Holliday Hype Still on Holiday
Matt Holliday is one of the best players in baseball. Joey Votto currently has a so-slight-it-is-meaningless lead in Wins Above Replacement among National League players over Holliday despite Holliday missing time at the beginning of the season recovering from an appendectomy. Holliday (201) is second only to his teammate Lance Berkman in wRC+ (213), and plays superior defense to Berkman.
Holliday’s excellence isn’t a recent development. From 2007 to the present, Holliday has accumulated more WAR (27.6) than any other position players in baseball other than acknowledged-best-in-the-business Albert Pujols (34.3) and the similarly underrated Chase Utley (28.6). Of course, there is a distinction between true talent and observed performance, and the uncertainty involved, e.g., with defensive metrics means that we don’t know “for sure” where Holliday ranks, but you get the idea. It is easy enough to see how good Holliday has been and continues simply by looking at his player page. He’s been just about as good or better than Carl Crawford each of the last few years; Crawford has been an excellent player (and very probably still is, despite his dreadful start in Boston), yet, unless I missed it, despite the big eventual payday, Holliday’s free agency did not receive the hype that Crawford’s did. Indeed, relative to his peers-in-performance, Holliday has not received much national attention lately. Why might that be?
