Community Post: Should We Take a Holiday from Our Holliday?
Matt "The Rookie" takes a look at Holliday debut against other former top prospects.
By: mattatbatt22
I often joke with my podcast co-host @pitchingspecs that I prefer hitters when we’re talking about our muddy B-siders. It’s the “hardest thing in sports,” according to the Splendid Splinter and who are we to disagree with Ted? Focusing my appreciation on the thing that I practiced the most sometimes bleeds into a little hate on those Handy-dandy boys on the mound, but it’s all in love. This game is effing hard. Even when you’re a little better than some dumb jock that topped out as a broken senior DH non prospect, this game humbles us all at some point.
This applies to college kids who never get a shot at the pros, the very best prospects, and even Hall of Famers. We know this from years of watching this game and playing fantasy baseball. Your first rounder busts and you never forget it (goddamn 2021 Cody Bellinger!), the top prospect you thought would be mashing 30 dingers a year (I genuinely thought George Valera was gonna be a stud!) ends up an afterthought, and even some great players get off to terrible starts (haha Derek Jeter once had an 0-32 in an April, he sucks!).
I really didn’t think a defense of Jackson Holliday would be my first writing piece of the season. I’ve been pretty skeptical of his fantasy impact here in the Dynasty Dugout Discord. To wit: he doesn’t have great power data or batted ball distributions, and while he’s fast-ish, he hasn’t shown much skill stealing bases, and the things he’s good at (OBP, defense) are least valuable in the standard 5x5 game. However, he was Baseball America’s top overall prospect coming into this year, and many others including our own Chris Clegg, ranked him in their top 5 overall prospects for fantasy. His level of success in the minor leagues at his age is incredible and backs up the near-universal praise for the young, blond Randall Weems doppelgänger (IYKYK).
ZiPS projected Holliday for a 103 OPS+ coming into this year, which is wildly good given that he is just barely 20 years old and had all of 91 PAs at AAA last year. Exploding through all four full-season levels last year with plus plate skills at every stop as a 19-year-old shortstop has a way of charming projection models and fantasy analysts alike. I’m sure it helps that he’s got Big-League bloodlines and is a former number one overall draft pick, too! Success is practically preordained for the kid who grew up with a hitting barn nicer than my college facility in his backyard. Syzmborski’s computer comped him to two Hall-of-Famers (Alan Trammel and Arky Vaughn) and another who has a great case (Bobby Grich). I cannot stress enough how hard it is to impress Danny Zips’ AI overlord like that.
And yet impressing the models wasn’t enough. After all the calls for the kid to open the year as Baltimore’s 2nd baseman, he started the year back in a stacked AAA Norfolk lineup, not further up the Chesapeake Bay with fellow former top overall prospects Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson in B-more. Sure, it probably was Mike Elias and co. playing service time games, because we only had to wait 10 games of typical Holliday excellence in AAA before he earned his promotion up to the big leagues. A .333/.482/.595 slash with more walks than strikeouts, a new max exit velo, and an increased 9.9 degree launch angle sure seemed to tell the story that he had solved the minor leagues and was more than ready to bring that baby face to the big show.
But remember how I mentioned that this game is humbling? Seven games into his career and Holliday is failing like never before. If you haven’t followed his first seven games, you’re probably thinking, “this kid is supposed to be a generational talent, how bad an adjustment could it be?” And that would be very reasonable. You’re probably equating it to a normal, relatable failure like how I failed to pass up that fifth piece of pizza last night or how I failed to fold my laundry for the 9th day in a row. Tough things to overcome, but we’ll deal with them tomorrow, probably maybe for sure.
Friends, this doesn’t seem like those kinds of failures though. First, Jackson Holliday is failing in front of millions. Second, he’s doing so in spectacular fashion. Third, there’s something particularly awful about failing on what should be one of the greatest weeks of your life. Twenty-six plate appearances into his major league career, a moment he’s been working toward since he could walk, and the kid has one hit and one walk. Pair that with 14 strikeouts and a 70% groundball rate and you’ve got nothing short of a disaster. He entered tonight’s game with a -65wRC+ and then punched out twice more.
I’ve already seen some folks talk about how bad he is, how they’re already trying to trade him, and how they can’t believe they bought into his skills before this year. The gamblers on DraftKings and FanDuel are saying worse, I’m sure.
Baseball used to be my passion, my identity, my raison d'etre and when it went poorly, so went I. I empathize with what Holliday must be feeling because in my own small way, I’ve been there too. There’s adjusting to the bigs and then there’s hitting significantly worse than the worst pitcher who ever hit.
It’s not uncommon at all for even the very best prospects to struggle out of the gate but I wondered if this is the worst start to a career of any recent top prospect? I looked at the first 25 or so PAs for each of the top one or two hitting prospects from Baseball America’s preseason list for the last 10 years and pulled their initial data to compare with Holliday’s.
By wRC+, yeah, this is probably the worst first few PAs of any top hitting prospect in recent memory. But Holliday doesn’t have the worst BB% on this list thanks to last year’s wunderkinds Carroll and Henderson. Yoan Moncada and Julio Rodríguez both ran K rates in the neighborhood of Holliday’s. Somehow Wander Franco not only managed to be worse at having age-appropriate relationships than his brother from another mother James, but also ran a worse BABIP than Holliday in his debut!
If anything, this list should tell you that Baseball America knows what they’re doing when they anoint a player a top hitting prospect. Outside of the 2017 blip (I’ll admit to playing the Benintendo more than once though), these guys all are or were top fantasy hitters. It’s simply a list of the best of the best hitters in the game and none of them were defined by their first few PAs on the good or bad side.
For Holliday, most of this is bound to pass. It’s a stubbed toe on a bad day in a cold stretch at the most visible time. Twenty six plate appearances tells you almost nothing about a player, especially if you’re in the dynasty world. If you thought Jackson Holliday was a great player before this week, you should absolutely still think he’s going to be a great player. If you thought he might have a few things to still work on before he gets there, perhaps this confirms that bias, too.
Let’s watch a few hundred more plate appearances before we victory lap one way or another, though. And in the meantime, maybe I’ll fold that laundry and have some empathy for a kid going through a tough stretch trying to do the hardest thing in sports. It’s what Ted Williams would do.