Ranking MLB's 10 Biggest Disappointments So Far in 2023
There have been a lot of pleasant surprises in the 2023 Major League Baseball season, but also quite a few colossal disappointments.
Well, pull out your half-empty glasses and get ready for some Debbie Downers, because we've ranked the 10 biggest disappointments through the first two months of the campaign.
For the players on the list, it's a combination of high-priced assets and preseason MVP/Cy Young/Rookie of the Year candidates who have provided replacement level (or worse) production.
For the teams, we've got preseason World Series candidates hovering several games below .500, a team spending $356 million for a barely .500 record and a team on track for all-time futility.
They are ranked in ascending order of how embarrassingly bad things have gone thus far.
Statistics current through the start of play Wednesday.
"Honorable" Mentions: Cleveland Guardians, Kansas City Royals, St. Louis Cardinals, Kris Bryant, Madison Bumgarner, Tristan Casas, Dylan Cease, Jordan Walker, Kolten Wong.
10. Grayson Rodriguez, RHP, Baltimore Orioles
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In 14 starts at Triple-A Norfolk in 2022, Grayson Rodriguez posted a 2.20 ERA, a 0.93 WHIP and a K/9 of 12.5. He was one of the highest-rated prospects in all of baseball heading into both the 2022 and 2023 campaigns, and he was one of the top preseason candidates to win AL Rookie of the Year.
The 23-year-old was somewhat controversially left off Baltimore's Opening Day roster, but the disappointment didn't last long, as he was called up just a few days later to make his MLB debut on April 5.
Unfortunately, he lasted just 10 starts before getting sent back down to Norfolk with a 7.35 ERA.
Rodriguez failed to make it six full innings in any of those starts, but in five of them, he lasted at least 5.0 innings and allowed two or fewer runs. So, no official quality starts, but half of his appearances were solid outings.
But there were also outright disasters in which he couldn't keep the ball in the yard.
Rodriguez allowed 11 home runs over the final five starts prior to his demotion, thrice allowing six earned runs without making it out of the fourth inning.
We have to assume he'll be back in the majors before too long—Baltimore's rotation isn't exactly overflowing with Cy Young candidates—but Rodriguez's initial big league stint of nearly two months was a huge letdown.
Kind of a miracle the O's have played this well while getting so little out of both Rodriguez and fellow preseason AL ROY candidate Gunnar Henderson.
9. Chicago White Sox
2 of 10
The good news for the Chicago White Sox is that they still have a playoff pulse, because the AL Central has been an unmitigated disaster, sitting a cumulative 41 games below .500.
Then again, that might be bad news. This 23-35 team with a negative-55 run differential (after Wednesday's loss to the Angels) could be tempted to actually try to make the postseason instead of embracing its impending rebuilding situation by trading away some of the 13 players on the roster who are either hitting unrestricted free agency this November (eight) or have team/mutual options for 2024 (five).
Chicago has rallied a bit from its disastrous 14-28 start to the season, doing so mostly at the expense of the aforementioned calamity that is the AL Central. After winning seven out of nine against the Guardians and Royals, it had clawed back to within five games of the Minnesota Twins.
Still, with the exception of Luis Robert Jr., Jake Burger and, occasionally, Lucas Giolito, nothing has gone well for the South Siders.
Save for breaking even in six games against Minnesota, the White Sox have a losing record against every team with a winning percentage of .465 or better.
And though they are faring better than both the Royals and the A's, they're also spending way more ($185 million) than both of those teams combined ($153.5 million).
After opening June with three home games against the Tigers, the White Sox will play 22 straight games against teams that currently have a winning record. Good chance that will push them in the direction of a trade deadline fire sale.
8. Carlos Correa, SS, Minnesota Twins
3 of 10
There were four shortstops who combined to make nearly $1 billion this offseason in free agency, and none of the four is faring very well thus far.
