Is Bo Bichette Good?

Bo Bichette is one of the most exciting players in baseball. He’s a young, power hitting free-swinger who has little regard for the strike zone. He plays one of the most important positions in baseball, is capable of hitting balls a country mile, and even has the added benefit of being among a crop of extremely promising prospects on a team that hopes to be a serious challenge in the American League for the first time in years.

While all of this shows how Bichette has immediately become one of the most fun to watch players in baseball. Still, the questions are there; is Bichette really going to be one of the best players in baseball over the coming years, or has his extremely small sample size simply kept people from seeing that there may be less below the surface than what they maybe imagined?

Bichette’s conventional stats so far in his career would appear elite. He burst onto the scene in 2019, scorching pitchers from literally the beginning. Bo hit .311/.356/.571 with 11 homer runs in just 46 games. He set the record for most consecutive games with a double to begin his career, and his 146 OPS+ showed how well exceptional he was in relation to the rest of the league.

Still, not everything was perfect. His numbers were incredible, but he only played in 46 games, which is not exactly a large sample size. He had an extremely high strikeout rate and an extremely low contact rate, which I suppose are two thing that tend to go together. This alone isn’t extremely troubling, but his walk rate was less than stellar. StatCast lends further evidence to doubters, as his expected batting average, slugging percentage, and weighted on-base percentage were all at least somewhat lower than his actual results.

2020 was honestly much the same story. He batted a marginally-worse-but-still-very-good .301/.328/.512 slash, netting him a 128 OPS+. The results are nearly meaningless, though, as an already shortened season was cut even shorter for Bichette after a knee injury, holding him to a mere 29 games played. Worse, he managed to rank in just the fourth percentile in walk rate and only the first percentile in contact rate. On the plus, all of his expected stats improved, which is near meaningless when you’re only playing a sixth of a season but is still a positive sign.

Many times, an evaluation of statistics leads to the ability to answer questions, but in this case they honestly seem to create more. His batted ball rates yo-yo between very good and not so good. His contact rates are poor but he keeps high batting averages despite that. His walk rate would be concerning, but those tend to improve with age, so that isn’t necessarily telling either. The worst thing, though, is that, despite making his MLB debut two seasons ago, he still hasn’t even accrued enough games to qualify as a rookie, so pretty much everything he’s done can be either justified or ignored as the results of small sample size.

The truth is, like any player, the answer will become much clearer simply by him playing more. The difference between Bichette and every other fantastic young star is how long these questions have existed. Young faces who came up at the same time like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr. have existed long enough to show patterns. They’ve become more of a known quantity, while Bo still really hasn’t.

In my more objective opinion, I think he will be a very good player, though I’d probably bet against him consistently reaching the results he has so far. He swings too freely, and pitcher’s have still not quite thrown him the slew of off-speed pitches that tend to follow players with his profiles.

The jury is far from out on Bichette, and frankly pretty much every conceivable scenario is still in play for Bo, so making just about any prediction is just setting yourself up for failure. As fun as questions like this are, answers don’t actually exist within data samples that small. The only real way to find them, in this case, is to just watch more games.