I have no basis for this, but I have this feeling that this is the season things just come together for Blanco, much like they did for Framber and Abreu after slow starts to their careers. Ronel will be a late bloomer, and is going to be a huge weapon this year.....maybe.
If anything, he will certainly appear to have turned a corner in ST. Whether that sticks through the season is anyone’s guess. Hopefully he has worked out some kind of fix for his fastball.
So who will have a breakout season this year? Last season in was Chas, Javier and Pena the year before, Garcia the year before that. I'm guessing Pena will take a step in his offense. Diaz will be up and down this season because people will stop giving him pitches to swing at and he will have to figure it out.
Breakout years: Diaz, Pena, Meyers, Cabbage, Brown, Whitley, Coleman, Sousa Good years: J Abreu, Bregman, Tucker, Alvarez, Dubon, Caratini, Javier, Garcia, Hader, B Abreu Down years: Altuve, McCormick, Verlander, Framber, Urquidy, France, McCullers, Pressly Meh: Singleton, Bielak
I won’t bet against him but I would take the under. He is my 2nd favorite athlete of all time, but he is at the age where every year is a roll of the dice as to when he will fall off an age related cliff. I hope he stays elite until he’s 40 but he is now in a new level of risk.
Literally just talked about this on the podcast today when talking about projections for the infield. They had Altuve at like 25 HR’s and 275/350/449 with a 127 wRC+. Thats a line that would be a step back from the last 2 years but one I would take for all the reasons that you lay out.
I feel like he's going to make the transition back to more of what he was early in his career. Less power but more hits. I could see him getting closer to the 200 hit/season with 15-20 hrs as his power starts to diminish but he's still maintains his bat to ball skills.
This would be very uncommon. Power tends to maintain longer than fast twitch muscle which is why batting averages for everyone goes down over time while homeruns are still good later into 30s and sometimes longer. It is much more likely that he continues the trend of be coming more selective and continues walking as his hits and AVG drop which will keep the OB% close but with a drop in SLG even if he keeps 20+ HR power.
That sounds like if you asked AI to write a country song about minor league baseball. But the production quality is pretty high so that’s cool. Way better than Brett Myers.
This. Altuve is likely to hit less doubles as age catches up to him. He will probably strike out the same or less and hit the same number of HR, but his BABIP will drop; his career BABIP has been .348 but I would expect that to be closer to .300 over the next 5 seasons. He is already stealing a lot fewer bases than he did in the first 6 seasons of his career. .270/.350/.470 is probably a decent slash line prediction for the rest of his contract. Still a very good player but not as good as he’s been the last decade especially considering his defensive value will also decline. In 2-3 years he will need to be hitting 5th or 6th in the lineup rather than leadoff (and probably also getting 50-60 games at DH instead of playing 2B every day) if Houston is still expecting to win the World Series. At this point I would probably bet pretty heavily against him reaching 3000 hits since I don’t think he’s the type to hang around another 3 seasons in his 40s as a bad player just to get those last 200-300 hits to reach the milestone.
I looked at OPS+ for ages 33-39 for the top 50 second basemen (by JAWS) who have played in the past 50 years. Age 33= 19 w/ 113.5 OPS+ Age 34= 18 w/ 115.2 OPS+ Age 35= 16 w/ 113.0 OPS+ Age 36= 17 w/ 101.9 OPS+* Age 37= 15 w/ 104.6 OPS+ Age 38= 10 w/ 105.3 OPS+ Age 39= 9 w/ 100.1 OPS+ *Sandberg missed his age 35 season which is why there are more @ age 36 than 35. Since Altuve is signed through age 39, I think him retiring or not playing before then is highly unlikely except for injury so am not concerned about the players who fell away. Bad news= Altuve is very likely to take a step back at age 36. Good news= He is very likely to remain at least an average MLB hitter throughout the length of this contract. 100.1 from 113.5 is an 11.8% drop. Also consider the age 33 average is 113.5 and Altuve hit 151 so he is starting much higher than these numbers. A 12% reduction still keeps him over 130 but that may be optimistic. Edit: Now I'm going to do 3B to see how a Bregman extension may work out.
