Regardless of the events that transpire on Wednesday night in Cleveland, the evening will conclude with a 2016 Champion of Major League Baseball being crowned. The elation that one club and its fans will experience with an extensive drought ending will only be matched in its intensity by the devastation felt by the club and the fans on the other side at seeing their own drought continue. As such, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on and reflect on the third base matchup that the evening will entail.

Game 7 will feature the overwhelming favorite for the National League Most Valuable Player award in Kris Bryant, while his counterpart, Jose Ramirez, has ridden a breakout regular season to a key role on this gritty Cleveland squad. Bryant represents the best of the best at the hot corner. He’s a member of the elite. Ramirez was mired in an obscure role until Michael Brantley’s injury allowed him an opportunity to crack the everyday lineup. He’s seized that opportunity by utilizing his high contact and baserunning abilities, as well as some clutch play.

While the overall skill set and season statistics obviously favor Bryant, in glaringly obvious fashion, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how each performs at the most strenuous point of the game’s brightest stage. Across a nine inning game, we’re talking about the most minuscule of sample sizes. But it’s still worth wondering what challenges each could present for his opponent, particularly in regard to their ability to make contact, their ability to make strong contact, and the threat that they represent on the bases.

Here’s a broader overview of their regular season performances.

In some regards, they’re not quite as far apart as one might initially think. Both are able to reach base at a really nice clip, but what Ramirez has going for him is his ability to get on base and utilize that speed, while striking out a at a far lower rate. Whereas Bryant represents the significantly more impactful bat in the power game. Ramirez embodies that scrappy type of play that has become the Cleveland narrative. As such, he won’t be an easy out at any point for Kyle Hendricks, especially with his success against the changeup. It’ll be interesting to watch Bryant against Corey Kluber for a third time as well, with Bryant having found his groove at the plate over the last pair of games.

In terms of the ability and type of contact we’ve seen from both, refer to the graph below:

Ramirez has been one of the higher contact guys throughout the season. He’s been aggressive in his approach, and he’s been able to utilize that speed effectively in notching a few extra hits because of it. Bryant may strike out more regularly, but his contact rate is also significantly improved from 2015 and his contact ends up being far harder and, subsequently farther, than that of Ramirez. If what we’ve seen thus far in the series is any indication, Ramirez will use that high contact and baserunning ability to be a thorn in the side of Chicago, and if there’s a big time hit to be made on the part of the Cubs, it could very likely come off the bat of Bryant.

It should be relatively well known at this point what each can do on the bases, as the pair rank 1-2 in BsR. Ramirez sports an 8.8 mark, while Bryant comes in not far behind, at 7.3. Ramirez is a legitimate threat to go, with 22 swipes on the season. This could prompt the Cubs to go with David Ross in order to try and slow he and the other Cleveland runners to an extent. While Bryant isn’t as active in the run game, with only eight steals, he’s still a capable baserunner who has been lauded for his intelligence on the basepaths.

As one-sided as it may seem based off of name recognition alone, it’s still a fun matchup that we’ve been able to watch at the hot corner. You have two players in the top eight in WAR at their position, with both bringing different skill sets to the table. While Bryant obviously represents the higher quality player in a variety of ways, the ways in which both could find a way to impact Game 7 in Cleveland on Wednesday night are countless. Bryant with the big power bat, Ramirez with the high contact ability. With perhaps only nine innings remaining in the 2016 Major League year, this will be one fun matchup in a multitude of things to watch in Wednesday’s final tilt.

We’ll get back into reviewing some of the performances at the hot corner next week. With the World Series currently underway, and myself having explored Kris Bryant extensively this season (and recently profiling Javier Baez), it’s the perfect opportunity to look at Jose Ramirez for the first time in a couple of months. While fans in Cleveland have become well aware of what he has brought to the table with a breakout 2016 campaign, the rest of the nation has really experienced their first exposure to Ramirez throughout this postseason. Not only has he broken out, but the numbers paint him as one of the more clutch players in baseball.

