If You Want to Win, Francisco Lindor is MLB’s Best Shortstop

If you want to live and die by the stats, this is not the article for you. Anyone can look at a WAR leaderboard and tell you who the best player is at a given position.

We now have stats like wRC+ that tell us who is the best hitter by an average score of 100, and defensive metrics that give us a numerical grade to measure players at their position beyond just the errors they make. All of that makes the sports debate rather boring though, no?

When it comes to the statistical argument on who is the best shortstop in baseball, there really is none, because Bobby Witt Jr. is coming off a 10-win season. He’s a 24-year-old superstar who embodies the merits of a five-tool player better than anyone else in the game.

If not for Aaron Judge, Witt would already have one MVP on his mantle, and there is no question that he is going to be in the running to dethrone Judge for years to come in the American League.

The numbers paint such a compelling story on Witt, that I made the mistake of cowering to them when Just Baseball made our rankings of the top 10 shortstops in baseball this offseason.

Our panel was made up of our editorial team and the hosts of the Just Baseball Show, and every one of us ranked Witt as the top shortstop in the game. Gunnar Henderson ended up second in the voting, with four of our six panelists placing him above Francisco Lindor.

Myself and Peter Appel were bold enough to not just follow WAR and ranked Lindor at No. 2, but I am having my regrets now that I didn’t go bolder and voice my true opinion.

Which is that if you want to win big across the marathon of an MLB season, there is nobody better at the shortstop position than Francisco Lindor.

Captain Clutch for the Mets

The timing of this thought exercise is no accident. I am writing it late at night, still buzzing from Francisco Lindor hitting his first walk-off home run in a Mets uniform.

Pretty crazy to think Lindor did not hit a walk-off home run last season, because he hit clutch home runs in basically every other situation. He took Bowden Francis deep after he carried a no-hitter and a 1-0 lead into the ninth inning of a game in Toronto.

He hit the game-winning home run that pushed the Mets past the Atlanta Braves and into the playoffs in a thrilling back-and-forth game the day after the season ended for everyone else at the end of September.

Then of course, he hit the game-winning grand slam against the Phillies that essentially put the NLDS on ice for the Mets and sent them to face the Dodgers in NLCS.

Now, here is in the Mets’ second weekend back home playing at Citi Field, and he greets a packed crowd to an early signature moment. A walk-off home run to cap a game where the Mets rallied back to tie twice, took the lead, lost it, then walked it off in style.

What made the moment more special for Lindor is the fact that it was his 250th career home run. A mark only five other shortstops have ever reached in MLB history.

The Exact Midpoint of a Hall of Fame Career

Francisco Lindor made his MLB debut in 2015, when he was 21 years old. Now it is a decade later, and Lindor is hitting career milestones at 31 years old that few shortstops have ever reached.

Earlier this season Lindor reached 1,500 career hits, marking the halfway point to 3,000 hits. Now here he is at 250 home runs, the halfway point to 500 home runs.

When it is all said and done, Lindor may never reach either illustrious club, but lucky for him, his ticket to Cooperstown does not hinge on it.

Future Hall of Fame voters are going to judge Lindor’s entire career, and there is still a back half where the story is unwritten. Yet the first half is 10 seasons of baseball where Lindor hit 250 home runs, racked up 1,500 hits, 187 steals, played Gold Glove caliber defense every season at the toughest position, and racked up nearly 50 WAR.

While I didn’t like the WAR argument for the best player in baseball today, because it doesn’t work with my narrative, the statistical argument for Lindor as the best shortstop in baseball over the past decade is as open-and-shut as the case for Witt being the best in baseball now.

What separates Lindor from Witt at this stage of their respective careers isn’t something that shows up in the box score. But something the New York Mets feel every day in that clubhouse. That is a decade of a Hall of Fame resume, and the experience that comes with that.

All of which has made Lindor as good at being a winning shortstop in Major League Baseball as anyone else in the game.

Lindor Learned How to Win in New York in 2024

As a Mets fan, I carry my biases into this debate and wear them on my sleeve. With that said, I am also fortunate that I have gotten the chance to cover my favorite team on a daily podcast for over six years now.

This is my seventh season hosting Locked On Mets, so I have covered every game of Francisco Lindor’s career with the Mets on my show.

Watching Lindor on a daily basis, the one thing that is so evident in his game is his consistency. Not always in terms of production, but definitely in terms of his presence.

Having Lindor as the captain of your defense at the shortstop position makes every single pitcher on your staff better. He makes the other infielders better, and does so much that won’t meet the eye and certainly not the stat sheet.

Lindor might not have the range of a Bobby Witt Jr. or an Elly De La Cruz, but he won’t have to run as far because he has a pitch com in his ear and he reads swings better than anyone so he is always in the right position. Lindor’s anticipation at the shortstop is unmatched, and his experience plays a big part in that.

By next week, Lindor will have played over 12,000 MLB innings at the shortstop position. Xander Bogaerts is the only other active shortstop who has even cleared 10,000 career innings, making Lindor the most experienced shortstop in the game.

It is a rare thing for a player to carry that much experience, while still being in their prime athletically. This allows Lindor to both talk the talk and walk the walk as a leader for a winning ballclub, having all the respect of the veterans and the admiration of the younger players on the team.

Last year, Lindor was able to tap into that and make it his superpower, as he got his team to rally around him and come together to make an incredible run from 11 games under .500 at the end of May, to in the NLCS at the end of October.

Lindor was the catalyst for that run, both with his MVP-caliber performance over those final four months, and the way he lead his team. From locking the doors of the clubhouse to hold a player’s only meeting when the season had reached it’s low-point, to hitting the biggest home run when their backs were against the wall at end of the 162-game marathon.

In his fourth season with the Mets, Lindor had taken lessons from his first three years of trials and tribulations in New York and became the best version of himself. He had learned how to navigate the media and deal with the pressure of playing in the biggest market in sports.

He took ownership of the clubhouse as a leader, and posted up and played every day until his back gave out, then played through the injury all the way through the finish line.

When it comes to intangibles, Lindor has 80 grades across the board, which matters more in a market like New York than it might anywhere else.

If you go by the numbers Francisco Lindor may no longer be the best shortstop in baseball.

The general baseball fan wants to talk about Elly, Gunnar, and Bobby, the young guns who are going to take the shortstop position into the next decade. When the year ends, there is a very real chance that all three of them finish with better stats than Lindor.

However Lindor provides something to the Mets that no other shortstop in baseball can. He posts every day and never takes an at-bat or an inning off. He leads his teammates both on and off the field, and he comes through in the clutch whenever they need him most.

For a team that has World Series aspirations, there is no shortstop in baseball that the Mets would want over Lindor. He doesn’t need to win an MVP or be ranked as the top shortstop in baseball by some website for it to be true.

All he needs to do is keep winning, and if he can complete the job and finish the season with a trophy in his hands, there will be no debating who the best in baseball truly is.