Cal Raleigh hit 60 home runs last season. Right now he is hitting .159, and that number still does not look real. Line him up next to a couple of other guys and the World Baseball Classic hangover stops sounding like an excuse and starts sounding like the only answer anybody has.
Start with Raleigh, because he is the loudest version of it. This is the catcher who finished second in AL MVP voting, broke the single season home run record for catchers and switch hitters in the same year, and did it playing half his games in the most pitcher friendly park in baseball. This season he went 43 straight trips to the plate without a hit, the longest active drought in the sport at the time. His hard contact rate fell from half his batted balls to under a third. By May, no regular player in baseball had seen a bigger drop in OPS from last season. He called himself awful, which is the kind of self scouting report you never want to be accurate.
Then there is Vladdy, who has the strangest version. He signed a 14 year, $500 million extension. Last October he hit .397 with eight home runs in 18 playoff games and walked off with an ALCS MVP trophy on the way to Game 7 of the World Series. This season he has seven home runs in 115 games, every single one of them on the road, and it has now been a full calendar year since he hit a regular season home run in Toronto. His OPS is the worst of his career. He is currently on the seven day concussion list after taking a knee to the head at third base.
Skenes is the quiet one, and the quiet ones scare me more. His ERA is 3.88, which for a normal pitcher is a good year and for the reigning Cy Young winner is a collapse. He threw 1.96 as a rookie and 1.97 last season. His fastball has gone from 98.8 to 98.2 to roughly 96.8, and in Miami on August 11 it averaged 95.7 with nothing over 97. Don Kelly pulled him after 65 pitches with one earned run on the board and told everybody afterward it was not injury related. Then Pittsburgh pushed his next start from Sunday to Wednesday to hand him seven days of rest. The Pirates are 3-13 in his last 16 starts.
What the World Baseball Classic Hangover Actually Looks Like
Here is the part that gets me. What do those three have in common? March.
Raleigh and Skenes were both on the Team USA roster that went all the way to the final in Miami before losing to Venezuela. Skenes pitched in it. Raleigh caught, and he looked so out of sorts that people were openly asking whether Mark DeRosa should put somebody else behind the plate. In March.
Vladdy went from Game 7 of the World Series on November 1 to his World Baseball Classic debut for the Dominican Republic in early March, three weeks before Opening Day, with a squeezed spring jammed in between. He played the most emotional baseball of his life in November and then did it again before the season even started.
NONE OF THOSE THREE GOT A NORMAL FEBRUARY. They got a tournament instead.
The Honest Counterargument
I am not going to pretend this is proven, because it is not. The historical pattern actually cuts the other way. Hitters who play in the tournament have generally come out of it hot, because seeing elite live pitching in March sharpens your timing instead of dulling it. That is a real thing and it deserves to be said out loud.
There are individual explanations sitting right there too. Vladdy’s lower back has bothered him all season, enough that he sat out the All-Star Game he was voted to start, and he tweaked a hamstring in late July. Skenes has an expected ERA near 2.90, close to a full run under his actual mark, behind a defense that fell from seventh in outs above average last season to 22nd this season. Balls that used to get caught are finding grass.
Give every one of those explanations full credit. You are still left with three of the five biggest names in the sport having the worst year of their careers at the same time, and all three of them played the most baseball.
What This Costs Baseball Next Time
Nobody knows yet, and that is exactly why this is bigger than one ugly summer. The sport is all in on this tournament. It sold the whole thing on the promise that the best players on earth will show up and treat it like it matters, and in March they absolutely did.
If the bill for showing up is a lost season.. that gets a lot harder to sell the next time an agent is sitting in the room.
Baseball got the March it always wanted. Nobody planned on this August.
