Mr. Commissioner, enough with the pace-of-play rules. For your next move as the face of MLB, can you make players wear a sign around their neck during spring training that says “WARNING: ALL STATS SHOULD BE TAKEN IN CONTEXT”?
I joke, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in meaningless spring statistics. Too often does a player look overmatched in the preseason, only to go on to produce at an All-Star level. Maybe it’s the need to analyze any little thing after a long, cold winter, but it’s a bad habit that every baseball fan takes part in.
With that being said, we can still draw conclusions from the exhibition period in a few instances.
Players like Brandon Phillips and Jacoby Ellsbury have struggled this spring and have shown signs of regression in recent seasons. Others, like Pablo Sandoval, have weight issues to battle, and guys like Matt Wieters and Ryan Braun have their own problems to overcome.
We’ll rank the most alarming superstar performances of this spring over the next few slides. Ugly numbers are probably involved, but a variety of other elements could also be cause for concern regarding a player’s future in 2015.
Let’s start with the honorable mentions.