Hope, hype and Byron Buxton: Baseball holds its breath for a phenom and a full season

Minnesota Twins center fielder Byron Buxton is one of the most magnetic players in the majors. A blistering runner now harnessing explosive power, he is batting .277 with 44 homers and 19 steals over his last 162 games while playing elite, jaw-dropping defense. Problem is, it’s taken him since May 7, 2019, to play those 162 games.

He managed 19 of those homers in only 61 games in 2021, justifying in his own way a prediction by Twins GM Thad Levine that he would be the season’s breakout player. He accumulated 4.5 Wins Above Replacement despite missing 101 games. That outdid, for instance, Jose Altuve’s 146-game campaign. Buxton packed that value into a season interrupted by injuries to his hand, hip, knee and hamstring.

In logging the shortest 4-WAR season in major-league history — “besting” 76-game seasons by Joe DiMaggio and Matt Williams — he achieved a distinctively Buxtonian burst of greatness. It’s just not the kind of record anyone shoots for.

Buxton has been so obviously good enough for long enough to be the most tantalizing talent of the 2012 MLB draft, the top overall prospect of 2014 and 2015, the most exciting player of the spring of 2018, the most exciting player of 2019 and the best player in baseball … right now … for a slice of 2021.

Six games into 2022, he has the baseball world salivating for more. As much as he can give.

In striving to meet the sky-high expectations, Buxton has endured a litany of injuries and setbacks — broken toes, balky shoulders, sprained wrists, migraines. Since hitting rock bottom at the plate in 2018 and suffering through a demoralizing, questionable demotion to the minors, Buxton has been an unquestioned star when he’s on the field. The durability concerns haven’t let up, though. At age 28, he’s only played 100 major-league games in a season once (140 in 2017). Still, this offseason he agreed to a seven-year, $100 million extension with the Twins. Combined with his alarmingly good showing in 2021, the deal both underlined how lucrative even one complete summer could have been and reset the cycle of waiting, watching and wishing.

What started out as hype has evolved into something more understanding but more desperate: hope.

The double-edged sword of talent

Ahead of the 2014 season, when he was still a shiny prospect rampaging through the minors, an executive told Baseball Prospectus that Buxton’s floor was Torii Hunter and his ceiling was Willie Mays. A scout told SBNation that he projected as “a better player than Mike Trout.” After ticking off rave reviews of just about every skill a baseball player can have, riding the wave of excitement higher and higher and higher, Baseball America’s Ben Badler was the evaluator who looked down.

“It gets to the point,” he said, “where he sounds almost too good to be true.”

There have long been people in the game who wince at tagging a young player with such expectations.

“It’s not fair to him. That kind of potential can be a kiss of death,” storied MLB skipper Davey Johnson said of the Willie Mays comparison. “When people lead you to believe you’re that good, before you really are that good, it’s an albatross around your neck. We give superstar accolades before the production comes — then the guy has to live with it. He can’t even enjoy the game.”

Johnson didn’t say that about Buxton, though. He said it in 1987. About Eric Davis.

Then 24, Davis was a riveting center fielder on the Cincinnati Reds coming off his first “full” season in the majors, one where he jacked 27 homers and stole 80 bases in 132 games and finished 12th in MVP voting.

His manager at the time, Pete Rose, told the Los Angeles Times he had “more raw talent than any player I have ever seen in my life, including Willie Mays.”

That’s the line Johnson was pushing back on. In relaying a cautionary tale, he said, “Remember Bonds?” That was Bobby Bonds, of course, also once bandied about as the player destined to match or exceed Willie Mays.

Davis really was a spectacular talent. Between 1986 and 1990, he tallied 148 homers, 207 steals and a park-adjusted OPS 43 percent better than league average. Over that stretch, he was nagged by injuries, never exceeding 135 games in a season. After that stretch, he was plagued. His career rolled on for 11 more years (10 seasons) and he never again exceeded 131 games.

