Barring some unforeseen act of the Baseball Gods, Adam Dunn will trudge into the offseason as the owner of the single worst offensive season in the history of modern baseball. Big Donkey inked a four-year, $56 million contract with the White Sox on the strength of seven consecutive seasons of more than 38 homers.
Suffice it to say that he won't reach that number this year. Dunn had never slugged lower than .454 entering 2011, carrying a better-than .500 mark into the season. His worst OBP in his 10 previous major league seasons was .354. In 2011, he's dropped an inexplicable .161/.292/.285(!) in 113 games, recording the worst
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) measurement of the 443 players with more than 100 plate appearances.
And it says here that while Dunn was clearly the league's worst player, he wasn't its most disappointing.
The Twins ponied up $184 million over eight years to keep local hero and all-around good guy Joe Mauer at home. Very quietly, the
uff das have been mounting, as Mauer will finish the season having played 82 games, hitting 3 homers and driving in 30. His slash lines of .287/.360/.368 are decent enough for a catcher, but only if that catcher's name is Jarrod Saltalamacchia (whose .759 OPS tops Mauer's for the bargain 2011 price of $750,000). Mauer's 1.7 WAR ranks him just below the exceedingly average (and heretofore unknown to me) Ryan Hanigan.
The fine people of the Twin Cities are far too nice to say this out loud, but I'd bet dollars to lutefisk-flavored donuts that they're worried that Mauer will never regain the form he displayed in 2009. And nobody writes that kind of ending to this story.
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