I’d say he is a bad player who had two hot streaks. That is what his results, in total, tell me.
I recognize I’m not going to convince you of anything, but let’s play this out.
For your statement to be true, his “hot streak” included a stretch of 167 plate appearances and 105 batted-ball events during which he hit the ball 95 mph or more in 51.4% of the occasions he came to the plate. That mark is 17th-highest in MLB, about as frequently as Bryce Harper (16th, 52.1%) squares up a baseball.
For that to be a hot streak, you’re saying that his baseline talent level is
not being able to do that. Which is absurd, because he can, and did so over a reasonably long stretch (100 BBE is fairly normalized).
“Hot” and “cold” streaks aren’t two sides of the same coin. Hitters who
can hit the ball that hard that frequently have cold streaks where they don’t, but hitters that
cannot hit the ball that hard that frequently
do not have “hot streaks” where they do.
What Cordero has is rare ability. With that kind of ability, there are fewer ways to make an out if you put the ball in play. His challenge is being able to make enough contact (SwStr%, K%), and the right kind of contact (launch angle, GB%), so that his ability can translate into on-field production. There’s a K rate ceiling that a player who hits the ball that hard can approach while still being valuable. Don’t like Trayce Thompson? Look at J.D. Davis with the Giants.
Also, I don’t want to overstate it, but it hasn’t helped that he has also had a handicap relative to many of his peers, which is hitting from a side of the plate that fielders can shift to further suppress that production. It’s good for him (and my ‘23 Sox RF target Max Kepler) that that handicap is being lifted next year.
That’s what statements like these…
He's the player you get when you combine all those games, just like every other player in baseball who goes through hot and cold streaks. You want to write off the cold streaks and only give weight to the hot streaks. He's a sum of the 2 parts. If you take away everyone's miserable cold streaks, they are all all stars.
Didn't Devers just go throw a terrible slump too? Xander? Lets eliminate their worst stretch and lets see what their numbers look like.
are an unhelpful way to think about this.
There are a ton of hitters who can do what Cordero did from July 2-17 and strike out half the time. There are very, very few MLB hitters who can do what he did over those first 167 PAs, especially with an above-average walk rate.
The language of “hot and cold streaks” generally does not describe ability. Often, it describes outcomes often based on factors outside a hitter’s control. Luck.
To be clear, hitting the ball very hard in game settings at an elite frequency is not some kind of party trick or trivial novelty. It is strongly correlated with getting on base, with “doing damage,” in today’s parlance. If we know that Cordero can hit the ball that hard as a general baseline, then the thing he needs to control for is contact. And it is a lot easier to learn how to recognize and lay off changeups tailing out of the zone than it is to teach a guy to hit the ball harder.
Brayan Bello had a 8.14 ERA in his first five major league starts. Was he an 8.14 ERA pitcher? In a narrow sense, yes. But anyone watching the games, or looking at xStats, could tell he was mostly unlucky (and the victim of bad umpiring).
By contrast, Sandy León did not unlock some newfound ability in 2016. He got lucky. It could have happened to a ton of hitters who had the same unremarkable hitting traits as he did.
Now, I don’t know what happened to Cordero to contribute to that collapse in July. I don’t see that he was being pitched especially different, but I haven’t looked that deeply. It may have something to do with spin rates spiking again that month; it may not. But I suspect it had more to do with your example of Devers’ sudden incapacity at hitting fastballs for a month from early May to early June, 2021. For a minute there, Devers was hitting fastballs as well as I could. But he didn’t lose the ability; it needed a mechanical fix.
Of course, Devers is a better player than Cordero. But I don’t think it makes sense that the latter’s sudden three-week incapacity, where he looked like a completely different player and every metric affirmed he was, is his actual true talent level. Nor does it mean that the elite ability he showed for a reasonable period is gone.