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Lindor making case as baseball’s best shortstop
- Updated: May 5, 2016
The case has been made for Carlos Correa as baseball’s best shortstop. After all, he was the No. 1 overall Draft pick, he was last year’s American League Rookie of the Year Award winner, and he’s even been called the best player in the Major Leagues (maybe). When FanGraphs ran its preseason staff predictions a couple months back, 11 out of 55 employees chose Correa to win the AL MVP Award. Beside he and Mike Trout, no other player received more than four votes. The public opinion on the matter seems almost unanimous: Correa is viewed as baseball’s best shortstop, just 126 games into the 21-year-old’s big league career.
But there’s a 22-year-old, just 123 games into his Major League career, who wasn’t the AL Rookie of the Year Award winner and received zero preseason AL MVP Award picks, whose case for baseball’s best shortstop might be just as strong as Correa’s. It’s time we consider whether it’s actually Francisco Lindor who is baseball’s best shortstop.
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The argument might not have to be complicated. Correa gained his status so quickly due to the hype and the performance. Both need to be present for a player to be accepted as a bona fide superstar in less than a calendar year. It’s when the two collide that lofty claims like “baseball’s best shortstop” or “MVP candidate” start to seem reasonable. So let’s start with the hype.
Correa went first in the 2012 Draft, Lindor was the No. 8 overall pick in ’11. At the conclusion of the ’14 season, MLBPipeline.com had Correa ranked as the No. 2 prospect in MLB, with Lindor at No. 4. And when FanGraphs’ prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel evaluated Correa last offseason, he put a 65 future value on him, on the 20-80 scouting scale. As prospects, Correa was regarded slightly higher, but the difference was essentially negligible. With similar pedigrees, then, we move onto production since their debuts.
Over the past calendar year, Lindor has been one of the 15 best position players in baseball by FanGraphs’ WAR calculation, and the the top shortstop in the game. …
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