Before getting too excited, let’s remember that the 2024 Cactus League MVP was Mitch Haniger

Spring Training is for the players

You know Spring Training doesn’t matter. Of course you do. There are the few things you can’t fake, like increased velocity, but for the vast majority of what’s going on out there, Spring Training results don’t translate into the regular season, and there are a thousand reasons why. People play so irregularly that by luck of the draw, the quality of competition any individual player sees varies substantially. Some guys are working on something specific–a new pitch, trying to go the other way, a new stance. And that’s before we even get to the cardinal sin of analysis gone awry: small sample size. If you’re reading Lookout Landing in February, you know all this.

And yet.

Every spring, even the most well-informed observers can’t help but get ahead of themselves a little bit. It’s always cabined, of course. “Spring Training doesn’t matter, but . . .” And then we latch onto what comes after the “but.” Even the best of us usually end up saying the line at least once because some player or other looks amazing, and we get excited. That’s what happens after you’re starved for baseball and you see someone playing with the success that makes your heart flutter with the possibilities of spring.

So as we get rolling, this is just a quick reminder that if the Cactus League gave out an MVP award, last year’s would have gone to Mitch Haniger. Coming off the first down year of his career, Haniger came back to Seattle in a trade that was largely greeted with some combination of trepidation and excitement. But however fans felt about the likely baseball impact, people were almost universally thrilled to have him back in a Mariners uniform. Few had meant as much to the fanbase over the past half dozen years as Haniger. And it was only one down year. And he’d been hurt. Maybe it wasn’t just that Mitch Haniger would be back; maybe Mitch Haniger would be back.

So too many let themselves get excited about his Spring Training results. How could you not when in his very first at-bat of the spring, he sent a ball soaring over the left-field fence? And his legs looked so fresh out in right field to match the arm that had never shown any signs of wavering. By the time they broke camp for Seattle, Haniger had slashed .385/.442/.846 with five home runs and another three doubles. He worked counts, fouled off tough pitches, and while swing-and-miss was always part of his game, he didn’t look like he was having trouble spotting breaking balls or catching up to velocity. Sure, his slash line and 232 wRC+ were aided by a high BABIP, but at .417, there was plenty of room for that to slide back down to earth while keeping his overall line that of an All-Star. In fact, his BABIP was the second lowest of the 10 players with the highest Spring Training wRC+.

But then came the regular season, and it all came crashing down. No one needs a reminder of what his summer looked like as he turned in his worst season as a Mariner.

Spring Training’s lack of correlation with the regular season goes both ways, of course. As Ichiro’s Hall of Fame tour rolls along, we’ve been consistently reminded of how much people doubted him based on his initial Spring Training, right before he won the actual MVP award. And I’m all for the positivity of spring–Haniger’s summer face plant takes nothing away from the joy of watching him crush the Cactus League like a 28-year-old version of himself. The joy of spring matters so much. So I couldn’t bring myself to publish this on Day 1. But as we get rolling, I wanted to remember a specific example rather than just the cliches. Things will be joyful and things will be worrying. But then the real games will start and we’ll forget all about it.