2017: Revenge of the First Baseman

This winter, we saw a number of free agent first baseman hit the market, and then promptly get rejected en masse. Edwin Encarnacion was looking for $100 million, and then took $60 million after his market collapsed. Mark Trumbo apparently wanted $80 million; he signed for $37.5 million. Quality veterans like Brandon Moss and Mike Napoli signed for fractions of what similar players had in prior off-seasons. Pedro Alvarez got a minor league deal to try to play outfield, after no one wanted him as their first baseman.

Overnight, the game seemingly shifted from highly valuing one dimensional sluggers to thinking they were fungible assets. At the end of January, this trend led me to wonder why so many contenders were willing to punt first base, and speculate that maybe teams were willing to put up with less offense from the traditional slugging position because it was so easy to find offense at other positions now.

After all, first baseman as a group were coming off one of their weakest offensive performances of all time. With shifting hurting so many slow left-handed sluggers, perhaps we were just transitioning away from first base as a dominant offensive position.

Yeah, about that.

After running a 110 wRC+ last year, players playing first base — this data is offensive performance while actually playing the position, not just guys who qualify as 1Bs on the leaderboard — 1Bs are up to 122 this year, which would be the highest mark of any year where we have split-by-position data. And not surprisingly, given the home run surge, it’s almost all because of a power spike.

1Bs have a collective .225 ISO this year, up from .194 last year. That number had bottomed out at .170 in 2014, but the power has come storming back this year; 1Bs haven’t had an ISO over .200 since 2009, when it was .206.

And this isn’t a Bonds-lifting-the-LF-baseline situation; almost every 1B in baseball is hitting this year. 30 different players have 70+ PAs while playing first base; 10 of them are running a wRC+ of 140 or higher. 23 of the 30 have a wRC+ over 100. And this is with Miguel Cabrera, Anthony Rizzo, and Carlos Santana struggling in the early part of the season.

In their stead, guys we didn’t think were going to hit that well — Ryan Zimmerman, Yonder Alonso, Mark Reynolds, Justin Smoak, and Logan Morrison — are all crushing the ball. And besides Miggy and Rizzo, the upper-tier guys are hitting the ball like few others in baseball. Freddie Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt remain monsters. Joey Votto has figured out how to stop striking out, apparently. Matt Carpenter has gone fully Jose Bautista. And yeah, Eric Thames is still a thing.

Naturally, some of these guys are going to regress. Maybe a few of the Alonso/Smoak/Zimmerman crowd have figured out some way to sustainably hit at a much higher level than they have previously, but a lot of what is propping up first base offense right now is mediocre hitters performing at a high level. That won’t last forever.

But after a winter in which the first base position essentially had a public funeral, the position has come roaring back to life this year. First base, it turns out, is still a power position.