This year could put Bobby Witt Jr. on two very different paths depending on how the season plays out.
Last year Bobby Witt Jr. put up the 104th-best season of all time for any position player in the history of major league baseball per Baseball Reference. That is a rather impressive feat, but Fangraphs had him as even better than that. Out of 20,786 position player seasons since 1900 (min 350PA), fWAR has Bobby as the 42nd-best season. He has shown that his top-end production belongs with the greatest of all time. This year he has a chance to show whether that means he is heading toward Cooperstown like a normal great player or if he is setting a trajectory that is aimed at the inner circle.
No one can put up 10 WAR every year. Mike Trout only did it twice per fWAR and bWAR (though not in the same two years). Barry Bonds did it four times in bWAR and five by fWAR. The best of the best cannot maintain the sort of level that Witt showed last season. Bobby still has zero 10 bWAR seasons, he was at 9.4 last year – so instead of focusing on 10 WAR seasons I looked at the top 100 position player seasons since integration in 1947. On those lists, Bobby now ranks 17th (fWAR) or 60th (rWAR), but I want to focus on the players who made it on the list more than once, which is what his next step is.
There are players that are in the top 100 that you would not expect – JD Drew in 2004, Ben Zobrist in 2009, Norm Cash in 1961. Those, to me, are good players having their career year plus BABIP luck. Again, all of them had good careers, but they are not HoF quality. The players who are on these lists twice are different.
*Shohei Ohtani is not included since this was position players only and he is complicated
The lists are nearly identical, 20 players cover 69 years for bWAR and 19 players cover 67 for fWAR. Henry Aaron and Mookie Betts made the bWAR list with 2 years each while Wade Boggs was on the fWAR list and only had 1 season for the other. Regardless, the names here are inarguably the best of the past 75 years of baseball. All of these are Hall of Famers, will be, or are not because of steroids. That is a list that Bobby could now join with one more season like 2024. Also, notice that George Brett is not on this list, so even some all-time greats have not done enough to make this list.
This is, in part, my warning to some fans going into 2025. Do not expect Bobby Witt Jr. to do what he did last year. Last season was something special that almost no one can repeat. If Bobby comes in this year and puts up a seven-win season, he is still one of the best handful of baseball players in the world right now. I won’t say he can’t repeat last season, but it is extremely unlikely and if he does that puts him in even more rarefied air. Back-to-back seasons of this caliber is an even shorter list that cuts out about half of those 21 players in the table.
If Bobby Witt Jr. puts up another 9+ WAR season in 2025, his trajectory is not merely a guy headed toward the Hall of Fame, but toward the true inner circle, first-ballot sort of discussion. At that point, I think he would be the best player in baseball right now not named Ohtani and maybe Aaron Judge if he can put up another monster year. He would pass the other elites who have not been able to put up two such seasons, think Mookie Betts and Juan Soto. I was expecting Bobby to be good, but the sky feels like the limit right now. All the normal caveats apply when you are talking about a guy who hasn’t even turned 25 yet. The back half of Mike Trout’s career is rapidly becoming a cautionary tale like Ken Griffey Jr. before him. Even the elite of the elite are not immune and we have seen Nomar Garciaparra, Grady Sizemore, and Giancarlo Stanton fall of amazing career arcs at very young ages.
I do not want to give people the impression that Bobby Witt Jr. is going to go down as the best Royals ever and the best player of this generation. That is saying too much, too soon. However, I do want people to know that it is within the realm of possibility. This season will start solidifying which track he is on. If he puts up a normal good season, All-Star and maybe sneaking into the down-ballot MVP voting, then last year is going to look very different than it does right now. There is nothing wrong with that, and that still likely means he is heading to Cooperstown someday if that is the player he is with the potential of spiking to another all-time year.
On the other hand, if he can even come within shouting distance of what he did last year, watch out. That puts him on a list of special players and pushes his long-term expectations into the stratosphere.