With a quarter of the MLB season left, these are the worst players to grace the American League this year.
You know the guy on your team. He’s the hitter who comes up to bat in a clutch situation and pops out to second. He’s the fielder who lets a ball clank off his glove at the worst time, or makes a diving stop only to throw it into the seats behind home. Maybe he’s the starting pitcher who keeps getting rocked, start after start after start, or the reliever who pours gasoline on every fire. He’s the guy in MLB who’s having the worst season of anyone on your favorite team. He’s your team’s worst player.
Sometimes good players have surprisingly bad years. A guy like Justin Upton can be an above average player for seven straight years and then suddenly lose his ability to hit. Because he’s been so good for so long, he sticks in the lineup and continues to drag the team down. A good pitcher may get bit by the home run bug and his ERA skyrockets. In that same vein, a pitcher can have bad luck on balls in play, leading to a high BABIP, and his ERA goes up along with it.
Just as every team has to have a best player in a given year, every team must have a worst player. The following list contains the player having the worst season for each team in the American League so far this year. To create this list, I started with the two versions of Wins Above Replacement, Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs, to narrow the list down, then made my choice from those players. For pitchers, I used the Fangraphs WAR based on Runs Allowed rather than FIP because I want to judge the players based on what has actually happened this year.
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