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Wrapping up my position-by-position look at the 2016 power surge, we hit third base and outfield today. If you missed the first two pieces, here are the catcher/first base and second base/shortstop ones.

THIRD BASE

The hot corner didn’t set any records with its power output in 2016, but the 17 hitters who popped at least 20 homers tied for the third highest ever. The previous highs had a Giants-like even year pattern with 2004 (17), 2006 (21), and 2008 (18) being the other three seasons with at least 17 hitters achieving the feat. Homers have been on the rise at third base the last three years with just eight reaching 20+ HR in 2014 and then 15 last year.

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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My original intention for this week’s column was to continue on with examining some of the 2016 performances of third basemen. However, given recent events, I am now presented with an opportunity to examine a versatile (and, as such, a third base-eligible) player that has easily emerged as one of my favorite players to watch, in all of baseball. This has been a growing trend for me, and many others with North Side loyalties, over the past couple of years. The rest of the country, however, spent the National League Division Series matchup between the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants learning just what Javier Baez brings to the table.

We’re not going to talk about the glove here. For one, it really speaks for itself. Javy Baez might have the best set of hands I’ve ever seen a baseball player possess. His instincts are off the charts, along with a strong arm. Toss in the athleticism and the versatility, and it’s really no wonder that Joe Maddon is comfortable deploying him at the five different positions at which he appeared this year. He maintains fantasy eligibility at second, shortstop, and, of course, third base.

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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My goal over the next few weeks will be to reexamine some of the seasons of third basemen throughout Major League Baseball. We’ll start with the bottom tiers, in the form of a couple of groups, working our way up to individual performances that are actually worth discussing.

Since WAR isn’t necessarily a fantasy element, we’ll use something at least a little bit more relevant to our purpose here and organize our 3Bs by their Off rating. And since the objective is to observe the results and performances of the position overall, we have to start somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ just happens to be at the bottom of our 24 qualifying third sackers.

The good news is that no third baseman finished on the negative side of the WAR game. However, there were some that provided negative offensive value to their club, based off of that Off rating alone. The following represent that group, with the exception of Yunel Escobar, who represents the only “league average” player among these seven, if we’re using Off to determine that.

There certainly isn’t a whole lot within this group that will surprise anyone. The strikeout and walk rates fluctuate a bit, depending on the hitter, but the on-base and power numbers are relatively consistent across the board. The wRC+ column gives you a pretty good idea of where this hitters stand, in terms of being considered “league average”, if Off didn’t already do that for you.

With numbers like this, most of this group isn’t terribly interesting to delve deep into, especially because this was largely expected from the majority of the names on this list. But a pair worth exploring just a little bit deeper, and two that we profiled earlier this season, are Maikel Franco and Travis Shaw.

Franco is interesting because he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was expected to take the next step forward as an offensive player and a potential building block for the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, he ended up providing negative offensive value overall. There’s some power there, to be sure, as he hit 25 homers and notched the second highest ISO among this group of 3B. In that column earlier in the year, I noted Franco’s increase in swing percentage from his tendencies in 2015, particularly against offspeed and breaking pitches. Turns out, that was a trend that continued throughout the year, as he experienced a near 10 percent increase against offspeed and one of about eight percent against breaking.

This is where things get interesting. Turns out, those trends aren’t necessarily indicative of his overall struggles. Even with that in mind, he still only swung at less than two percent more pitches outside of the strike zone, and experienced a swinging strike rate of 11.8%, only a 0.7% increase. His contact rate was also up about a percentage point. And even those figures can be somewhat deceiving, as his 52.0% overall swing rate was a five percent increase (and the 21st highest rate among all qualifying Major League position players). His penchant for swinging at the first pitch crept up near 40%. That’s absurd. And while he was still able to make decent contact (30.7% Hard%) at a reasonable rate (77.1%), he’s going to have to find an appropriate balance between a legitimate approach and the aggressiveness that he’s become known for. That’ll be the challenge with the new hitting coach in Philly.

