The Worst Everyday Players in Baseball (Part 2)

In my last post, I discussed some of the worst players in baseball who get run out everyday. It is not surprising that a great many of them are aging veterans who were once great and have aged poorly. Some of them are paid a great deal of money and no GM wants to sit a $25 million / year player. It just doesn't look good and there is always the hope that they will break out for a few weeks at a time. Plus, future Hall of Famers, even aging ones, bring people to the ballpark.

Moving beyond those aging vets, there is another group of players that gets rolled out everyday, young players, perhaps future stars, particularly in premium defensive positions. Here are 14 players with a negative WAR over an entire season with at least 502 plate appearances:

As with the older group, very few of these teams were in contention. Of these players, only Nicholas Castellanos was on a playoff team. The 2014 Tigers managed to win their division, but were swept out of the playoffs in 3 games by the Orioles. Only one other player was on a winning team. That is not terribly surprising as great teams can not afford to play a bad player everyday. The players making more than minimum wage (those not in the half-million dollar range) were all international free agents. Of the international players, only Dayan Viciedo is completely out of the game. Replacing a corner outfielder / first baseman making less than $3 million is not the hardest thing to do.

Eleven of these fourteen players play a premium infield position. Tommy Joseph plays first primarily, and is excluded from this number. Thus, the vast majority of players allowed to run up a season of such futility play at positions that are harder to replace. On both teams with winning records the subpar player was a 3rd baseman.

On their surface, these players don't have a lot in common, but we can dig deeper and find more commonalities. For those who were drafted (international free agents do not participate in the draft), they all have one big thing in common: they were drafted high.

These are not low level draft choices. Dansby Swanson was the number 1 overall draft pick in the 2015 draft. All except Tommy Joseph were first round draft picks and Joseph was picked early in the second round. Much like with the aging veterans I looked at in the last post, a GM wants to get a high draft pick out on the field. A wasted first round pick is embarrassing. Tommy Joseph is playing in AAA and has a chance to get back to the big leagues because of his power. However, he strikes out an alarming clip (better than 1 per game in the minors this year), so that may hold him back. Matt Dominguez is currently in the Japanese league, so his big league days are most likely behind him. The others are still playing the game, some at a fairly high level.

The international players were a mix of outright rookies and players who had previously established themselves. Only 1 of the rookies was regarded enough to make that season's top 100 prospects list (according to Baseball Prospectus), Jose Peraza. In the table below, the rookies are highlighted in yellow. If they are not highlighted, then their previous season's WAR is listed:

As with the drafted players, most are still in the game. Yasmany Tomas is in AAA, though many look at his signing as a disaster for the Diamondbacks. Dayan Viciedo is now in his third year playing for the Chunichi Dragons. Given their name, you would think they would have a more awesome logo than this:

Seriously guys, you're the dragons. Back to the drawing board with that one. The players who were not rookies on the list, except for Viciedo, had established themselves as starters in the previous season. Remember that, in general, a WAR of 2.0 or greater is a solid major league starter. The fact that these players were allowed to be so bad for an entire season has to rest, at least in part, on the fact that they were decent just the prior year. Young players often struggle at times and the manager and GM were probably hoping they would play out of their slump.

Given how small the sample size is, broad conclusions cannot be drawn about they types of young players who are allowed to be so bad for an entire season. However, some generalities do seem to have emerged. If they were drafted, they were drafted high. They generally play on bad teams. If they aren't rookies, they have a season or two that established them as everyday players. They generally play at premium defensive positions. Given their age, and the fact that so many are still in the game, these are generally decent players that had a really bad year.