Right Field: Christian Yelich, Milwaukee Brewers
2019 fWAR: 7.8
Here was another tough tiebreaker, with Yelich and Cody Bellinger each finishing with 7.8 fWAR. I gave the nod to Yelich here because while he played fewer games than his fellow NL MVP candidate, he still logged more innings in right field.
Similar to a number of players we’ve already discussed, Yelich is another one who has seen his offensive statistics jump tremendously in the right direction over a short period of time. Among the pitches he saw more than 200 times in 2019, Yelich’s wRC+ dropped on just the curveball, going from 198 to 149. Nothing else was below 154 in this department, with his performance against four-seam fastballs (211 wRC+) and changeups (247 wRC+) really standing out.
His overall contact rate went from 79.0% down to 73.8%, but that was because most of the drop in contact came on balls outside the strike zone (62.2% to 56.8%), not inside the strike zone (88.1% to 87.0%).
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