MLB Stars on the Brink: Career Revival or Retirement on the Horizon?

In the world of MLB, predicting performance isn’t just statistics or guesses. We’re into March, you know, where the scent of fresh cut grass mixes with the buzz of excitement, and every soul from top brass to the kid with the sign in the stands is dreaming of comebacks and success stories.

So, who’s looking to rebound like a real-life Rocky? Who’s poised to bottom out faster than a failed investment? Here are the answers:

Take Texas Rangers’ Marcus Semien for example—he’s been a fielding machine, sure, but his stats last year dropped like my jaw when I realized I got an email from Google Ads giving me high-fives for my click-through rates. His numbers looked like they were following some odd, every-other-year dance.

But let’s not skip to the league. Pitchers like Arizona’s Jordan Montgomery might’ve had a season that made fans want to look away, but this is a guy who was a star not too long ago. His last year was so rough, you’d think his pitches were more like gently tossed baseballs. Is he bound for a shocking collapse, or will he show up pretenders what real pitching looks like?

And what about Matt Olson with the Atlanta Braves? A powerhouse one year, he suddenly lost his juice last season, leaving fans scratching their heads. His stats eerily mirrored his rookie days, minus the whole “young asset” factor. Can he tap back into that power?

Or look at Marcus Stroman, the whisker donned right-hander with the Yankees, who seemed to be an afterthought until injuries made him essential. What’s his deal? Is he about to cement his place or fall further from grace?

The journey from the bottom of the barrel to a triumphant return isn’t an easy one, but it’s a path many have walked, especially in baseball’s March Madness where anything’s possible. So let’s dive in, shall we?

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Miles Mikolas, St. Louis Cardinals: Since 1961, there have been 89 seasons when a pitcher qualified for the ERA title with a BB/9 of 1.31 or better. Mikolas has two of those seasons, which is impressive. In 2018, the right-hander had a 2.83 ERA and allowed 8.3 hits per 9.0 innings. In 2024, he had a 5.35 ERA – highest of any of those 89 seasons – and 10.2 hits per 9.0 innings. Throwing strikes is good, but he has to figure out a way to compensate for the velo he’s lost.

Overall, pretty much every other number fell as well. His final numbers were amazingly similar to his first full season in MLB in 2018. Check it out:

Truth is, Olson has been prone to both extended streaks of struggles and greatness in his career. Braves fans are almost certainly choosing to remember how he finished the 2024 season with an extended streak of power production.

The lefty showed up this spring having reportedly dropped 20 pounds, determined to show the 2024 debacle was a fluke, not the new normal. If he somehow repeats his 2024 performance, though – grain of salt and everything, but, wow, that first spring outing was rough, wasn’t it? – his collapse will be one of the most shocking in recent memory. 

Kenta Maeda, Detroit Tigers: One thing the Tigers have to love during spring training: Maeda is missing bats again. His whiff+ fell from 101 in 2023 to just 77 in 2024, a drop shown clearly in more traditional stats: His K/9 rate dipped from 10.1 to 7.7 in his first year with Detroit. In four outings this spring, the veteran right-hander struck out 19 in 12.2 innings.

Rhys Hoskins, Milwaukee Brewers: Milwaukee brought Hoskins in to supply power to the lineup, and he hit 26 home runs (including a couple memorable ones), but his ISO (isolated power) of .205 was a career low, as was his .303 OBP and 98 OPS+. Going hitless in three playoff games wasn’t a great look, either. 

Yikes. You’ll remember, league average for RV- is 100, with the lower, the better. So to be that far the other way? Yep, just ugly. 

Anything is possible in March.

What other veterans are in similar situations?

Instead, they went the other way. Arenado’s power almost completely disappeared; he played 152 games but produced just 16 home runs and 39 total extra-base hits – he had 30 and 73, respectively, in a similar number of plate appearances in 2022 – and the lowest OPS+ of his career (aside from the pandemic season of 2020).

Marcus Semien, Texas Rangers

Bottoming out or bouncing back? He has to bounce back, right? This is a guy who owned a 3.67 ERA through his first seven seasons in the majors and just turned 32 in December. A guy who was traded to St. Louis in 2022 and helped the Cardinals make the postseason, then was traded to Texas in 2023 and helped the Rangers do the same. And it’s worth noting that his underlying data was relatively stable last year: command+ (107 in 2023, 103 in 2024), whiff+ (100, 108) and strike+ (101, 95).

Why we’re concerned: The question every Braves fan was asking last summer: What, um, happened to Olson’s power? The left-handed slugger played the same number of games in 2024 as he did in 2023 (162) but somehow hit 25 fewer home runs, dropping from 54 to 29. At the same time, his BIP+ – which measures damage done upon contact – dipped from 166 to 143.

Bottoming out or bouncing back? Stroman, who turns 34 in May, had an odd season. At times, he was very good. For example, in 10 of his 29 starts last year, Stroman lasted at least 5.0 innings and allowed zero or one earned runs. On the other hand, he had nine starts with four or more earned runs allowed and he failed to last even 4.0 innings in four of his final nine starts to the season. Stroman has made a career of beating expectations, but the challenge this season feels pretty daunting. 

Adolis Garcia, Texas Rangers: He’s never been a high-OBP hitter, of course, but that .284 mark last season was disconcerting. As was his drop in BIP+. Garcia’s 176 in 2023 was elite; his 135 last year was still well above league average but trending in the wrong direction. 