Of the Xander Bogaerts, Carlos Correa, Dansby Swanson and Trea Turner quartet, though, only Correa agreed to deals with three different franchises before finally landing back with the one he played for in 2022—this after also turning down a $35.1 million to return to that team for 2023 in the first place.
As a result, we spent what felt like half of the offseason talking about Correa and couldn't wait to see if he came out on fire in his reunion with the Twins, motivated to stick it to both the Giants and the Mets for second-guessing his ability to be a star for the next 12-13 years.
That hasn't been the case, though, as the 28-year-old is sputtering through the worst season of his career.
At the start of play Wednesday, each part of his triple-slash (.211/.303/.378) was lower than where he had previously finished any other season. And we're talking about a guy who typically does his best slugging in May and June before cooling off in July and August, so it's especially concerning that he's already hitting absolutely nothing like an All-Star.
Moreover, his defensive impact at shortstop isn't what it used to be. Per Baseball-Reference, Correa's range factor is lower than ever before. FanGraphs also has him at just two defensive runs saved above average—two years removed from leading all shortstops in that category with 20 DRS.
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7. The Reigning Cy Young Winners
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It's not easy to win a Cy Young while playing for a team that loses 93 games, but Sandy Alcántara sure made it look easy last season, unanimously running away with the NL crown with six complete games and a 2.28 ERA.
Meanwhile, Justin Verlander was even more dominant in the AL, coming back from Tommy John surgery at the age of 39 and delivering MLB-best marks in both ERA (1.75) and WHIP (0.83) while getting every first-place vote possible.
With JV35 relocating from the AL West to the NL East, the preseason assumption was that those two aces would battle each other (as well as Corbin Burnes and Max Scherzer) for NL supremacy in 2023.
But they have both put up "barely replacement level" numbers thus far.
Verlander has only made five starts after spending the first five weeks on the IL. And while two of those five starts were quite good, two of them were very much not good. He got shelled by both the Rays and the Rockies and enters June with a 4.80 ERA.
And after going at least 7.0 innings in 22 of his 32 starts in 2022, Alcántara has pitched into the seventh inning only four times through 11 starts in 2023.
The 27-year-old did toss a complete-game shutout against the Twins in April in one of those deep outings, but he has a 4.93 ERA even with that early gem.
His whiff rate is still solid, but he is neither generating ground balls nor stranding runners at anywhere near the rate he did over the previous two seasons.
6. Oakland Athletics
5 of 10
The miracle of all miracles happened this week: The Oakland A's won back-to-back games against the World Series favorite Atlanta Braves.
But it's going to take much more than that for this team to be anything less than a massive disappointment.
You could argue Oakland doesn't belong in the top 10, since the A's are terrible by design. In the first 11 months after the lockout ended, they traded away basically every player on the roster with even a shred of trade value and entered 2023 all but guaranteed to be the worst team in the American League. (Oakland's preseason win total was 60.5. The next-worst were Kansas City and Detroit tied at 69.5.)
You could also argue the A's should be No. 1 on this list, as they have been so much worse than we even thought was possible.
At 12-45, Oakland is on pace to win just 34 games. And with a run differential of damn near negative-200, there's nothing fluky about that record.
The A's have already been swept eight times. Prior to the recent unfathomable wins over Atlanta, their lone series win of the season came against a Kansas City team that would have the worst record in baseball by a 5.5-game margin were it not for Oakland bringing up the rear.
Oakland has also had two separate 18-game stretches of this season with a 2-16 record. The Los Angeles Dodgers haven't lost 13 games in a calendar month since August 2018, but the 2023 A's have twice suffered 16 losses in the span of less than three weeks.
In the most recent new rock bottom, they went 2-19 from May 7-28 and needed extra innings to get each of the victories. So, we're talking 21 consecutive games in which they did not have the lead at the end of the ninth inning.
After Brent Rooker hit .333 with 10 home runs in his first 26 games, even that lone bright spot has gone dark with a .185 batting average and one home run dating back to May 6.
