MLB Best Players: Past calendar year studs and duds

Who are the MLB best players and worst players at each position over the last 365 days?

Like former commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, the game “is designed to break your heart.” It begins in the spring, when everything else begins. It’s there in the summer, along with barbecues and days at the beach. Then, when the weather turns bad, baseball leaves us. Some fans turn to football or basketball in the winter, others just look out the window waiting until baseball season starts again.

Baseball fans think of seasons as separate units of time. That’s how we digest the game. The strike-shortened 1981 season. The “Miracle Mets” of 1969. The Great Home Run Chase of 1998. One season ends and we put it in the record books and wait until the next one begins.

Because we think of baseball in set, distinct seasons, we can sometimes miss trends that carry over from one season to the next. Some players get hot in August and it carries over into the following April, May and June. Others go into a funk in September and continue to struggle for days, weeks or months the next year.

With this in mind, I was curious about which players have been on an extended run of greatness over the past calendar year. Who’s the top player in baseball since last year at this time? What surprising names have will we find on this list?

Then we have the other end of the spectrum, the players who have been bad in the first half of this season and were bad in the second half of last season. These are the guys to worry about and there are a few who are getting up there in age and have been worth very little over the past calendar year. Some of these guys have been paid many millions of dollars and still have many millions coming.

This is a position-by-position breakdown of the past calendar year’s studs and duds.