To take that problem missing bats issue one step further: Stroman’s whiff+ in 2023 was 86, well below the league average (100), and that plummeted to 71 in 2024. Not exactly what the Yankees were hoping for. And that’s almost certainly one of the reasons the Yankees reportedly are still interested in trading Stroman, even with the loss of Cole and Gil. It’s not what you’d call a vote of confidence, and the Yankees don’t have a cavalcade of teams lining up to trade for the veteran right-hander.

Jordan Montgomery, Arizona Diamondbacks

Why we’re concerned: Nobody in baseball has taken the field more consistently over the past seven seasons; Semien has topped 700 plate appearances in each of the past six non-pandemic seasons, and his 4,605 PAs since 2018 are easily the most in the bigs. He’s played consistently, no doubt, but he hasn’t necessarily produced consistently. A lot of Semien’s traditional numbers took a tumble last year. For example, his on-base percentage dropped 40 points from 2023, and his OPS fell 127 points.

Let’s take a look…

The post Bottoming Out or Bouncing Back? MLB Players Who Stand at a Crossroads appeared first on Opta Analyst.

It is, generally speaking, a time when front-office executives, fans and even the players bathe themselves in optimism and best-case scenarios.

Look at the St. Louis Cardinals last year as an example. In 2022, Paul Goldschmidt won the NL MVP and Nolan Arenado finished third. Both took pretty big steps back in 2023 but were still productive. The Cardinals and their fans were expecting – hoping, maybe? – both would revert to form in 2024 and lift the club back toward contention.

Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves

Bottoming out or bouncing back? Semien is entering his age-34 season, which means at some point (probably soon), there will be no bounce-back. But a quick look at the Opta data shows maybe his drop last season wasn’t quite so precipitous. 

Goldschmidt hit 22 homers, but his strikeout rate soared, his walk rate plummeted, and his on-base percentage was an astounding 102 points lower than his MVP season. Instead of a bounce-back, Cardinals fans watched a bottoming out. 

• 2018: 162 games, 29 homers, .247/.335/.453, 117 OPS+
• 2024: 162 games, 29 homers, .247/.333/.457, 118 OPS+

It was yet another step in an odd every-other-year pattern, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. Check out his year-by-year numbers, starting with 2019.

Why we’re concerned: No surprise that he’s here; we all watched his disastrous season with the Diamondbacks unfold in 2024. Montgomery signed as a free agent at the end of spring training and never really found his footing in Arizona. The big lefty, who was so bad it was almost easy to forget he was an absolute rock star for the Rangers during their run to the 2023 World Series title, finished with a 6.23 ERA in 117 innings. 

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Marcus Stroman, New York Yankees

Of the 131 pitchers who worked at least 100 innings in 2024, Montgomery’s raw value- (RV-) of 130 was the fifth worst ahead of only Cole Irvin of the Minnesota Twins (143), Martin Perez of the San Diego Padres (135), Cal Quantrill of the Colorado Rockies (132) and Jordan Hicks of the San Francisco Giants (131).

Why we’re concerned: Remember when – a mere few weeks ago – it seemed like a foregone conclusion Stroman would be either traded or sent to the bullpen as the Yankees went with better rotation options? Things have changed in a hurry. With Luis Gil already sidelined for a couple months, news has followed that ace Gerrit Cole will have Tommy John surgery, potentially knocking him out until perhaps midway through the 2026 season.

Bottoming out or bouncing back? Olson’s only in his age-31 season. He will be just fine. We mentioned the end of his 2024 season; in his last 60 games, Olson posted a .380 on-base percentage and .953 OPS, with 16 homers, 16 doubles and 54 RBIs. The Braves went 35-25 in that stretch to make the postseason, mostly without Ronald Acuna Jr. or Austin Riley, to name a few, in the lineup. 

We could go on, but you get the point. Up/down/up/down/up/down. The good news for 2025? If anyone has experience mentally rebounding from a tough season, it’s Semien.

Others to Consider

Truth is, though, lots of players enter spring training every year with their best seasons already in the rearview mirror, with the inevitable career conclusion closing in. Many of them have no clue, but there are almost always signs. 

Stroman seemingly went from excess to essential pretty quickly. Problem is, Stroman is coming off his worst season in the majors, which is why he’d fallen out of the club’s primary rotation plans during the offseason. For the first time in his career, Stroman posted a FIP north of 4.00 – he was at 4.62 – and a 4.31 ERA. His hits allowed per 9.0 innings jumped, as did his homers per 9.0 innings, while his strikeouts per 9.0 innings was his lowest ever for a season with more than 27.0 innings. 

A team like the Kansas City Royals could be on the verge of going from triple-digit losses to a wild-card berth. A veteran like Chris Sale could be on the precipice of shaking that injury bug and winning his first Cy Young award. Dream it, do it, right?

Not such a big drop, right? That’s a good thing for the Rangers, who have him under contract through the 2028 season. 

Some players will put together a bounce-back campaign after a rough 2024, while others will continue to bottom out. But who will trend in which direction? We have answers.
If you remember, that 2018 season was kind of disappointing, too. He’d lit Oakland on fire when he came up for good in early August 2017, blasting 20 homers with a 1.090 OPS in the final two months of the season. It’s not like 29 homers and a 117 OPS+ was bad, but it didn’t quite meet expectations. Same with his 2024 season, except this time there was no “young hitter adjusting to a full-time slate of big-league pitching” in the equation.