2019 MLB Season: 5 Contract Year Players to Watch
Contract year performance can have a huge impact on one’s place in the free agent market, which is why you might want to keep an eye on these 5 players during the 2019 MLB Season.
Especially before the 2019 MLB season, baseball’s free agency system has seen better days, but that doesn’t mean that the prospect of becoming a free agent isn’t an exciting one.
When a player’s contract ends and they enter the open market they get to cash in on improvements they’ve made in past seasons, opening themselves up to plenty of new opportunities. The more you’ve improved the more lucrative these opportunities are, and having an impressive contract year can play a big part in putting you in the best possible situation.
With this said contract year’s aren’t entirely make it or break if affairs.
Players like Bryce Harper can have a subpar contract year and still cash in because they’re reputation has already been pretty fully solidified. It’s for this reason that players like Paul Goldschmidt and Chris Sale won’t have so much to sweat this season as far as potential future earnings go.
Other players in contract years are really counting on this coming season to prove their value and boost what they can get. These players either have yet to prove themselves as high-level talents, or they have had a perceived drop off over the past few years.
For these players, 2019 will be super important. Though their main focus will be on helping their team compete on the field it will be tough to keep their impending free agency off their minds, and it will surely become a huge part of their season.
Let’s take a look at a few of the players going into their contract year’s who can have the biggest impact on their careers by showing out during the 2019 MLB season.
5. Nicholas Castellanos
To this point in his career, Nicholas Castellanos hasn’t been the big bat of the future that the Tigers had hoped he might be. From 2013-2017 combined Castellanos was only worth 1.3 bWAR, a performance highlighted by a middling offensive output paired with pretty bad defense.
Luckily for Castellanos things changed for the better in 2018. He slashed .298/.354/.500 in 678 plate appearances over the season and showed flashes of the offensive prowess that made him such an attractive prospect in the first place.
His defense was still bad, but his bat made up for it and he was able to contribute to the team in ways he hadn’t in past years.
This jump in performance led some to think that Castellanos might be an offseason trade candidate, but nothing materialized on that front.
Now, heading into his contract year, Castellanos needs to show which version of him we can expect moving forward. Was 2018 a fluke? Or is he really on the path to contributing offensively in a way that makes him worth pursuing?
It will be interesting to see what areas Castellanos focuses on during the 2019 MLB season.
He’s a notoriously bad defensive outfielder, and one has to wonder if he should focus on improvements in the field or if he should just focus on hitting well enough to make up for defense. Even if Castellanos does improve his defensive ceiling in the outfield isn’t super high, so he might be better off showing he’s an offensive powerhouse.
4. Troy Tulowitzki
It’s awful to see a promising career get derailed by injuries, which is one reason that so many people will be rooting for Troy Tulowitzki during 2019 MLB season.
From 2010 to 2014, Tulo seemed like the future of baseball, and though he no longer can reclaim that title at this point in his career he still can prove that he’s a solid player worthy of a starting spot. After missing most of 2017 and all of 2018 with various lower body problems Tulowitzki has been given a second chance by the Yankees, and it’s a chance he isn’t taking for granted.
At this point it looks like Tulo will likely be the team’s opening day shortstop, filling in at that position until Didi Gregorius returns from Tommy John surgery.
Once Gregorious is back Tulowitzki is going to see his playing time go down drastically, so if he wants to show potential teams that he’s worth signing for 2020 and beyond he’ll need to make an impression early. There are a lot of rumors swirling around that the Yankees are looking to extend Didi, so it’d be surprising if Tulo stuck around longer than this season.
Facing the open market this offseason will be daunting for Tulowitzki.
Locking down a solid spot as a 34-year-old shortstop is tough enough without a history of injuries, and if he wants a shot at regular playtime with a decent paycheck he’ll need to showcase his offensive skillset against some tough pitching in the AL East.
3. Madison Bumgarner
Over the past two years, Madison Bumgarner has not been the best possible version of himself, which doesn’t mean he’s been terrible. Actually, he’s still been a pretty decent, if not durable, starting pitcher.
In 2017 and 2018 Bumgarner saw a major drop in innings pitched, but he still put up pretty respectable numbers with a 3.32 and 3.26 ERA in each season respectively.
If he hadn’t been so consistently elite in the years leading up to this his situation wouldn’t seem so dire, but after six straight seasons of 200+ innings and four straight seasons with sub-three ERA expectations get heightened.
