michael joseph chicago bears signing bonus

There were reasons to believe it was possible, thanks in part to his two-strike line-drive approach, his ability to keep batted balls in the Sweet Spot, and the fact that he just kinda stopped whiffing. Maybe Bellinger had completely reinvented himself as a hitter in a way that can translate less-traditionally-awesome batted ball metrics into pretty darn good results. The word usually there is doing a lot of the work, of course, and that’s much of what the previous post was about.

But I am saying that there was a fundamental misalignment in Bellinger’s results in 2023 and his underlying performance at the plate by the metrics we USUALLY associate with results. I’m not saying Bellinger in 2024 has to be the guy he was in 2019, or that you’d even remotely be hoping for that no matter how big his contract winds up being. But it is a legitimate concern when the batted ball percentiles at Statcast look like this for his MVP season in 2019:Īnd look like this for his bounce-back year in 2023:

Michael joseph chicago bears signing bonus