There has been a lot of fans that have complained about the performance of Kris Bryant. While, sure, he hasn’t produced a season like his 2015-2017 years but how much of that performance was due to injury and how much has he declined? I field a TON of comments suggesting Bryant has already peaked as a player. Or that he is overrated and even that he isn’t a good clutch player.
There is a weird line where a lot of Chicago Cubs fans have bought into the narratives about certain players. They “watch every game” but they don’t seem to really grasp what they just watched. This is where the narrative of Bryant being overrated comes from. They saw what his 2018 season was like, and they pair it with his seemingly outlandish contract asks and then watched an extremely fun Javier Baez compete for the NL MVP.
They will even look at the “back of the baseball card” stats, and point out that Bryant’s home run totals and RBI totals have decreased since the 2016 season – so he must be on the decline! Right!?
Well, actually no.
The first thing we need to start doing as a baseball fandom is ignore the antiquated attachment to “Runs Batted In” as a personal stat line. RBI is a team stat and not an individual stat, and those who come up in the most RBI situations will have the most RBI’s. It’s just that simple and when Bryant bats second in an order and isn’t seeing those RISP situations as often as he was earlier in his career.
Home runs are a thing. This was supposed to be a guy that mashed 40 bombs a year, but now he’s looking like a low-30’s hitter. I do think there’s an explanation for this. Bryant has adjusted his hitting approach since the 2016 season to help him become a better all-around hitter. He’s worked hard at reducing strikeouts and chasing, which has shown increases in contact rate and increased walk rates. He had also worked on driving the ball top the right-center power alley, which increases hits but not necessarily homers.
We can talk about all these things, but we have to discuss injury.
Fans have got to understand one thing. If there’s one thing you remember from this article, have it be this. Kris Bryant is NOT injury prone. Kris Bryant is NOT fragile. Up until the 2018 season, Bryant had never missed a game, in his life, because of injury. This covers nearly 1,000 games.
But, when you talk about what Bryant is, right now, you have to discuss the injuries that he’s had these past two seasons. In 2018 Bryant separated his shoulder diving headfirst base on May 19th. He then played until June 22nd ignoring immense pain, slashing.241/.321/.336. In comparison, before Bryant injured his shoulder he was slashing .311/.428/.595. A season that was shaping up to be his best ever, it completely fell apart because of a freak hustle play.
What keeps going unnoticed is the fact that 64 of the 102 games Bryant played in 2018, he couldn’t lift his arm above his shoulders. This presents a problem where Bryant can’t win. A casual fan will look at that and say, “he’s sucked.” Then you tell them he was playing through injury and that fan says, “he hurt the team, he should have sat out!” But, if he sat out that same fab would then call him fragile.
Bryant played the second-most games of any Cub in 2019, and the most of any Cubs infielder. But he played through a knee injury which limited his ability to drive through balls. This caused a reduced impact in August, and soon after his cortisone shot, the Cubs shut him down in September.
Last 140 games
In-between injuries Bryant has been an incredible player. If we look at the 140 games that he has played, assuming these are healthy, he has slashed .296/.410/.555 with a .965 OPS over that stretch. This is 64 points higher than his career mark of .901 and 26 points higher than his MVP season (.939).
(See full detail of Kris Bryant’s merged 2018-19 Healthy stats here)
In the 140 games registered, Bryant accumulated 629 plate appearances and 530 ab-bats. Over this span, he scored a pretty amazing 108 runs and 44 doubles. He also belted 29 home runs through that span. If you track this across 162 games Bryant would finish a full season with 125 runs scored, 50 doubles, and 33 home runs. This is quite an incredible season, one which would put him in the MVP conversation nearly any year he’s been in the league.
It is this reason that a lot of people in media, as well as in the blogging world still look at Bryant as a similar player as to who he was in 2016. In fact, his hot stretches over the last two seasons have been better than any stretch of play he’s had at any point in his career.
Take a 66-game stretch of play from May 5th through July 26th of this past season. In this time, Bryant hit .331/.425/.623 with 18 home runs, 19 2B, and 59 runs scored.
The best player on the roster
There have been many fans that keep pointing to Javier Baez as being the best player on the Cubs. This is a great “opinion” but is factually incorrect. Now, I absolutely love Baez and I don’t think there is another player in baseball worth the price of admission. He does something on a nightly basis that will make you say wow.