Shaw is disappointing just because of the start off to which he got in 2016. He hit .314 in April and a still quality .275 in May. Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall that a slump was on the way and, boy, did it come. His next four months saw averages of .214, .246, .167, and .203, respectively. His OBP over those final four months was just .270, while the power dipped from a solid .213 ISO in the first two months (including a .239 mark in May), to just .160 for the rest of the year. In three of those months, he posted a wRC+ at 50 or below.

Given that his BABIP in April came in at .410, followed by a .347 mark in May, there wasn’t any doubt that a slump was coming. Especially since his hard hit rate dipped in the second half by about seven percent, following from about 35 percent to a mark more around 28, finishing just into the bottom half of the third base group in that regard. While luck certainly played into it in both regards (within the hot start and the frigid finish), there’s reason to believe that Shaw can be a serviceable player in Boston. He’s a versatile player with some pop. If he can solidify the approach, as his strikeout rate did rise above 25% in 2016, there will be a place for him.

The place for the remainder of this group, however, remains to be seen. Escobar, Suarez, and Garcia all maintain relative insignificance because they’re merely stopgaps on bad teams. Headley is past his prime and showed some pop towards in July, but was decidedly average for the remainder of the year. Cuthbert was merely a fill-in for Mike Moustakas and will attempt to become more versatile this winter in order to maintain some semblance of value. In any case, Franco and Shaw remain the only intriguing options for this group moving forward.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the middle-of-the-road types before subsequently moving onto those third basemen worthy of individual attention. And visuals.

Ah, the final week of fantasy baseball. The time of year when guys you would normally never consider rostering become crucial lynchpins in your quest for championship glory. If you’re still reading fantasy content in the last week of September, chances are you’re in a highly competitive league, so I’m not going to waste your time talking about players that are likely owned. Instead, I’m focusing solely on players who are available in nearly every league. (If speed is your need, take a look at Mike Podhorzer’s column from this morning.)

Adam Rosales – San Diego Padres

Shocked doesn’t come close to describing my reaction to Rosales’ 2016 numbers. Entering this season, the 33-year-old journeyman infielder had a 0.9 Wins Above Replacement through 1,226 major-league plate appearances. This year, he’s sitting on a 2.3 WAR, with just 245 PA. In the past, Rosales always hit lefties better than righties, but it’s not like he mashed lefties either:

• vs LHP (pre-2016) – 529 PA – .242/.311/.375, .133 ISO, 15 HR
• vs RHP (pre-2016) – 697 PA – .215/.281/.317, .102 ISO, 12 HR

Now take a gander at his numbers from this season, his first in San Diego:

• vs LHP (2016) – 113 PA – .242/.354/.505, .263 ISO, 6 HR
• vs RHP (2016) – 132 PA – .224/.295/.500, .276 ISO, 7 HR

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I’m a big fan of Jake Lamb. This is likely well known throughout the land at this point. And in the first half of the season, boy, did Lamb justify every bit of praise that was showered upon him. He was making contact at a high rate, using his ability to generate hard contact to further develop his power, and reaching base at an obscene rate. Lamb’s first half performance was a rare bright spot for an Arizona Diamondbacks club that has suffered greatly throughout the season, save for a few individual offensive performances. As the club has slipped deeper into its misery, though, Jake Lamb’s performance has tailed off considerably, appearing to leave more questions than answers at the plate as we approach the end of 2016.

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I’ve spent a lot of time this season profiling some of the league’s young stars at the hot corner. Kris Bryant and Jake Lamb have each represented points of emphasis, while the likes of Manny Machado, Justin Turner, and others have all had their moment in the sun in this here column at one point or another throughout the 2016 season. But there’s one that I have failed to give his due, which is a shame because he’s doing exactly what he’s done for the better part of his (potentially) Hall of Fame career. There may not be a finer example of consistency than that of Texas Rangers third sacker Adrian Beltre.

