We can't stop talking about Francisco Lindor of the Cleveland Indians, who, with an OPS around 1.000 in the early going to go with his Gold Glove-caliber defense at short, seems to be having a breakout season. But there's a lot more than just the young star in Cleveland happening at shortstop in 2017. We're seeing a rare explosion of excellence at the position in history as a whole.
Back in the late '90s and early '00s, when the sabermetrics community was on its initial ascent, most of the shortstop debates centered around the Big Four shortstops of the era: Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Jeter and, post-2000, Miguel Tejada. They weren't the only star shortstops of the era -- Omar Vizquel and Edgar Renteria had their moments, and Barry Larkin was in the twilight of his Hall of Fame career -- but they were the shortstops who jostled for position at the pinnacle, and each personified his franchise in some way.
The end of that struggle was an anticlimax. In the end, Jeter took the crown, with A-Rod finished at short by his age-28 season, Nomar's last good season at the position occurring before he turned 30 and Tejada fading away by his mid-30s.
Still, when we weren't worried about the Y2K bug destroying civilization, we thought we were in a golden age for the shortstop position. It was our generation's version of Willie, Mickey and the Duke.
We were wrong. That was just a taste of the talent that was to come at shortstop. Now, in 2017, we have a slew of impressive all-around shortstops, most of them not yet in their primes. No-hit shortstops have gone the way of the five-and-dime, with baseball blessed with players with wide talent bases who can hit and be at least glove-adequate at short.
Don't take my word for it, however. Let's run down the data. Looking at the ZiPS projections for the next 10 years at the shortstop position, there are a shocking 16 shortstops in professional baseball projected with an over/under of 20 WAR over the next decade.
That is a lot of young talent, and it doesn't exhaust the list of shortstops you'd want on your franchise without holding your nose: Jean Segura, Didi Gregorius, Marcus Semien and Troy Tulowitzki. Some prospects, such as Gleyber Torres or Nick Gordon, could supplant names on this list who fall short in the end.
This list isn't a product of the irrational exuberance of a set of algorithms. Let's jump back to 2007 for a minute and look at how this exercise worked out. Back then, ZiPS projected nine shortstops to amass 20 WAR as a shortstop from 2007-2016: Derek Jeter, Jimmy Rollins, Stephen Drew, Jose Reyes, Hanley Ramirez, Troy Tulowitzki, B.J. Upton and J.J. Hardy. In the end, seven did, with Yunel Escobar and Jhonny Peralta surprising ZiPS projections while Jeter, Drew and Upton fell short.
Now, 16 players' being projected to have an over/under of 20 WAR at shortstop doesn't mean that 16 players will. As a group, players don't exactly match their midpoint projections. Some will overperform, some will underperform, and some will move off the position. A Monte Carlo simulation with the year-to-year probabilities for all shortstops in baseball can guess how many players will hit this mark. As for moves to other positions, ZiPS contains a model for the probability that a player moves to a less strenuous defensive position (a combination of defensive performance, age and size works the best).
Even running the projections in this manner, 16 players, on average, are projected to end up with 20 WAR as shortstops. There are enough players close to the 20-WAR mark to balance out the players who will underperform or move to third base or elsewhere before the decade is done (of the list of 16, ZiPS sees Seager and Correa as the most likely to move at some point).
Compared to history, the next 10 years is looking really good. I went back and compared the 16-player average projected for the next 10 years to every 10-year period in baseball history. For the seasons, I counted every season with more than 50 percent of games played at shortstop and ranked every decade by the number of players to hit 20-WAR in years in which they were primarily used at shortstop (Baseball-reference.com WAR).
Even when you take into account the smaller leagues in the old days (you can't simply divide by the number of teams in a league, as teams take the cream of the crop no matter the size of the league), this era is off to a great start toward surpassing the previous generation's crop of shortstops as the best group in history.
Maybe one day, we'll have a song about "Carlos, Francisco and The Seag." But until then, seeing it in person is better than hearing it in song.