But, being the most exciting player doesn’t equal the best player. Sure, being really, really good helps Baez be even more exciting. But, we need to pump the brakes when we say because Baez made a crazy diving play in the hole makes him a better player than anyone else. It simply means he made a crazy play.
There is no argument that 2018 was Baez’s best season. He hit .290/.326/.554 with 34 HR, 40 2B, and 101 runs scored. He would ride this season to finish second to Christian Yelich in the NL MVP race. When you compare his numbers to Bryant’s from 2019, here is how the stack:
| Season | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS | HR | 2B | R | |
| Kris Bryant | 2019 | 0.282 | 0.382 | 0.521 | 0.903 | 31 | 35 | 108 |
| Javier Baez | 2018 | 0.290 | 0.326 | 0.554 | 0.881 | 34 | 40 | 101 |
Fans turned their allegiance over to Baez in a season that you could argue either way on which was better. Fans are also fast to point out that Bryant’s 2017 was a down season, which statistically was better than either of the two above.
| Season | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS | HR | 2B | R | |
| Kris Bryant | 2019 | 0.282 | 0.382 | 0.521 | 0.903 | 31 | 35 | 108 |
| Javier Baez | 2018 | 0.290 | 0.326 | 0.554 | 0.881 | 34 | 40 | 101 |
| Kris Bryant | 2017 | 0.295 | 0.409 | 0.537 | 0.946 | 29 | 38 | 111 |
I don’t bring this up to knock Baez down a peg, I love the dude after all, I do bring this up because I don’t believe a lot of people actually look at the numbers when they talk about who the best player on the club is. While offensive stats do not tell the whole story and defense is a thing, but when you’re voting on All-Stars and giving out Hall of Fame plaques they aren’t using defensive metrics.
Lack of Clutch
This is the last piece that people bring up. Bryant isn’t a clutch player. Well, sure, over his career there have been situations where he hasn’t come through. But as a fanbase we need to understand there really isn’t such a thing as being “clutch” since nearly everyone’s clutch stats resemble their career stats when things are all said and done. It is all a sample-size thing, and once a player has a large enough sample size, stats will equal out.
But, let’s look at those clutch stats. First, 2019…
In 2019, Bryant was a perfectly capable “clutch” player. But, over the course of his career, he hasn’t been…
But even looking at his career numbers, he posts completely fine results. In all of these scenarios, he averages out to a .883 OPS, something nearly any player would love to achieve in any situation. But, this is also only 18 points lower than his career OPS of .901.
While I think some fans prefer some other Cubs on the team, which is fine, I think they’ve built a weird animosity towards Bryant. I can’t be certain, but it seems that it all really started when the rumors of him turning down contracts started to surface. Now, there has not been a single deal that has actually been presented to Kris Bryant. The Cubs have talked to his agent, Scott Boras, but have yet to offer a deal that presents a fair value for him.
Even if you believe the Cubs offered him a 10-yr, $200 million deal (they haven’t) that isn’t a fair market deal for Bryant based on other deals out there. A fan will see $20 million a season to play a game and blow a gasket! But, in the business of baseball, and based on Bryant’s resume, he’s worth nearly $10 million more a season.
Now, maybe he doesn’t warrant a 10-year deal, but if there is a team out there willing to go there, Boras knows and will continue to push Bryant and the Cubs to think along those guidelines. It is hard for a general working-class individual to grasp the potential of earning $1 million, let alone $30 million. We also understand that many Boras clients end up testing free agency. So we look at $200 million and Boras and the whole thing and thing that the player is a greedy prima donna. But that couldn’t be any further than the truth.
Bryant is one of the most down to earth and classy guys in the league. He isn’t the greedy type, regardless of what you have made up in your head. I mean, here’s a guy that told Las Vegas reporters that he was going to wait until he is in Spring Training so he can discuss his grievance with local Chicago reporters since he thinks they should be the first ones he talks to.
Cubs 3rd baseman Kris Bryant is declining to discuss his takeaways on the grievance process he underwent with the team out of respect for Chicago media who he says he hasn’t been able to speak with yet. The #lasvegas native says he’ll wait until spring training to do so. @News3LV pic.twitter.com/lmNP4sK3OM
— Amber Dixon (@AmberNews3LV) February 6, 2020
I don’t know how much longer Bryant is a Cub, and while I would hope it is the rest of his career. I also don’t know why a casual fan is so concerned with how much the Cubs spend on players… the fan’s concern should mostly be, “does this roster present the best chance to win?” Any roster that has Kris Bryant on it has a better chance to win than one without him on it.
