FG on Fox: Ben Zobrist 2.0
For years, there’s been a pretty easy answer to the common question of “Who is the most underrated player in baseball?” It’s Ben Zobrist. It was Ben Zobrist last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. It’s probably been Zobrist since his breakout year in 2008. If you want to win a bar bet — and you happen to be at a bar where the patrons know what Wins Above Replacement is — the “Ben Zobrist has a higher WAR than Robinson Cano over the last six years” factoid is a pretty good place to start.
But Ben Zobrist is still human, and humans don’t age particularly well when it comes to athletic competitions. Next week, Zobrist will celebrate his 33rd birthday. His power is already starting to wane, as just 10 of his 40 hits this season have gone for extra bases, continuing a trend towards weaker contact that began last year. He’s also slowing down and is not the dynamic baserunner he was a few years back. While he remains an excellent defender and a player who can still control the strike zone, he’s becoming more of a good player than a great one. After years of being underrated, Zobrist is finally regressing into the player that people have thought he was.
And so now, it is probably time for him to pass the torch, and to anoint a new Most Underrated Player in Major League Baseball. Interestingly, the prime candidate looks an awful lot like the incumbent.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Confusing ending, an incumbent is someone replacing the former, so is the “prime candidate”. Typo maybe, you left me hanging there though. Who is the incumbent? My guesses are Arenado, Owings, maybe Blackmon?
Click on the article link
Please look up the meaning of “incumbent” in any English dictionary.
I’m not naive enough to argue with you here, I stand completely corrected. I suppose its definition has been lost in my vocabulary after being out of college for what seems to be TOO LONG. Apologies.