Royals Superstar Bobby Witt Jr. Gets Bizarre Top 100 Player Ranking From MLB Network
Stop me if you've heard this one before. The fourth-best shortstop in Major League Baseball is also the third-best player at any position in the entire sport.
Sounds impossible, you say? Clearly, you haven't been following MLB Network's offseason player countdown shows. And specifically, you haven't yet been utterly bewildered at the way Kansas City Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. has been ranked.
First, the league-owned television network did rankings for each individual position earlier this offsesaon. They use a mysterious methodology, known as The Shredder, for those positional rankings, and outrage ensued when Witt was ranked fourth at the shortstop position.
But if you can believe it, just three weeks later, the network counted down the Top 100 overall players, and Witt was ranked behind only Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge among the very best players in the entire sport.
Wait, what?
In an attempt to explain how two sets of rankings from the same media outlet can vary so drastically, MLB.com's Brian Murphy and Manny Randwaha wrote a preface to the article that listed the Top 100 players in order after they were revealed on the air.
"MLB Network’s production and research team has once again ranked the very best players in the Majors using a formula that differs from "The Shredder," which was used to determine the Network’s rankings for the top 10 players at each position," the article read.
It sure would be wild to be in a room listening to that production and research team debate "The Shredder" over Witt's standing among his peers.
Witt ranked behind Gunnar Henderson, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager on the "top 10 shortstops" list. Hilariously, not only did the overall Top 100 list rank Witt ahead of all three of those other shortstops, but it also ranked the Los Angeles Dodgers' Mookie Betts, who was The Shredder's fifth-ranked shortstop, ahead of Henderson, Lindor, and Seager as well.
Is the entire concept of a player ranking aimed at creating rage bait? Are we all falling for the trap? To some degree, of course we are.
But any Royals fan who watched Witt play last season knows how ludicrous it is to call him the fourth-best shortstop in MLB. And he still has four months until his 25th birthday, so it's entirely realistic to think he could be even better this season than ever before.
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Jackson Roberts is a former Division III All-Region DH who now writes and talks about sports for a living. A Bay Area native and a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, Jackson makes his home in North Jersey. He grew up rooting for the Red Sox, Patriots, and Warriors, and he recently added the Devils to his sports fandom mosaic. For all business/marketing inquiries regarding "Kansas City Royals On SI," please reach out to Scott Neville: scott@wtfsports.org