history to take home the award). Oh, and by the way… he was the first player in baseball’s history to do all of these in consecutive seasons.

In 2017 Bryant started to get his first criticism, and his drop in home run numbers (39 in 2016 to 29 in 2017) and RBI (102 to 73) gave credence to some scout’s assessment that Bryant wouldn’t age well. Some Cubs fans began to latch onto this thought and pointed to Bryant’s 107 point drop in OPS from his 2017 August to 2017 September.

Now, this criticism was extremely unfair as Bryant had an incredible August (.343/.457/.588) and still posted a pretty good September (.304/.405/.533). Fans still pointed to Bryant’s inability to hit elite pitching and the entire offense’s stumbling down the stretch for their exit in the playoffs – which was still an NLCS visit.

For the scorecard, Bryant posted a .946 OPS in 2017 which was BETTER than his 2016 season where he posted a .939 OPS. Bryant had an arguably BETTER offensive season in 2017 than 2016 and fans started to point fingers because he didn’t have enough RBI.

Most people that cover baseball have essentially eliminated RBI from their conversation. The RBI stat isn’t a personal statistic, it is more reliant upon the surrounding hitters than you yourself. If it weren’t reliant on others, the only way a player could have a 100 RBI season is if that player hit 100 solo home runs. That is of course not possible.

In 2016 Bryant had 102 RBI, which according to everything people have been taught forever, is a good productive season. In this season, Bryant hit with men on base 333 times. Bryant was walked in 40 of those PA, leaving him with 283 chances to drive in runs, which he was able to collect 80 RBI in those spots. In 2017, he had 280 total plate appearances with runners on base and was walked 45 times, leaving him 235 opportunities to drive in a run. He drove in a run in 28% of the opportunities he had in 2016 and did so in 22% of his opportunities in 2017. Sure, a dip, but this is why simply looking at numbers without context is a sticky perspective.

2018

This is the season where it all started going south for Kris Bryant – but it really shouldn’t have.

As the 2018 season began, Bryant was crazy hot. Through the first 40 games (25% of the season), he had an OPS over 1.000. On May 28th of that season, Bryant’s OPS was higher than it had ever been before. He was on his way to being a no doubt NL MVP for the second time in his career. I’m still pained by a tweet Peter Gammons sent out in November of 2018.

Kris Bryant hur4t his shoulder May 19, hit 5 HR w/a .362 slug rest of season. On 5/19 morn, he projected to .580 slug, .960 OPS, 42 HR. '16 MVP season he had .554 slug, .921 OPS, 39 HR. Just thinking

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) November 14, 2018

Many fans point to a painful night in Colorado as the turning point in Bryant’s career. In the first inning, Bryant was hit in the head by a 96-MPH fastball thrown by German Marquez. Bryant was immediately removed from the game and he would miss the next four games. He returned to play against the Milwaukee Brewers and wen 0-3 with a strikeout and a walk.

He would then go 1-10 in his next 12 PA with 2 walks and 2 Ks.

Many people worried that this would mark the end of Kris Bryant, the MVP caliber player. There has been many careers derailed because of bean balls, look toward the Cubs right fielder, Jason Heyward as an example.

Back in 2013, Heyward was hit in the face with a ball thrown by New York Mets’ pitcher Jon Niese. The 90-MPH pitch broke his jaw, and Heyward never really regained his form. As an example, Heyward hit 27 homers with a .814 OPS in 2012. It took him seven years to break the 20 homer mark again, and even that was in a season where the 100th fan to enter the ballpark was hitting 20 homers (juiced ball reference).

Getting hit in the head can cause a number of issues, concussions, broken bones, additional eye, and depth issues, and possibly more frustrating – an unconscious flinch of any thrown ball, especially inside.

That was the biggest fear when it came to Bryant. Would he have a lasting fear of being hit again? Will a hesitation cause a reduction in offensive production? With this potential lasting injury, does it effectively close the Cubs window?

What happened next was pretty remarkable. Not only did Bryant return to form, he produced at a better rate than before he was hit in the head.

As you can clearly see, Bryant performed at a much higher rate. He hit three times as many home runs, had four more extra-base hits, and a better OPS.

I ran this for 20 games after the beanball for a particular reason. That is because on May 19th, 2018, Bryant dove into first base, headfirst, and ripped his shoulder to shreds. This is an injury we still do not know the full details about, but it was something that plagued him for the rest of the season.

From May 19th on, Bryant would take two trips to the IL (at that point it was the DL), he eventually needed to change his swing to eliminate the pain. Here is how he performed after his shoulder injury in 2018:

This was clearly the issue with Bryant in 2018. Before the shoulder, in 39 games he was averaging 1.2 hits per game. After the injury, he averaged 0.9. Before the injury, to his shoulder, he was averaging an extra-base hit in every 0.6 games (putting him on an incredible pace of 97 extra-base hits) and after the injury, he was averaging 0.3 extra-base hits a game. If you project his stats after the injury over the course of 162, he would only hit 13 HR with 36 doubles and 200 strikeouts.