And, oh yeah, they might be moving the franchise to Las Vegas.
5. Alek Manoah, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
6 of 10
Alek Manoah pitched just 35 innings in the minors between 2019 and 2021 before getting called up and immediately dominating the big leagues. Over the past two seasons, he had a 2.60 ERA and a 1.01 WHIP—this despite making 27 of his 51 starts against the loaded AL East.
The 25-year-old finished third in the 2022 AL Cy Young vote and even got a few votes for AL MVP.
Expectations for this season were sky high, even though Manoah's xFIP—4.17 in 2021; 3.97 in 2022—suggested he was due for some regression.
No one expected him to completely fall apart like he has, though.
Manoah's walk rate has been (no pun intended) out of control. There have been 87 pitchers who logged at least 50 innings of work this season, and Manoah's 6.37 BB/9 is the worst of the bunch. He has walked at least four batters in seven of his 11 starts, including an especially brutal seven-walk, three-strikeout game against the Yankees on May 15.
Making matters worse, his previously low BABIP—the main reason for the high-ish xFIP—has more than come back to earth and is now much worse than the league average. Plus, he's allowing home runs at more than double his 2022 rate, so he's really paying for all of those baserunners.
Manoah entered Wednesday's start against the Brewers with a 1-5 record, a 5.53 ERA and a 6.16 FIP that suggests things should be even worse than they have been.
Including Wednesday's loss to the Brewers, the Blue Jays have lost eight of Manoah's last nine starts and would feel like much less of an underachiever if they were even .500 in those games started by their ace of yesteryear.
4. Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber and the Philadelphia Phillies
7 of 10
Hey, remember when Trea Turner was, arguably, the best hitter in the entire World Baseball Classic, clubbing five home runs in just six games and leading everyone to believe that the $300 million man was, at worst, a top-five candidate to be named NL MVP?
Well, 53 games into the Philadelphia half of his career, he has merely matched those five home runs and presently has the worst batting average (.240) and on-base percentage (.285) of his career. (Excluding when he hit .225 in 40 at-bats as a late call-up in 2015.)
Turner has also been a mess on defense, already committing seven errors, putting him well on pace for a career-worst in that department. (The 16 errors committed last season is his current high.)
Meanwhile, Kyle Schwarber has more than twice as many home runs (13) as the next-closest Phillie (Alec Bohm with six) and does have one of the highest walk rates in the majors. However, he is batting an atrocious .166 and is somehow slugging just .401 in spite of the baker's dozen of round-trippers. (Every other player with at least 12 home runs is slugging at least .498.)
And if Turner's defense is problematic, Schwarber's is a straight-up catastrophe. FanGraphs rates his defense in left field as the worst in the majors among qualified hitters. Not exactly surprising, either, after he posted the fourth-worst defensive rating in 2022. But they have to play him in the field just about every night with Bryce Harper still unable to throw.
They certainly aren't the only struggling Phillies. After averaging at least 10 K/9 in each of the past four seasons, Aaron Nola has plummeted to 7.86 in his contract year. Ranger Suárez has been a mess since spending the first six weeks on the IL. (Though he did at least pitch well relatively well Tuesday night.) And the bullpen—closer Craig Kimbrel, in particular—has been a hot mess.
But Turner and Schwarber feel like the biggest reason the NL champs are flirting with the worst record in the National League.
3. José Abreu, 1B, Houston Astros
8 of 10
At long last, José Abreu hit his first home run of the season this past Sunday.
(Bronx cheers and sarcastic golf claps)
Somewhat fittingly, it was a meaningless home run—a solo shot in the eighth inning of a 10-1 win over maybe the worst team in MLB history—but, hey, he finally ended the drought.
Prior to that homer, Abreu had hit just one in his previous 105 games—one over the course of his final 55 games with the White Sox; none in his first 50 games with the Astros.
