![]() Isn’t money great?įor the second straight season, it’s hard to believe that the Twins landed Correa in free agency. The Phillies came into last year with a bad first option and unproven backups. We don’t think they’ll get many opportunities to show it, because Turner has been quite durable in recent years, but it’s worth remembering in case he misses any time. I wouldn’t want them as my first two options, but between Stott’s lefty bat and Sosa’s plus defense, they’re an enviable backup tandem. When he needs a day off, Stott and Sosa will be able backups. Regardless of the shape of his production, Turner looks like a fixture atop the Philadelphia lineup for years to come. ![]() ![]() The only thing stopping him is that the lineup behind him is homer-heavy, which makes steals slightly less valuable. The new rules should give him a boost there, though: I wouldn’t be shocked to see him swipe 40 or 50 bags this year. The only surprising thing about his 2022 performance was that he eased off on the basepaths, totaling only 27 steals. Turner wasn’t the best shortstop in baseball last year, but he wasn’t far off, and he’s coming off of his fifth straight excellent season. Their shortstop position was still kind of bad, though, and they needed Stott to cover other holes in the infield, so they went to the superstar market over the winter. They cast Gregorius aside in favor of Stott and Sosa midseason and made the World Series. ![]() The Phillies came into the 2022 season with one of the worst shortstop situations in baseball, long on Didi Gregorius and short on hope. That doesn’t make those players any less fun to watch, or any less valuable to their teams relative to the next-best option, but it does emphasize how baseball is changing. A league-average hitter who can hack it defensively at shortstop used to be a rare find. They’re great baseball players, far better than you’d think from where they show up here. Spare a thought for the perfectly reasonable shortstops mired at the bottom of this list. Now that shortstop takes a wider pool of baseball players, and with teams still trying to place their best players there in the minors, it’s no wonder that it’s hogging an increasing share of major league talent. The new question is whether Oneil Cruz can play shortstop at 6-foot-7, not whether Correa can at 6-foot-4. Now that conventional wisdom has been thoroughly discarded. The belief that shortstops need to be slight and limber is persistent, but it had already been cracking in previous eras, as Cal Ripken Jr. They’d man third base, or perhaps an outfield corner, thanks to their size. In bygone eras, hitters like Carlos Correa, Corey Seager, and Xander Bogaerts wouldn’t play shortstop. The top of this list is peppered with examples of how this has happened. The past five years are the best aggregate offensive years for shortstops, as measured by wRC+, since 1947. The best defenders still play short, but it’s less and less a position where teams are willing to employ poor hitters. But in the crowded world of good shortstops, there are just so many options. Crawford, and Jeremy Peña stand out to me in that category all three are excellent, and could easily be All-Stars, particularly if compared to a different positional group. No other position’s list of three-WARriors extends past 20th.Īs a result, there are a lot of solid shortstops who come out of this exercise with strikingly low rankings. You have to delve down to 25th on this list to get to a team whose aggregate projection is less than 3.0 WAR. That’s because everyone puts their best athletes there for as long as they can, which results in an embarrassment of positional riches. If you think of an average player as one who accrues roughly 2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, 29 teams are above average at shortstop. That’s true of the Mariana Trench, which extends some 36,000 feet below sea level, and also of the shortstop position in the major leagues.
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