At the beginning of the 2015 season, Francisco Lindor was playing shortstop for the Columbus Clippers.
Last year at this time, he was coming off a second-place Rookie of the Year finish, with Carlos Correa of the Houston Astros squeaking out the win. Still only 23, Lindor is coming off his first full season in the majors, one featuring his first All-Star appearance, his first Gold Glove and a ninth-place MVP finish.
Even more importantly, he continues to get better, escaping Correa's shadow and making the question of the best young shortstop in the American League a tougher one to answer. The Indians aren't at the top of the division yet, but with slow starts from Edwin Encarnacion, Carlos Santana and much of the rotation, Lindor's blazing April is one of the things keeping the team afloat.
His hits aren't dinky, little, seeing-eye singles either, as Lindor has upped his power game in 2017 to that of the elite players. Just take a look at Statcast's Barrels count, which is a tally of balls hit with the exit velocity and angle to result in a batting average of .500 and 1.500 slugging (and starts at 98 mph exit velocity), early-season standings. The top five for rate include three noted power hitters in Yoenis Cespedes, Freddie Freeman and Khris Davis, a fourth in Eric Thames, who leads the league in homers as he returns from two 40-plus-homer seasons in Korea, and Lindor, the former glove-first shortstop prospect.
Lindor's scorching .351/.415/.684 through Tuesday's games has been significant enough to move his rest-of-season projections. I'm not just talking about the season totals added from the fast start. I'm talking about the actual estimate of his baseline level of play. The ZiPS projection system now projects Lindor to finish the season with 6.2 WAR, up from 5.3 WAR before the season. His OPS projection of .805 for the season is now up to .826 from now until the Indians finish their season.
What does 6.3 WAR mean beyond "That's good"? Only two offensive players in baseball project to finish with more: Mike Trout (8.1) and Josh Donaldson (6.3). That also means that of baseball's bumper crop of absurdly good shortstops, it's Lindor who stands at the front in 2017, ahead of Correa (5.0), Corey Seager (4.4), Brandon Crawford (3.6), Xander Bogaerts (3.2), and Addison Russell (3.0).
For the long term, Lindor's already impressive career projections continue to improve quickly as well. One of the most important things to know about projections is that there is a lot of uncertainty involved. When a player is at an age when he is still developing, sudden improvements in performance are a bigger deal than they are for, say, a 30-year-old veteran. With the sudden power burst at Lindor's age, his already impressive career projections become even more eye-opening.
Coming into 2017, ZiPS projected Lindor to have the third-most WAR remaining of any position player in professional baseball, behind only Mike Trout and Carlos Correa
With the latest update, Lindor has all but pulled even with Correa, with 71.1 rest-of-career projected WAR, compared to Correa's 71.2. That sounds like a lot of wins, but ZiPS isn't known for being over-exuberant, with only seven position players and three pitchers projected at 50 or more for the rest of their careers.
Throw in the 10.9 WAR (Baseball-Reference.com) Lindor has already banked, and you see a player with a good shot at a historically significant career, both as a shortstop and as a Cleveland Indian.
If Lindor were to stay in Cleveland for his entire career, that WAR projection would leave him near the top of Cleveland's career WAR rankings. If we aren't quite so optimistic and guess that Cleveland somehow manages to retain his services for 10 years -- the team reportedly already started extension discussions this spring -- it's still enough to make him a Cleveland legend.
The last time baseball was blessed with so many talented young shortstops was 20 years ago, when Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra, and Miguel Tejada all hit their peaks at roughly the same time. While A-Rod ended up with the best overall numbers for his career, with 696 homers, a 140 OPS+, and 117.7 total WAR, he never started a game at shortstop for the Yankees, with his 2003 Gold Glove season being his final hurrah just after his 28th birthday. At 63.5 WAR, behind Jeter's 70.8 (Jeter had 73 games as a DH), A-Rod falls behind just as a shortstop. As for Nomar, after his 6.1 WAR season in 2003 at age 29, injuries took over, and he collected only three WAR the rest of his career. Tejada hung on a little longer, but with his last real star-level season at 32, he also fell behind The Captain and A-Rod.
Lindor isn't on top of these all-time lists yet, but he's one of the rare young players to establish himself not just as an MVP candidate but also as a player of historic significance. Many younger fans today weren't around for the peak years of the A-Rod/Jeter/Nomar/Tejada shortstop battles, but they're here for the newest one, one Cleveland's young superstar has a good shot at winning.