No one would care about the lack of home runs if the 2020 AL MVP was at least getting hits that didn't leave the yard. But in addition to very rarely getting to trot around the bases, he has struggled to just get on base in Houston.
He batted .292 and had a .354 OBP and .507 slugging percentage in his nine-year run with Chicago, but he's sitting at .214, .276 and .264, respectively, one-third of the way through his age-36 season.
The home run was perhaps a nice first step in the right direction, but Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs still rate Abreu as one of the least valuable players in the majors.
Not exactly what the Astros had in mind when they signed him to that three-year, $58.5 million deal in an effort to solve what was a season-long dilemma at first base in 2022.
2. So. Many. Expensive. Padres.
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In 2022, the Chicago White Sox were Major League Baseball's biggest disappointment, missing the postseason altogether after opening the year as one of the top candidates to make the World Series.
And they were a massive underachiever because basically all of their high-priced players underachieved. José Abreu was solid, but between Lance Lynn, Dallas Keuchel, AJ Pollock, Yoan Moncada and Yasmani Grandal, they spent about $83 million for a whole lot of nothing.
Thus far, sub-.500 San Diego finds itself in a similar boat in 2023.
Juan Soto and Xander Bogaerts are at least mostly living up to their $20 million-plus salaries, but between Yu Darvish ($25 million), Joe Musgrove ($20 million), Manny Machado ($17.1 million) and Blake Snell ($16.6 million), the Padres are spending $78.7 million for...precisely 0.0 wins above replacement as of Wednesday morning. (All four were in the 0.2 to negative-0.2 range.)
Musgrove is starting to come around after missing the first three weeks on the IL, and maybe Machado will start hitting better after a few weeks out with a fractured hand.
But this quartet is the main reason San Diego's big spending spree has been a bust so far.
If this is the beginning of the end for Darvish, hoo boy. The 36-year-old is in the first season of a six-year, $108 million extension signed in February. Don't want to overreact to just 10 starts—and he did have a 3.67 ERA prior to a recent implosion against the Yankees—but he simply hasn't been as crisp as he was in his first two seasons in San Diego.
Scarier to think about: If this nucleus isn't working out now, will it get even worse with age?
Musgrove (will be a free agent after 2027), Darvish (after 2028), Jake Cronenworth (after 2031), Machado (after 2034), Bogaerts (after 2034) and Fernando Tatis Jr. (after 2035) are all signed with San Diego for the long haul. And if they don't eventually sign Soto to a long-term deal, why did they blow up the farm system to get him?
This roster was constructed to win multiple World Series, but early returns aren't exactly inspiring hope for the present or future of the franchise.
1. New York Mets
10 of 10
It's not just that the New York Mets have squandered the highest payroll in MLB history.
It's how laughably far they are above the previous high for money spent in a year that makes this barely .500 start to the season such an outright disaster.
The Dodgers spent a little over $266 million in 2021 before setting the record with a payroll of $270.4 million in 2022. While the Yankees (just shy of $280 million) were happy to go north of that mark to retain both Aaron Judge and Anthony Rizzo and also bring in Carlos Rodón, the Mets skyrocketed right past that mark to $346 million—about 28 percent higher than what Los Angeles spent last season.
Even if they hadn't signed Justin Verlander for $43.33 million per year, the Mets would still be paying about 10 percent more than the next-biggest spender.
Basically, 2023 Steve Cohen is to MLB spending what 2015-16 Stephen Curry was to NBA three-point shooting, obliterating the old record.
And, yes, there's plenty of season left for the Mets to salvage this messy start. In fact, if the season had ended Wednesday morning, they would've been in a three-way tie with Miami and San Francisco for the NL's second and third wild-card spots.
However, there's also time for Philadelphia, San Diego and St. Louis to get their acts together, and the Mets haven't built up much of a cushion over any of those teams.
And if they don't even make the playoffs after spending all of that money, it's going to go down as one of the biggest disasters imaginable.
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