Overrated or Not, Kris Bryant Remains Misunderstood

Monday night belonged to Kris Bryant, whose three-homer, two-double onslaught made everything else fade into the background. Bryant is a focal point of the media attention around the Cubs almost all the time, but when a performance like Monday’s happens, he becomes the ubiquitous talk of Baseball Twitter for a while. There was a lot of gushing on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the backlash (backgush?) landed.

Those three homers tied the Cubs’ slugger for the NL lead in home runs (however briefly), but they didn’t impress Tony Massarotti. Massarotti hosts a show on 98.5 The Sports Hub, the CBS Local sports station in Boston, and he writes for their website, too. On Wednesday, he wrote an article that began with the following lede:

Look, I’m a cynic. I feel compelled to mention that before I tell you that I think Chicago Cubs phenom Kris Bryant is overrated.

Unfortunately, Massarotti muddled his own thesis, dragging the reader through a quagmire of trite and inaccurate characterizations of Bryant’s reputation and statistical evaluation in general to reach his point. Here’s what he was trying to say, distilled to a bullet-point list that might be the best form of the argument:

• Bryant swings and misses a lot in the strike zone. That’s a major vulnerability.
• Good pitchers often need only to execute their pitches in order to not only get him out, but strike him out. (He adds together Bryant’s poor numbers against a handful of selected pitchers he considers elite, and presents the aggregate as evidence.)
• As a result of that weakness and good pitchers’ understanding thereof, Bryant isn’t much feared, compared to other hitters with similar power profiles.
• When compared to players who had similarly auspicious starts to their careers in recent years (Massarotti chooses Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, and Mike Trout) or those whom Massarotti sees as truly dominant sluggers (tellingly, perhaps, the Bostonian chooses David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez), Bryant doesn’t measure up.

He finishes with an untidy, failed effort to declare his own point proven, and to connect Bryant’s weaknesses with the imperative that the Cubs win the World Series, rather than become one of those great teams who never got over the hump.

The piece is short, meandering, and poorly executed. Pujols, Cabrera and Trout are transcendent players, superstars of a class to which no one sensible has suggested Bryant belongs. Ramirez and Ortiz are Hall of Fame-caliber offensive players, and Massarotti is certainly not making a learned comparison between them and Bryant at any similar stages of development. He’s comparing two of the top 10 hitters of the last 20 years, at their peaks, to a player with fewer than 1,000 career plate appearances, and faulting Bryant for failing the test of that comparison.

Sifting past those somewhat cosmetic problems with the argument, though, these two things must be said.

One: Massarotti isn’t wrong about Bryant’s vulnerabilities. He’s probably too dismissive of the possibility that Bryant will adjust well and close the holes in his swing and approach, given not only the tangible adjustments we can document since Bryant reached the big leagues, but also the ability Bryant has shown to consistently dominate against ever-increasing levels of competition over the last four seasons. A player who can win both major Collegiate Player of the Year awards, then the Arizona Fall League MVP, then the Baseball America Minor League Player of the Year, then the NL Rookie of the Year, all in consecutive opportunities, deserves some benefit of the doubt with regard to staying ahead of the adjustment curve.

Still, it’s true that Bryant whiffs in the zone more often than any truly elite hitter does, and it’s true that pitchers with excellent stuff have been able to manipulate him and thoroughly beat him most of the time during his brief MLB tenure. That point is important, and Massarotti’s distance from the glow that surrounds Bryant in Cubdom allowed him to see it a bit more clearly than even many people who know Bryant better as a hitter.

Two: That said, Massarotti is still massively wrong about Bryant on an analytical level. That’s because he’s not seeing Bryant for what he really is, a problem that persists for many non-local observers. He sees the power, knows that’s the calling card, and automatically hones in (much too closely, in this case) on what Bryant brings to the team as a hitter, and particularly as a slugger. He compares him to Pujols and Cabrera, elite hitters whose offensive skills Bryant might never match. Another sensible comp might be Ryan Braun, whose own offensive exploits are a bit underappreciated.

