Baseball’s falling stars
Harper, Goldschmidt nowhere near game’s best at break
The votes are in, the AllStar rosters are set (at least until the next seemingly-daily injury), and MLB is ready to tee up what we can only presume will be more home run follies in Cleveland, both in the derby Monday night and the game itself Tuesday. But you can pardon Phillies owner John Middleton and Cardinals board chairman Bill DeWitt for feeling as if the stars are not aligned the way they’re supposed to be.
When Middleton embarked on his frantic shuttle back and forth from Philadelphia to Las Vegas last winter in his effort to sign Bryce Harper as the franchise player who would lead the Phillies to the top of the National League East and on to the World Series, the least he could have expected for his $333 million was Harper having a good enough season to make the All-Star team. Similarly, last spring when DeWitt, in an uncharacteristic move for the Cardinals, signed 31-yearold Paul Goldschmidt to a five-year, $130 million contract to keep him out of free agency, he assumed he would certainly be getting an All-Star performance at least in the first year of the deal. But Harper and Goldschmidt will be nowhere to be seen in Cleveland, just as neither is anywhere be found on the mid-season major league offensive leaderboards.
Indeed, it must be a sickening feeling knowing you’ve saddled yourself with terrible, financially onerous longterm contracts before they’ve barely begun. But in lavishing all that money on marquee sluggers to excite their fan bases, Middleton and DeWitt chose to ignore the red flags that both Harper and Goldschmidt respectively were already showing signs of decline. Harper last year hit .249 and struck out 169 times as opposed to 137 hits. This year he’s hitting .251 with 105 strikeouts
and just 81 hits. His OPS has declined from 1.008 in 2017 to .889 last year to .843 currently this year. For $33 million a year, if Harper is already declining in production, what’s it going to be 3-4 years from now when he’s not even midway through the contract? Middleton can only hope the Phillies and Harper get to a World Series by then. For now, however, Harper hasn’t even gotten to the All-Star Game.
In Goldschmidt’s case, the decline has been even more dramatic. In his seven-plus years with Arizona, he averaged .947 OPS with 17 steals. This year, his OPS is .741 and he has zero stolen bases. “He’s slowed considerably both in the field and with his bat,” was one scout’s assessment last week. “It was already down last year, and you wonder why the Cardinals didn’t let him play out this season before making an assessment on whether to give him a longterm big money contract like that. It’s not like there would have been a wild bidding war for a guy going into his mid-‘30s starting to show decline.”
By contrast, if Harper and Goldschmidt would have been on just about everybody’s winter projected All-Star list, there is no one who would have made such a projection on James McCann, Hunter Pence or Tommy La Stella, all of whom have been major firsthalf factors in this year’s home run explosion.
Both McCann and Pence were essentially released players last winter, cut loose by their respective teams, the Tigers and Giants. McCann wound up signing a one-year deal with the White Sox, which is turning out to be Sox GM Rick Hahn’s most inspired acquisition in his slow rebuild on Chicago’s south side. After hitting .228 with eight homers and 39 RBI for the Tigers in ’18, McCann is hitting .318 with nine homers and 30 RBI in just the half season for the Sox, his .886 OPS over 200 points higher than his career mark of .683 heading into this season. In addition, he as proven himself to be an excellent handler of pitchers — fellow Sox All-Star Lucas Giolito credits McCann for the bulk of his success — and, in retrospect, the Tigers, who need all the help they can get, were shortsighted in giving up on him, at 28. As for Pence, no one saw his renaissance season (.294/15 HR/48 RBI) coming following his release, at age 36, by the Giants last season. After a fourth straight injuryplagued season in which he hit .226 with four homers and 24 RBI, Pence waited around all winter with no offers before finally signing a minor league deal with the Rangers just before spring training. He leads the Rangers in homers and RBI but he’ll be sitting out the AllStar Game with a groin injury. But it is La Stella, the Westwood, N.J., native, who has been the biggest surprise of 2019. A backup infielder his entire career, La Stella hit 16 homers (six more than he’d hit in his entire previous five years in the majors) and had 44 RBI for the Angels before hitting a ball off his leg and fracturing his tibia, forcing him to miss the All-Star Game as well. Before he got hurt, he said a change in his batting stance to standing straight with his bat at a 45degree angle on his shoulder increased his average launch angle 8.1 degrees to 15.0.