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In 2024, George Springer slashed .220/.303/.371, good for 95 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 87.5 mph, his xwOBA was .324, and according to FanGraphs, he was worth 1.2 WAR. I threw all those numbers at you for a reason: every one of those numbers was the lowest of Springer’s entire career. In other words, during his age-34 season, Springer very much played like the game had passed him by. He’s been trending down for a while now. In 2019, he ran a 155 wRC+, which meant that he was 55% better than the average hitter. In every subsequent season, his wRC+ has steadily gotten worse.
That’s not what you want to see. The bottom has dropped out over the last two years, and 2024 marked the first time in his entire career that Springer was below average at the plate. According to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value, he was also worth -3 runs as a defender, also the worst mark of his career. So that’s the preamble: Springer is on the downslope of his career, and with two years left on his deal, it’s starting to look like a free fall. Now we’re going to look at some signs for optimism.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to argue that Springer can turn back into the star he once was, because that’s not happening. All the same, there’s a big difference from the 1.8 fWAR he put up in 2023 and his 1.2 in 2024. It’s the difference between an average player and a player who’s actively hurting his team. At this point, his defense likely is what it is, but Springer is still capable of putting up solid offensive numbers.
Let’s start with batted ball luck. In 2024, Springer ran a .245 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Not only was that the worst mark of his career, it was the fourth-lowest mark of all qualified players. Springer has a career .294 BABIP, and the other only time he’s ever been below .286 was the short 2020 season. Obviously, Springer isn’t as fast as he once was, so he’s not going to beat out quite so many infield hits, but we still wouldn’t expect his BABIP to drop off that suddenly. Furthering the luck argument is the fact that springer also had a 26-point gap between his .324 wOBA and his .298 expected wOBA. That’s not an enormous difference, but it’s tied for the second-largest gap of Springer’s career (once again with the short 2020 season). According to DRC+, Baseball Prospectus’s overall offensive metric that judges player not just on outcomes but on their deserved outcomes, Springer was at 99 in 2024, just three points off his 2023 mark of 102. Springer really did seem to have some bad batted ball luck, and that doesn’t usually last forever.
There’s also a bit of encouraging information when it comes to Springer’s contact quality. I know his average exit velocity was a career-low, but it’s not as if he was completely unable to hit the ball hard. His 90th-percentile exit velocity – which is a better measure of a player’s overall power – was nearly identical to his 2023 mark.
When I look at Springer’s overall offensive marks, I don’t love that his whiff rate crept up, but what really jumps out at me is the way he’s shifted to hitting more balls on the ground and fewer balls to the pull side. I still think he’s been unlucky, but the graph below is part of the reason his BABIP cratered; he’s grounding out a ton, and he’s not hitting the ball to the small part of the ballpark.
Before the 2023 season, I wrote about how Springer had lived many lives as a hitter. When he was young and fast, he was able to perform well at the plate despite running a huge groundball rate. Then he got older, and he started optimizing his swing to pull the ball in the air, and it resulted in some of his best seasons. For a while he was very aggressive at the plate, and then he was patient again. My takeaway was that somehow, Springer always seemed to find a way to be an excellent hitter. However, in recent years, that has stopped. Springer is back to running one of the highest groundball rates in all of baseball, and without the speed or power of old, he’s no longer able to find success.
Springer has always played the game like there was no tomorrow. It is joyous to watch, but it is finally catching up to him. At this point in his career, he no longer has the physical tools to be a superstar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s done yet. He’s still got a great eye, he’s still got enough power, and he still makes enough contact to run excellent walk and strikeout rates. If Springer can figure out how to drive the ball in the air like he did just a couple years ago, he can still be a productive right fielder. If he keeps hitting the ball on the ground, the graphs are only going to get worse.
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