Those three players all came up younger than Bryant, and were better hitters right away. Each also began their career as a third baseman, like Bryant. But none stuck at that position. Pujols has just 95 career starts there. Braun hasn’t played a single inning there since his rookie season. Cabrera has nearly 700 starts at the hot corner, but only because he’s tended to be on teams who needed to creatively cram an extra bat into their lineup. He’s not a credible defender at that position. Pujols became an excellent defensive first baseman, though not for all that long. Braun is an average corner outfielder. Cabrera mans first base pretty capably, but will never take home a Gold Glove.

Bryant is an average defensive third baseman, or thereabouts. He’s about average, and perhaps a bit better, in either outfield corner. He can play center field, and has. He can play first base, and has. He’s not a liability of any kind at any of those spots. He’s also a very good baserunner, something only Pujols can claim ever to have been, and then only if he has a very good memory.

Let’s say Bryant finishes this season with at least 35 percent of his total defensive games played in left field (he has room to give some share back and still clear that). If it happens, Bryant will be just the 15th player to qualify for the batting title while splitting his time that evenly between third base and left field, in the last 101 years (or more). Jim Ray Hart did it at ages 25 and 26 for the Giants in the late 1960s, and put up WARP figures of 5.4 and 3.2 in those seasons. The year before Dick Allen found a home with the White Sox and won the AL MVP, he was a third baseman-slash-left fielder for the 1971 Dodgers, and racked up 5.6 WARP. Tom Tresh came up a shortstop for the Yankees, then moved to center field, then to the corners, and played a Bryant-like hybrid role in 1966, good for 5.9 WARP. Bip Roberts had a 6.4-WARP season for the 1990 Padres as a utility man, with third base and left field just happening to be his leading positions. Hart, Allen and Tresh are the guys to whom Bryant compares closely, not Pujols, Cabrera, Braun or Trout. To that objectively culled list, add Ben Zobrist, Tony Phillips, and Bobby Bonilla.

If you prefer to consider Bryant in a more traditional role, then let’s compare him to players who have taken at least 1,000 plate appearances over their first two seasons, while making at least 70 percent of their defensive appearances at third base (a bar he still clears, for his young career). With Willson Contreras asserting himself as yet another part-time outfield option, if you (optimistically) project that Jorge Soler and/or Dexter Fowler will soon return to action, Bryant might well go back to being a full-timer in the dirt soon. That really isn’t fair to the competition, though. Bryant has 10.4 WARP through his first season and a half in the big leagues. Evan Longoria had only 9.8 over his first two seasons. Wade Boggs is the best regular third baseman in terms of WAR over one’s first two seasons in the Majors, with 12.9 WARP, but that record is in trouble if Bryant returns to full-time third-base duty.

Massarotti doesn’t have to like Bryant’s strikeouts. They are a genuine problem, though one Bryant has already begun to correct. He doesn’t have to backtrack from his concerns about Bryant’s ability to hit great pitchers, because that, too, is a legitimate gripe, but he probably needs to better acknowledge the flip side of his own argument: Bryant absolutely pummels anyone with something short of dominant stuff. That’s not an easy thing to do. No big-league pitcher is easy to hit. Though it might mean a little less carryover into October production than one might wish for, Bryant’s ability to hit all the average and poor pitchers in the league harder than almost anyone else does has real value. It helps the Cubs win games throughout the regular season, which Massarotti either overlooks or doesn’t sufficiently appreciate.

Most of all, though, Massarotti missed his mark on Wednesday by failing to grasp what he’s really talking about when he talks about Kris Bryant. He might be talking about the best young third baseman since Massarotti’s hometown hero, in Boggs, or he might be talking about a versatile weapon the likes of which the league has rarely seen (or rarely had the guts to deploy in this way) since the 1960s. In either case, he’s not talking about a total offensive package on par with the legends he perceives as Bryant’s comparators (though if he wants to talk about such a player, maybe he need only watch one of Bryant’s throws across the diamond on a ground ball until it finds the glove of its recipient). Until he understands how a Kris Bryant really works, he’s not going to be able to build the credible, cogent case he wants to make in support of his claim.

Lead photo courtesy David Kohl—USA Today Sports.