Putting Bo Bichette's disappointing 2024 season into historical context

A couple of weeks ago, I requested questions for a Blue Jays mailbag. As I sifted through the inquiries and narrowed down which ones I would answer, I selected a fascinating one from Peter M.

How common is it for a player in his mid-20s who’s been a regular for several seasons to suffer as steep an offensive decline as Bo Bichette did, and do prior examples point to a bounce-back season?

As Peter M. rightly points out, Bichette’s sharp decline in performance was among the most surprising — and disappointing — elements of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2024 season.

The 26-year-old Bichette was expected to be an anchor at the top of the lineup, and rightly so. He came into the 2024 season having twice led the American League in hits (2021, 2022). He had a 126 wRC+ over his career, meaning he was 26 percent better than the league average.

In 2023, his wRC+ was 124 and he was viewed as one of the game’s top hitters, even as he battled through a couple of leg injuries toward the end of that season.

And then, 2024 happened. Among players with at least 300 plate appearances, Bichette’s 71 wRC+ was the 15th-lowest in the majors. Bichette’s slow first half was followed by injuries that hampered his second half, ultimately ending his season prematurely.

So, how bad was Bichette’s decline? And what can history tell us about the probability of a rebound?

To help answer Peter M.’s question, I first turned to my The Athletic colleagues who cover other MLB teams and asked if anyone else had recently covered a player who experienced a similarly steep decline in performance.

One reporter mentioned Cody Bellinger, whose decline since his MVP season in 2019 was partially due to a shoulder injury, which has been widely reported. The same goes for another suggestion: Ronald Acuña, Jr., who had a dip in his performance in 2022, but he was coming back from a torn ACL and he still finished the season with a 115 wRC+ — a mark that was under his best, but still very good.

As with Bellinger, injuries have played a role in Bichette’s struggles, though it’s hard to pinpoint if those struggles were due to the injuries themselves or the missed time disrupting his rhythm and timing at the plate.

Bichette experienced right knee and quad injuries in 2023, but there was no suggestion that he came into the 2024 season less than 100 percent healthy. In mid-June, Bichette suffered a right calf strain. After spending 10 days on the IL, he returned but then re-aggravated the injury less than a month later and was back on the IL on July 20. He didn’t return until Sept. 17 but two days later, he was back on the IL with a right middle finger fracture after a freak accident while taking ground balls.

Another suggested comparison was Jason Heyward, who experienced a swift regression after signing with the Chicago Cubs ahead of the 2016 season. Heyward arrived in Chicago with a career 118 wRC+ before slumping to 79 wRC+ in his first two seasons with the Cubs during his age-26 and 27 seasons. Heyward strung together two average seasons (100 wRC+) in 2018 and 2019 but he has only posted a wRC+ above 118 twice since — in 2020 with the Cubs (131 wRC+) and in 2023 with the Los Angeles Dodgers (120 wRC+). Overall, since 2018, Heyward has averaged a 98 wRC+.

Next, I asked The Athletic’s Eno Sarris, our resident stats guru and master of the FanGraphs leaderboard search, if he could find comparables.

Looking at players who experienced notable declines in year-to-year production (via wRC+) since 2014, one name that stood out was Carlos Correa in 2018. After three very good seasons, where Correa averaged a 136 wRC+, the then-23-year-old shortstop had a 101 wRC+ and hit .239/.323/.405 in 110 games in 2018.

The downturn in performance was significant, but Correa’s 101 wRC+ still qualifies as league average. It was a decline, but not as steep as Bichette’s, so not a perfect comparison.

So, we widened the search. Turning to STATS Perform, we requested a list of the largest decreases in wRC+ between two qualifying seasons by a player in his age-27 season or younger (based on age on July 1) and only in cases where the player had 1,500 or more career plate appearances entering the season they declined in. The results netted this list.

Some players saw their wRC+ decline by more than Bichette’s 54 points, but when Bryce Harper goes from a wRC+ of 197 (elite) to 111 (still very good), it’s a little different.

Javier Báez had the lowest wRC+, dropping 55 points between 2019 (112) and 2020 (57), but 2020 was the 60-game COVID-19 season, so it feels like an imperfect comparison. (That said, since Báez posted a 117 wRC+ in 2021 with the Cubs and New York Mets, he has been on a steady decline, averaging a 70 wRC+ since 2022 with the Detroit Tigers.)

In terms of year-to-year decline, that puts Bichette in a class with two others: Dick Johnston, who in 1889 with the Boston Statistics had a 65 wRC+ after posting a 129 wRC+ the year before, and Cory Snyder, who in 1989 with Cleveland had a 69 wRC+ after posting a 121 wRC+ the year prior.

With respect to Johnston, baseball was a very different game in 1889 than it is today, so that comparison is not very useful.

Snyder was the No. 4 pick by Cleveland in the 1984 MLB Draft and finished fourth in AL Rookie of the Year voting in 1986. Snyder and Joe Carter were featured on the infamous “Sports Illustrated” cover that predicted Cleveland would finish with the AL’s best record in 1987. In fact, they had an MLB-worst 61-101 record that season, and became another example of the SI “cover curse.”

After Snyder’s career-best 1988 season, he slumped in 1989 and those struggles were made worse by a midseason back injury he suffered diving for a ball, according to a 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times. He played for five more seasons — including a brief 21-game stint with the Blue Jays in 1991 — and had a couple of good seasons late in his career with the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers, averaging a 107 wRC+ between 1992 and 1993. But he wouldn’t play again after 1994.

To return to Peter M.’s original question, with this data, it’s fair to say that it is not common for a player — especially a star player — in his mid-20s to suffer the type of dip in performance that Bichette did. There are only a handful of comparables. But those players’ careers won’t tell us what the future holds for Bichette. No one can know that for sure.

Of course, Bichette’s season deserves some caveats. He played only 81 games, missing most of the second half of the season because of injuries. Had he played a full season, perhaps he could have broken out of his slump and improved his numbers to get them closer to at least league average, if not slightly better. We’ll never know.

We do know the Blue Jays — hoping to compete next season after this year’s step back — are relying on a return to form from Bichette to complete the turnaround.

“He’s been one of the best hitters in the league for a lot of years. I don’t think anyone expected him to have the year he did, both physically and performance-wise,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said about Bichette this year. “That gives you a lot of confidence just because of what he’s done over his career.”

Bichette’s 2024 season was among the worst year-to-year downturns in MLB history, but the Blue Jays are banking that Bichette will be an outlier and it will be a one-year blip and not the start of a concerning trend.

(Top photo: Cole Burston / Getty Images)