One of the league’s longest tenured veterans, despite not being among the game’s oldest when the season began, I’ve come admire Beltre above many others over the past few seasons, and it really is for a variety of reasons. His stoic presence with which he graces the field each day is not unlike my own, whether in the classroom or manning the infield on my own slow-pitch softball team (of course, that’s really where the similarities between the two of us really begin and end). I’m also a sucker for great defense, especially on the left side of the infield. Perhaps above all, though, there is something to be said for consistency, and there may not be a more upstanding example of a steady presence in recent years than that of Adrian Beltre.

I should preface this by noting that of course there are going to be declines and discrepancies in certain aspects due to factors such as age, health, BABIP, etc. The variation is going to exist, no matter how often the word consistent is going to be tossed around. Nonetheless, that consistency comes in a number of different regards. And given that the natural reaction is to neglect those down years in Seattle, we’ll start with 2010 as the basis for labeling him as such a constant presence at the plate.

Since re-establishing himself with Boston in 2010, Beltre has been the model performer at the third base position:

If we were to take each specific category and slap it on a line graph, I’d venture to say that it’d be a pretty steady distribution as the disparity between figures exists, but isn’t terribly significant. His power has declined a bit as he’s aged, but he’s still extremely productive, as indicated by virtually everything else above. Obviously there are going to be some outliers over the course of seven seasons, something which is true of every player because baseball. That strikeout rate is especially impressive, though, just because of how little disparity actually exists over that time.

Raw numbers have a little bit more “give”, as far as their ability to fluctuate a little bit more and still allow us to declare a player consistent. Which is what makes the contact rate and contact type aspects of Beltre’s game so intriguing:

We’ve seen players whose ability to not only make contact, but solid contact, fluctuates significantly from year to year. Obviously there are players out there who make hard contact at a significantly higher rate than Beltre as the percentages stand right now, but look at the Hard% since 2011. That’s very little variation. Which is kind of the theme here with Adrian Beltre: very little variation.

Beltre has never been keen on taking a free pass. His walk rate this season has him set in the bottom half of qualifying third basemen. Last year, he ranked 12th at the position (6.6%) and in 2013 (7.2%) he ranked 14th (2014 serves as the outlier here as he walked at a clip over 9 percent). But that hasn’t been a detractor from his success, as he’s maintained the high contact rates and low swinging strike rates as illustrated above. That’s not to say he’s a free swinger, as his Swing% on pitches outside the strike zone is just 33.o% for his career. The approach is there, even if he hasn’t exactly demonstrated a penchant for walking.

The production and contact at the plate are certainly one result of that consistent approach. And as far as his pitch selection is concerned, that’s yet another element of his game where he’s been entirely steady. That’s yet another aspect of his game which has not deviated from what we’ve come to expect:

The lone exception there is the offspeed in 2014 and 2015, but everything else has remained pretty steady. Beltre has posted a mean swing percentage of 53.02 against the hard stuff, with a median of 52.58. Against breaking pitches, he’s gone for a 44.23 average and a 43.22 median, with a 43.91 average against offspeed and a median of 43.75. Each category lends itself to a pretty even distribution and really helps to drive home the point of Beltre’s consistency as it relates to a number of different aspects.

It’s almost difficult for us to appreciate production this consistent. At some point, it becomes the norm and, thus, less impressive to us. Rational or not, that just seems to be the way we, as fans or media types, tend to react to overwhelmingly stable production. Such is the case with Adrian Beltre. So while we’re obviously going to pay plenty of attention to the guys making all the noise, Kris Bryant, Josh Donaldson, etc., it’s important to take a step back once in a while and admire as reliable of production as we have seen this decade at the hot corner over these last seven or so years.