If you project his stats from before the shoulder injury across 162, he was on pace for 35 homers, 60 doubles, 120 Runs Scored, and 197 hits. Heck, even if you only project his results between the beaning and his shoulder injury, he was on an incredible 49 HR season with 57 doubles.

Simply put, there is absolutely zero evidence that being hit in the head had any impact on Kris Bryant’s 2018 season, let alone his career.

After 2018

As mentioned, Bryant changed his swing for the final month of the 2018 season. Any time he would swing the bat, finishing with his typical one-handed finish, it would cause incredible pain. This pain caused him to pull in, he was unable to reach outside pitches and reduced his bat speed as his body anticipated that pain.

During the offseason, between the 2018 and 2019 seasons, Bryant had to do quite a bit of rehabbing. This took time away from his typical offseason of reviewing holes in his game, developing training programs to fix them, and working on the new mechanics to fix those issues. He didn’t begin to work on those issues for probably a month or so later than he normally would.

This did put him behind where he normally would be, and his performance in the first month or so proved this. But for the sake of getting in the weeds, I won’t lean on his early-season struggles in any of my examples.

In 2019 Bryant showed he was back. He was every bit the MVP caliber player he always has been. His performance was overshadowed by the seasons that Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger were having, and it would have taken a lot to put him in the MVP conversation. But, he was an absolute beast through mid-August. On August 14th, Bryant was hitting a very good .292/.391/.537.

How would your opinion of Bryant change if he finished with 35 homers and 45 doubles in 2019? As it was, his performance was good enough to earn him an All-Star nod. His 141 wRC+ over this time would have placed him eighth in the NL. For reference, if you begin his 2019 on May 1st and run it through August 14th, he slashed .311/.402/.573 and was pacing 39 homers and 39 doubles with a 152 wRC+.

When facing the facts, he was an elite, top 10 player in baseball.

Knee issues

Sometime around the All-Star game, Bryant hurt his knee when a cleat stuck on a hitting mat. This was something he continued to play through, again displaying his mental and physical toughness while continuing to be a great teammate, and finally had to come out of a game on July 24th. Throughout this time, National Sports Media were proclaiming that Bryant had returned to form from his up-and-down 2018. His shoulder and any other issues were over and he was again the MVP of the Cubs.

But that knee caused issues in his swing, negating his power. I’m not exactly sure when the knee zapped his power, but if we just run his stats from July 24th through the end of the season you can see a pretty dramatic drop-off.

The .975 OPS guy we had seen the months before, became a .787 OPS hitter with 11 homers, 5 2B, and would strikeout 1.2 times a game. His batting average dropped 50 points, his OBP dropped 60 points, his slugging percentage dropped 100 points. How could you assume there was anything else going on besides being injured?

Bryant would still finish 2019 with a .903 OPS, a 135 wRC+, and 4.8 WAR. These were all aligned with his career averages. To put this in context, Nolan Arenado is widely considered to be the better third baseman between Bryant and him, finished the 2019 season with a 128 wRC+, and his career mark of 118 wRC+ would mark Bryant’s WORST offensive season (excluding 2020…).

It is incredibly evident that any Kris Bryant struggles have been directly tied to unfortunate injuries. Up until this point it has been his shoulder and his knee. There are of course other nagging things that pop up, but these are very typical when you follow the body’s kinetic chain. A shoulder can progress into oblique and even leg/knees. Knees can follow up the chain to cause back problems.

I’m no doctor, I’m no personal trainer. I have listened to many in the professional health industry in my time playing the game and watching the game, and I know that all of these things are connected. Hell, we learned this watching Sesame Street and singing,

Well, your toe bone connected to your foot bone
Your foot bone connected to your heel bone
Your heel bone connected to your ankle bone
Your ankle bone connected to your leg bone
Your leg bone connected to your knee bone
Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone
Your thigh bone connected to your hip bone
Your hip bone connected to your back bone
Your back bone connected to your shoulder bone
Your shoulder bone connected to your neck bone
Your neck bone connected to your head bone

Everything is connected and that is more evident in a professional athlete’s life. These guys (and gals) put forth more effort athletically daily than us Average Joe’s do in a year. We may run out to our beer league softball game, drink a pitcher, with a knee we can’t stand on and hit a homer (I saw someone write this, I cannot place it now, but I’d like to provide credit) and then we watch these guys fail to perform with a hangnail.

That pisses us off because we see the money involved, and we assume the money they’ll want, and we reference our own athletic prowess. Fact is, if you’re on the couch watching them play – you can’t do what they do. I have conversations with a former-MLB pitcher often. This pitcher spent some time with the Detroit Tigers and a cup of coffee with the Cubs. He’s a friend. He’s the first to tell the Average Joe that they are absolutely clueless when it comes to their expectations of a professional athlete. This is coming from a guy who’s first career game he was asked to face Derek Jeter with bases loaded.

