Bobby and Gunnar: The future of shortstop
Bobby Witt and Gunnar Henderson are young, exciting, and talented. Hopefully we see them competing for MVPs for years to come.
The Royals have won the Wild Card series, and the Orioles’ playoff woes continue. But Baltimore has a very bright future ahead of them if they can just get some more pitching. Plenty of people will be talking and writing about the upcoming series with the Yankees, but I want to talk about Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. before moving on to the next set of games. They are clearly two of the best young stars in the game, and along with Elly De La Cruz they are setting up shortstop to be one of the star-studded positions of this coming era of baseball.
Both Bobby and Gunnar had phenomenal seasons, no one will argue with that. In WAR, as calculated by Fangraphs, they finished second (10.4 fWAR) and fifth (8.0) respectively. Most years that would mean one of them was getting an MVP trophy, but probably not this year. Baseball-Reference likes Henderson a bit more and has him at 9.1 wins, and they like Witt a bit less at 9.4 wins. Either way, both were very, very good. They took different paths to those sparkling top-line numbers, so let’s take a look at their seasons in some more depth.
Gunnar Henderson was straight mashing baseballs early in the season. He hit 10 homers by the end of April, 8 more in May, and 8 again in June. By the All-Star break he had 28 bombs and was looking like he had a shot at MVP. After the break, his power dropped off significantly and he ended the year with 37 home runs. That Fangraphs WAR number above was already at 5.7 in mid-July, so ending up at 8.0 meant his pace dropped way off down the stretch. Naturally, the question then becomes which half should we believe in more?
The home run rate that Henderson was managing in the first half was partially a mirage. His HR/FP rate was 31.1%, well above his career rate of 21.6%. Some players can maintain a rate up 30%, but they tend to be named Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani. There are players here and there that manage it for a full season, like Teoscar Hernandez in 2020, but those usually turn out to be fluky unless someone establishes themselves as an elite power guy and can do it repeatedly. I don’t think 23-year-old Gunnar Henderson is that guy, but maybe in his peak power years he will be. He definitely hits the ball hard:
There is a lot to like there on his Baseball Savant page. His launch angle is pretty low on average however, and a lot of his homers come from playing in Camden Yards. It favors left-handed power with a park factor of 111 for home runs if you isolate left handed batters. I think a 28-year-old Henderson might have grown into some more power and has begun putting up some serious power numbers, but he has not quite shown that he can sustain it the way the elite power guys do yet. His rookie-year splits were not quite so extreme, and they were flipped. He struggled a bit out of the gate and then got hot in June before leveling out posting 125, 123, and 125 wRC+ values in July, August, and September. His second half was less steady this year, but the overall number of 131 is right in line with his rookie season. For now, I would say he is a very good hitter, but not in the top tier because of the launch angle and a bit too much swing-and-miss.
Bobby Witt Jr. has taken a very different path to stardom. His rookie year was way less impressive and at the end of 2023, most people would have expected him to be the lesser player of the two in 2024. That second-half surge that Bobby had in his second full season carried over to this year however, and he has been the best player in baseball since the 2023 All-Star break posting 13.7 fWAR across 229 games. Gunnar Henderson is number five in fWAR across that stretch, so we might just be heading into a world where they are the preeminent talents in the game (non-Ohtani division) battling for shortstop supremacy. Francisco Lindor is right there with them too. It is kind of like the late 1990s when A-Rod and Nomar showed up and everyone thought a new breed of power-hitting shortstops was going to change baseball forever, and maybe they did.
Back to Bobby, he has been really good now for a year and a half, but it is more than that. In 2024 his worst month was September when he still hit .278/.371/.444 for a 126 wRC+. He has now been an above-average hitter for 9 consecutive months, and way above average for most of them. He is also only behind Dansby Swanson in Baseball Savant fielding run value for shortstops, so while I keep thinking he is the best defensive shortstop in the game , I should probably modify that to “one of the top shortstops in the game.” Swanson has been consistently at the top for the last three years. I would plant my flag right now that Bobby Witt Jr. is going to be in the conversation for the best player of his generation, though there is going to be some stiff competition.
Now what we need is the Royals and Orioles to meet in the playoffs five more times over the next decade and develop a true rivalry. It would be great to have the two best shortstops in the AL battling year in and year out. Round one went to Bobby, but the Orioles are set up to be tough for years to come.