I thought his heyday was over. How did Yelich become an All-Star again
I thought his heyday was over. How did Yelich become an All-Star again
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The former MVP is an All-Star again.
The Major League Baseball secretariat on July 4 (Korea time) unveiled the list of 18 fielders who will be selected for the 2024 All-Star Game. They are the "best nine" in each league selected by the All-Star fan vote.
Aaron Judge (NYY) of the American League and Bryce Harper (PHI) of the National League confirmed their 6th and 7th All-Star Game starts, respectively, and some players were back on the All-Star Game stage in five difficulties.
Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich won the honor of being selected as the third All-Star and the second All-Star Game. After being named the All-Star for two consecutive years from 2018 to 2019, Yelich will play in the All-Star Game again for the first time in five years.
Yelichin is displaying his best performance in the first half of this season, which is a matter of course to be selected as an All-Star. Yelichin played in 61 games through Sunday, recording .333/.408/.519 with nine homers, 37 RBIs and 19 steals. He has yet to meet the requirement, as he has been out for about three weeks due to injury in the early days of this season, but is still below the current requirement of 10 at-bats. He is currently batting more than 10 percent higher than Shohei Ohtani (LAD, batting average of .319), who is the batting leader in the National League.
In fact, the reversal was not easy to predict. Yelich was stepping down from the top position and gradually moving away from the All-Star team. The shining time was Yelich, who seemed to have passed.
Yelich, born in 1991, was drafted by the Florida Marlins as the 23rd overall pick in the first round of the rookie draft in 2010 and made his big league debut in 2013. He won the Gold Glove award in his first full-time season in 2014, and played in 643 games for the Miami Marlins for five years through the 2017 season, recording .290/.369/.432 59 homers, 293 RBIs and 72 steals. Being a batter with exquisite mid- to long-range feet and strong defense, Yelich made it into Miami's top outfield team along with Giancarlo Stanton (now NYY) and Marcel Ojuna (now ATL).
Yelich was also traded to Milwaukee prior to the 2018 season as Miami went on a "fire sale" after Jose Fernandez's sudden accident. Milwaukee acquired Yelich and sent four prospects, including then-top prospect Luis Brinson, to Miami.
Yelich immediately exploded after moving to a different team. In 2018, the first season after joining the Milwaukee Brewers, he became the batting champion with 147 games, .326/.402/.598 with 36 homers, 100 RBIs and 22 steals, and won the National League MVP award. Yelich, who also had 130 games, .329/.429/.671 with 44 homers, 97 RBIs and 30 steals, ranked first in the National League in terms of batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and ranked second in the 2019 MVP. He was named an All-Star for the second consecutive year and also won the Silver Slugger award.
Yelich won his second MVP at the age of 27. Yelich seemed to take a step forward with the trade and become the best player to dominate the league.
However, this was not the case. Yelich had only .205/.356/.430 12 homers and 22 RBIs in 58 games in the shorter season, and had the worst record of .248/.362/.474 with nine homers and 51 RBIs in 117 games in the 2021 season. Yelich, who had an OPS of less than 0.800 for the third consecutive year in the 2020-2022 season, had only .243/.358/.388 with 35 homers and 130 RBIs and 32 steals in three years. He was a completely different player from Yelich in 2018-2019.
Milwaukee also felt frustrated. Milwaukee, which had watched the best two years in the 2018-2019 season, signed a nine-year, 215 million-dollar contract with Yelich ahead of the 2020 season, breaking the team's stance of rarely signing a long-term contract with a player. However, Yelich, who fell right after signing the contract, failed to rebound. He had 144 games, .278/.370/.447 with 19 homers, 76 RBIs, and 28 steals last year, improving from the previous three seasons, but it was a big difference from the 2018-2019 season.
Of course, it is difficult to say that the MVP season has fully recovered its skills this year. Looking at the Saber Matrix indicators, there are many differences from the 2018-2019 season.
During the 2018-2019 season, Yelich had a ratio of nearly 15 percent of his shots at the barrel. Although his shooting angle was not very high, he had a whopping 93 miles per hour on average, recording the expected batting average and slugging percentage of the top 1 percent in the league. However, this year, he has only recorded the half of his barrel hitting percentage (6.7 percent) and the expected slugging percentage (top 27 percent) of his players in the upper and middle ranks. Although his on-base percentage (xwOBA) and contact on-base percentage (xwOBAcon), which are indicators of batting quality, are also in the top ranks, they are not at the highest level in the league as they were five years ago. Of course, his record is better than that of the past four years.
While batting quality is worse than that at the time, the batting average of BABIP (inplay batting average) is setting a career high. Yelich had a career-high BABIP of 0.348 until last year, but his overall BABIP was 0.395 this year. As it is difficult to say that the batting average of in-play batting has increased due to improved batting quality, it is also possible to interpret that he is having considerable luck.
Of course, since he is still a batter with strong batting average of 91 miles per hour, not everything can be regarded as luck. Rather, it is possible to interpret that his performance over the past few years was the result of lack of luck. Yelich was never a low-productivity hitter, although he was sluggish compared to the MVP season and was disappointed compared to the expectations of a special contract. 메이저놀이터
Yelich is still 32. However, his prime is not over yet. There is a high possibility that this season could be the beginning of a rebound. Attention is focusing on how Yelich, who became an All-Star again in five years, will perform.