Bo Bichette question or, when do you move on?

[Jasper70]

Currently 2025, 40 games into the season
Rockies save. During the off season after 2023, trade Elias Diaz and a minor league pitcher for Bo Bichette
2024 Bichette is an All Star slashing 295/325/498, 26 Hrs 128 RBI.
Leads the league in hits with 198.
2025, 40 games into the season he sits at 113/159/208 3Hrs 10 RBI and his K rate is 47% yet his scouting reports have showed very little in ratings decline.

I understand players decline pretty much at the whim of the OOTP gods despite what their ratings actually say so that is not the problem.


The question is, how long before you move on?

[pgjocki]

40 games isn't a huge sample size but it's enough to cause concern.

You can try moving him around in the line-up, looking at match ups to try and get him more favorable at-bats, or just flat sit him for 3 games as all stop gap ideas.

In some cases a guy will just have a down year and nothing you do will matter but you don't always want to immediately get rid of him because he might be back to his normal self the next year.

[Syd Thrift]

IME scouts tend to pick up on actual ratings changes for well known vets very, very quickly (too quickly in fact; it's a long-standing issue I have). If you don't really have scouting on or you don't trust them... straight up average takes I want to say around a full season to become statistically significant, but K rate by itself doesn't take that long and if it's insanely high like 50% even after 150 games you can probably safely conclude that his under-the-hood rating is still pretty bad (Mike Zunino springs to mind here).

If it was at-bat after at-bat of the guy grounding to shortstop... well, even for hitters, BABIP is another thing entirely.

[Dave Stieb II]

Clearly you are being punished by the baseball gods for having acquired him for Elinor (sic) Diaz and a pitching prospect.
Joking aside, those are insanely anemic numbers even for a 40-game sample size that many would refer to as too small.
Yah, it's too small unless you've had him batting in the top three of your order and watched your season collapse at the 1/4 mark....in which case how do you describe a sample size with an impact big enough to tank an entire team's season?
Still small? Yet big enough for one player's 40 games to keep an entire team out the post season.
Small sample size with an outsized impact I guess.
Anyway, this is OOTP so no matter how extremely negative the 40 game results are, I wouldn't unload him just yet. But he would bat in the bottom third of my line up until he shows signs of turning things around over the course of a month or more.
Hard to imagine someone making Cody Bellinger's 2021 and 2022 seasons look solid and normal but it appears your version of Bo Bichette is well on his way.

[jeffkost]

I had Bo on a white sox save for many seasons and saw a lot of variance in his play over each season. He seems to be a high variance player, and a slash line like that over 40 games may not be evidence that hes washed.

[Jasper70]

I put him o waivers right after posting this. It was the final year of his contract, Warming Bernabol was lighting up Albuquerque and he ended up getting claimed by Arizona.
His slash line for AZ in 361 AB 222/273/388 14Hr 50 RBI 107Ks