Now, in the last year of his contract, Bumgarner is in a position where he must prove himself again, this time in an era where teams are starting to change the ways they value traditional starters. Bumgarner seems pretty opposed to the idea of following an opener, so if he wants to be a guy who goes 6+ innings he’ll need to show why teams should let him.
Bumgarner’s overall success can be pretty closely tracked with how effective his fastball is. Since 2015 the batting average against his fastball has jumped up by 50 points. This is frustrating because his average fastball velocity has only dropped about 1 MPH over that same period.
One explanation for this is that as the speed of the average MLB fastball has increased Bumgarner hasn’t adapted, and a pitch that was once tough to handle is now pedestrian. He showed some adjustment last year, relying more on his curveball than ever before, but this is an evolution he’ll need to take further during the 2019 MLB season if he wants a high-level contract with a contending team.
2. Xander Bogaerts
With 2 World Series rings to his name and a few solid seasons under his belt Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts will surely get paid heading into 2020; the question is: how much?
You’ll notice a shift here for the last two people on this list. We’ve covered a few guys who need to earn their future keep, now we’re looking at two guys more focused on maximizing it.
Last year Bogaerts had the strongest season of his relatively young career. He slashed .288/.360/.522 with 23 home runs over 580 plate appearances while posting a respectable 1.1 UZR at shortstop.
There aren’t many shortstops in the game who will give you so much offensive production without taking away from your team defensively, so there will be plenty of teams who will be interested in Xander.
Though Bogaerts’ performance last year was his best yet, it was far from a major outlier. Over the last four seasons, he’s racked up 14.3 bWAR, and he’s also been super durable, never falling below 550 plate appearances.
With all said, what will teams be looking at in Bogaerts during the 2019 MLB season? What should he do to make himself a more attractive option?
One thing to keep an eye on is how hard he’s hitting the ball. Last year Bogaerts saw a major jump in his average exit velocity, which increased by around 3 MPH to 90.5 MPH, putting him in MLB’s top 50. Bogaerts was able to do this without raising his K%, and he actually had the highest BB% of his career.
It’s promising that Bogaerts was able to grow in this area without sacrificing his ability to get on base or make contact, and you should expect more of the same during the 2019 MLB season.
Bogaerts showed plenty of pop last year, but if he can become a 30+ home run guy then he might start approaching Francisco Lindor-level value. There’s no guarantee this will happen, but it’s not a bad ceiling to have.
On top of this Bogaerts will only be 27 at the start of the 2020 season, so he could be a player worth locking up long term. The possibility of this hinges a lot on this season, which will certainly be one to watch.
1. Anthony Rendon
Anthony Rendon’s time playing second fiddle for the Nationals is over, and he’s now the main man on a Washington team poised to make a playoff run. This is exciting for Rendon, and if he chooses to he can use this time in the spotlight to leverage a big contract for 2020 and beyond.
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Rendon’s first year with Washington came in 2013, which was the second year of Bryce Harper’s tenure with the team. Since then Rendon has only been worth 1 less bWAR than Harper (21.1 and 22.2 bWAR respectively), so he’ll have no problem taking the mantle as the face of the National’s franchise.
How solid Rendon has been offensively over the past three years can’t really be overstated.
He’s twice batted over .300 and has slashed a combined .292/.374/.504 since 2016. Over that period he’s consistently had an average exit velocity in the league’s top 50, and his 2018 hard hit percentage was 10 percentage points above the league average.
This alone might be enough to make Rendon’s contract year interesting, but there are also some circumstances outside of his control that has really changed how he’ll be viewed in free agency.
Rendon was slated to be the second most attractive third baseman in the 2019-20 free agent class after Nolan Arenado. When Arenado signed an extension with the Rockies in February Rendon was catapulted to the number one spot, arguably making him the best position player in the entire group.
There were a lot of teams that passed on Manny Machado this winter who justified the decision by saying they were waiting for Arenado. Now, with Arenado off the board, they might need to go all or nothing for Rendon to appease fans and shore up their rosters.
Rendon is probably a tick below Machado value wise right now, but with a strong 2019 MLB season, he can push himself to or even beyond Machado’s level, meaning he’d have a big payday incoming.
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It’s possible this big future offer will come from the Nationals, who wouldn’t want to lose Harper and Rendon in back to back years. All of these circumstances combine to give Rendon a lot of negotiating power, and that power will only grow if he continues to play well in this coming season.