Comeback Player of the Year, 2017

We don’t play in keeper leagues, for various good reasons, but right now, we’re kind of regretting that we don’t. As we look over our portfolio of leagues during the mid-season lull, we see a couple in which we’re doing quite well, and a couple more in which we are in contention to be in contention. But in one league—and of course it’s the one that cost us more to enter than all the others combined—we are hopeless. That would be our entry in the NFBC Auction Championship, in which we stand 12th of 15 in our league and 125th of 165 overall. Both of these, distressingly, constitute our high water marks in that league so far this season.

We won’t bother with a full post-mortem now. All you need to know is that we are fifth from the bottom overall in pitching, and all you need to know about that is that we’re midpack in saves, signifying that we are incapable of identifying good mid-priced and low-priced starters. If you want to visit the morgue and conduct an autopsy, go here. We got to wondering, though: if this were a keeper league, whom would we try to trade for? For at least some of you, this isn’t the moot question it is for us.

There are obvious answers to this question, not including starting pitchers, about whom we are not to be trusted. First, of course, there are Grade A prospects who aren’t expected to be in full MLB flower until next season. Dansby Swanson and Yoan Moncada are the obvious examples. Then, there are relief pitchers who aren’t closers now, and probably aren’t going to be before the end of the season, but could well be next spring. We predict that two of Bruce Rondon, Cam Bedrosian, and Felipe Rivero fit that description, though we don’t know which two.

But you didn’t need us to tell you these things. As we looked over the league’s rosters, though, Victor Martinez caught our eye, prompting bittersweet emotions. As you no doubt know, Victor Martinez is a great hitter, and is proving it yet again this season at age 37, with a slash line of .305/.353/.514 and an expected total output of about 30 home runs and 100 RBIs. Our pleasure at seeing an old guy succeed is tempered by our painful recollections of last season, when Martinez kept us from winning our NFBC slow-draft league. The 2015-model Martinez hurt his knee during the winter, tried to come back too soon, hurt his knee again, went on the DL, and came back again, still too soon. He ended with a line of .245/.301/.366 in almost 500 plate appearances. In other words, you’d have been better off with Alexei Ramirez, a shortstop having a subpar year, except that Ramirez steals bases. Concerns about Martinez’s health this season depressed his draft price to $2 in one of our auction leagues and $4 in the other, and—as you will have surmised—we weren’t the buyers.

That’s the kind of thing that can make your season, so we got to wondering: who might be the 2017 version of Victor Martinez? That is, who is the great but aging hitter who is hampered if not entirely sidelined by injury this season, but might come back strong next year? This question plucked the mystic chords of memory, and we recalled that one of our successes last season was envisioning, as a 2015 Bold Prediction, the resuscitation of Carlos Beltran. As we noted at the time, there were some sabermetric reasons to like him, but what sold us was something more intuitive. There, at the very top of Beltran’s comparables in Baseball Reference, was Dave Winfield, who, we recalled, sat out the 1989 season with an injury, and then came back unexpectedly strong at age 38—Beltran’s age last year—in 1990.

You can see where we’re going with this. Beltran’s comparables are all retired. But there among Martinez’s comparables we found Travis Fryman (horrible, injury-related 1999 season at age 30, best season of his career in 2000). We found Chase Utley (bad injury-related season in 2015 at age 36, good-not-great season this year). And we found David Wright. Aha, we thought.

Wright is a great hitter who, over the course of his 13-season career, has had a variety of significant injuries, most of which he’s managed to play through. Not last year, though, when he was on his way to a pretty great season when spinal stenosis got in the way. And not this year, when he was heading towards a not-that-great season when he went down with a herniated disk in his neck, for which he had (apparently) season-ending surgery.

As with Martinez, concerns over Wright’s health meant he sold for cheap in auctions this season ($2 in our NFBC league), so if he’s healthy next year the price should be right in a keeper league. But will he be healthy? Wright will be 34, and we can tell you from unhappy personal experience that spinal stenosis doesn’t go away and (as it did for Wright) generally gets worse. And while we gather that people do recover from cervical discectomies, which is the surgery Wright had, we’re not sure that any of them are 34-year-old once-elite baseball players with chronic degenerative lower back problems and declining defensive skills. But of course, that’s the point. If the prognosis were better, other teams in your league might want him.

A couple of other interesting tidbits. Sweet as it would be to tell you that Martinez shows up as a comparable to Wright, he doesn’t. But Fryman, Utley, and (ha!) Winfield do. And honesty compels us to note that another comparable for both Wright and Martinez is Nomar Garciaparra, whose steady, three-season, injury-related (or so most would say) decline, starting at age 33, brought numerous Fantasy players to grief. Paying full price for Garciaparra in 2008 or even 2009 would have destroyed your season.

We know that the approach we’re taking lacks, shall we say, analytical rigor. It’s more like dowsing. If you’re in a keeper league and in the same sinking boat we’re in, but you don’t want Wright, don’t trade for him. We would if we could, though.