Of course, if you just saw him during a fantastic stint as a 36-year-old slugger in Baltimore in 1998, or popped into his Baseball-Reference page today, you’d see a consistently great hitter. This was a guy who had serious speed, who put together a 17-year career in the majors, who garnered MVP votes six times.

We don’t see that. We look at Davis and see what could or “should” have been. Even now.

After he spoke to a college baseball team in February, an MLB.com reporter asked Davis the question he’s probably sick of answering. “What if?”

“That’s for you guys,” Davis said. “People build up to regrets. If you say, ‘Man, you didn’t come up to be Willie Mays,’ that was for you. That wasn’t for me.”

Byron Buxton echoes the Shohei Ohtani experience

On the first Sunday Night Baseball broadcast of 2021, the world tuned in to watch the latest, greatest Next Great Hope: Shohei Ohtani, pitching and hitting at the same time for the first time.

It had been years in the making, a “too good to be true” promise fulfilled after three seasons that thrilled but also unnerved hopeful fans waiting for Babe Ruth But Better. That night, Ohtani took the mound and worked through a walk to toss a scoreless first inning. Then he sauntered to the plate in the bottom of the inning and belted the first pitch into oblivion. With one exceedingly loud crack of the bat, he vacuum-sealed an already pressurized ballpark. This was a kid who has practiced an acrobatic high dive over and over, turning and finally saying to everyone he knows, “Hey, watch this.”

Then, in the fifth inning, everyone watched him go airborne over home plate, and recoiled. Already straining in an effort to get a win, Ohtani wound up covering home on a play gone haywire. As 2020 AL MVP Jose Abreu slid in, the evening’s two-way hero was leaping for a throw sailing over his head. He was undercut on the landing and toppled awkwardly to the dirt.

He’s hurt. The dream is over. This is never happening again. The flood of anxieties on his behalf came rushing up again. In that moment, it felt like watching Ohtani — who had Tommy John surgery in 2018 —would always mean holding our breath. There was no joy without the pulsating encroachment of fear.

That’s how it feels to watch Byron Buxton right now. His must-see plays make you want to cover your eyes.

A sprint back into the right-center gap, hot on the trail of a screaming fly ball, turns from scintillating to squeamish. On Tuesday night, he stole a double from Max Muncy before gently pirouetting off the wall. In the split second before his graceful finish, you couldn’t help but recall the 2018 AL wild-card game, when he took away extra bases and slammed up against the Yankee Stadium fence so hard he had to leave the game.

The conflicting priorities are apparent. Buxton playing at full speed is the entire appeal of Buxton, but it’s also the greatest impediment to Buxton playing at all. (Similarly, Ohtani pitching and hitting in the same season is really cool. Ohtani pitching while hitting like an MVP in the same game is, conservatively, the coolest baseball thing any living person has ever seen.)

With a masterpiece on the books for Ohtani, Buxton is the man on baseball’s highest tightrope in 2022. Are we prepared to watch him walk it?

Rooting for a healthy 2022

Lofty comparisons usually spring from positive places. They start out as flattery, as almost necessary context for just how talented, how special a player like Davis or Ohtani or Buxton could be. They often turn out to be unintentionally cruel. They take real, present-day superlatives and turn them into tests.

It would be nice if we appreciated the flashbulbs of ability without the strings attached. In an alternate reality where we consume baseball without numbers to buttress our understanding, Buxton may well rival Ohtani as one of the game’s consensus best players.

That’s not a realistic ask, though. If the literal object of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, the spiritual object is to rigorously, almost scientifically, plumb the game for lasting understanding.

A player prevented from taking his rightful place in the history books is perhaps the sport’s greatest lamentation.

What we should wish for Buxton isn’t continued inclusion in sentences with Mays or Trout. It’s that he can stay healthy enough for long enough to appear in sentences by himself. So hold the what-ifs and hold your breath. Maybe 2022 is the year Byron Buxton fills in the full picture, the year he turns question marks into periods. If he can make them exclamation points, well, all the better.