When a finely tuned professional athlete has an injury, it can have a devastating result in their performance. When you have a tall, lanky body. When there is so much precision to the way you swing a bat, if any part of that process is limited or not functioning as expected – you’re not going to perform as well as you can.

Money, money, money…

On the heels of his 2018 season, there was an erroneous report from NBC Sports’ David Kaplan. In the report, Kaplan mentions that Bryant turned down a deal worth “north of $200 million.”

Once this got out, fans began bashing Bryant in droves. Calling him and his agent, Scott Boras, greedy. Calling for him and his 13 HR to be traded. Questioning if he even had trade value any longer. If there were fans on the fence about Bryant, after this news they officially wanted him gone.

But, that story was untrue. And like anything in the media, people will read the initial news and not the retractions.

Which there was no shortage of retractions…

• Bleacher Report
• NBC Chicago
• Sporting News
• The Athletic
• Cubs Insider
• Sports Mockery
• Me (yes, myself and I would claim to be the first to call it out as false)

There are a ton more of course, but most Chicago media immediately jumped up in arms and denied that the offer was ever made. Once this happened, Kaplan backtracked his statements and then it all got put to bed publicly. But the damage was already done, and the fans only really invested in the first accounts.

To this day there are still fans that suggest Bryant’s production has dropped since the bean ball and that he turned down a $200 million deal. Both of which are untrue, but public perception is often the alternate truth.

2020 season

I was personally looking forward to Bryant coming out and producing in 2020. There had been a lot of chatter in the offseason about him getting traded. There were open reports of the Cubs discussing long-term extensions with Javier Baez and to a lesser extent Kyle Schwarber. The 2018 offseason there were rumors of talks with Willson Contreras and Anthony Rizzo as well.

It seemed like the only core guy that the Cubs weren’t discussing long-term plans with was Kris Bryant. Seemingly, all discussions with the others resulted in no extensions, meaning, they all turned down whatever the Cubs offered. The only player to publicly get bashed for turning down money – was never offered money at all.

It didn’t help Bryant’s public Q-score that his grievance – filed in 2015 – was finally being heard. Fans that mostly ignored the fact that it was out there for the last five years, finally took notice and thought Bryant was pissed at the club for manipulating his service time clock.

The public lynching was harsh, so much so Bryant came out and talked openly, honestly, and put himself out there like he never had before.

(I highly recommend actually watching his entire press conference)

Bryant doubled-down on a lot of these remarks when he joined Ian Happ‘s podcast, The Compound.

Bryant continues to tell the world and anyone that would listen that he doesn’t have, nor ever had ill will towards the Cubs or Theo Epstein or Jed Hoyer about the service time. He continued to suggest that he always knew this was an uphill battle, but looked at this as an opportunity to help the next group of young players and to help with the next round of collective bargaining to help future players.

He wants to be a Cub for his entire career. He tells family, the team, and fellow players know he wants to finish his career as a Chicago Cub. On The Compound it was said that if he plays his career in Chicago he would have a statue and his number on a flagpole here. It seems that everyone (fans) are stuck on him wanting $300 million, that he will leave in free agency for the highest bidder. Facts are, he would love to remain in Chicago and has never suggested otherwise.

But fans see Scott Boras as his agent. They see some huge contracts he’s worked out for his clients. They see the press conferences he hosts to talk up his players, suggesting that they deserve so much more money than they might otherwise get. But Bryant is the one mapping the plan, even if Boras is steering the wheels at times, there isn’t a turn that happens if Bryant doesn’t tell him to do it.

“Scott and me, I have my own beliefs and thoughts on certain things. He works for me, he does an unbelievable job, but at the end of the day he always knows what I say goes.”

Kris Bryant talking about Scott Boras in Spring Training 2020

It is completely fair to wonder how often Bryant will be healthy over the next five or more years. It is fair to question if someone would invest $200 million in him over eight or more years (I made this suggestion recently). What isn’t fair is to say Bryant isn’t a capable player. It isn’t fair to say his best days are behind him. It isn’t fair to say he isn’t an elite offensive player.

It definitely isn’t fair to say he’s soft!

In an exercise the other day I realized Bryant has played more than half the games over the last three seasons injured. If you’re soft you don’t play that many games injured.

It seems many people have a lot of opinions on Bryant. Maybe he will be the elite guy that he’s been his entire career. After all, Bryant has a higher career WAR (24) than the next 15 players picked in the 2013 draft (23.9). Coming into the 2020 season he had a career .901 OPS. Coming into the 2020 season he owned the third-highest WAR in baseball since 2015.

Will the Cubs see things my way? Who knows. Will another team see things my way? Likely.