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By Adam Eyal
The 2017 Major League Baseball season has only just finished, but some players should have given up a long time ago.
Every year scouts and experts pick out the hottest prospects to watch out for over the coming months. These players are meant to deliver some of the best baseball in the world, but occasionally they leave us disappointed. Whether it’s through injury, personal issues or even a lack of motivation, there are many reasons why they let the side down.
After watching the games, we’ve picked out ten of the players who raised our expectations, then caused us the greatest disappointment.
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Now, the Baseball Players who have Disappointed Us in 2017:
- Rougned Odor
Rougned Odor had a fantastic 2016 season, so we were expecting him to bounce back with the same big hits. However, this season he’s been hitting .215/.254/.417, which simply isn’t good enough to maintain a long-term career. He can hit home runs – with 30 under his belt this year alone – but he’s out too often to make him an entertaining player.
- Kyle Schwarber
Kyle Schwarber was always a little suspect when it came to his defence, but his hitting skills in the World Series made him a safe prospect. He’s known for his big hits – and he was meant to be fully fit at the start of the 2017 MLB season – but by landing a .171 it turns out that he isn’t all he’s cracked up to be.
- Miguel Cabrera
Miguel Cabrera is costing the Detroit Tigers almost $200 million in total, but he’s turning out to be an expensive mistake. Last year he hit 13 home runs, but this year has seen a dramatic drop in performance. Hitting just three home runs, having the lowest slugging percentage that he’s ever had and scoring significantly below average, Cabrera’s performance this year could be a worrying sign of injury.
- Carlos Gonzalez
2017 is Carlos Gonzalez’s worst MLB season to date. He’s seen a minus-1.8 UZR and a minus-1.6 WAR: shockingly poor performances from the guy who won Gold Gloves not once, but three times. This isn’t just us being picky – even Gonzalez realizes that his season has been poor, admitting that he felt like ‘the worst player in the game’ earlier this year.
- Jonathan Lucroy
Jonathan Lucroy has scored twenty fewer home runs in the 2017 season than he did last year. That isn’t just a sign of having a bad day: that’s an entire bad season. He was highly praised for being a catcher, but with rumors that the Rangers aren’t that keen to hold onto him, Lucroy can’t even save himself.
- Byron Buxton
Byron Buxton was a hot prospect a couple of years ago, but since then his hitting has been below par at best. With just five home runs and .200/.274/.291 under his belt this season, it looks like he’s going to fall into field positions rather than being the big hitter that everyone expected. He’s still young so he has plenty of time to improve, but at 23 he’s already coming under threat from some of the young up-and-comers of next year.
- Trevor Story
It always seems harsh to judge a player who has been plagued by injury, but even a rocky couple of seasons can’t excuse some of Trevor Story’s numbers. His strikeout rate is 38.4% but he has scored 11 home runs – more than double that of some other players who have disappointed us. As things stand, he’s firmly in the ‘mediocre’ category, a far cry from the runaway success that he saw in 2016.
- Jose Bautista
Could 2017 be the last season in Jose Bautista’s baseball career? He’s one of several Blue Jays players who have had a dismal year, managing only two home runs and a minus-9 DRS. He was only signed on a short-term contract, and at 36 years old he has little time left to improve his game.
- Mark Trumbo
In 2016 Mark Trumbo seemed like the most under-rated player on the circuit. After scoring 47 home runs, it seemed ludicrous that no clubs wanted to part with their cash. Maybe they knew something we didn’t: Trumbo’s homers have dropped by more than half, his slugging percentage is down by over .130, and his on-base percentage is now .289. If those were his stats a few years ago, he probably would have struggled to catch the attention of even the Orioles.
- Albert Pujols
After having a successful history in baseball, the skills of Albert Pujols are tailing off disappointingly quickly. This season has seen him hit plenty of records for all the wrong reasons, with his slugging percentage and OBP all being the lowest statistics of his entire career. He’s already 37, so his remaining four years with the Angels are going to be pretty tough to watch.
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