With a 70.5 VORP, he had a classic Bryant season, but with waning defense as he ages, he saw more time at DH than ever before and fell out of the Top 5 of player WAR for the year. Jeff Cole would go on to win the MVP in the CL, breaking the 3-way tie between himself, Cole and John Crowe with 2 MVP wins.
Before last season Bryant sat atop the all time list for batting average, nearly 5 points ahead of Greenville's Paco Rosas. A giant year from Rosas which saw him win the batting the tittle with a .339 average. At the moment he has squeaked by Bryant by 1/1000 of a point at .3289 to .3288. Nothing changed in OPS as Cole still has a commanding lead with Bryant in 2nd by a healthy margin over the next active player in Shumei Yokoyama by nearly 14 points. In Slugging percentage, nothing changed as Bryant has a large lead over 2nd place and retired vet Mel Fields and leads Toronto's German Rivas by 30+ points.
Though it took the most plate appearances of his career, Bryant reached 200 hits for the 6th straight year of his career and as far as we could look, he is the only player to even have 5 straight. Those 213 hits took him from 57th all the way up to 34th, where he sits 3 hits shy of 1400 and if he stays healthy should hit 1500 sometime in July after the All-Star break and would likely be the 30th or 31st player in the league history to hit that milestone. Another big season would push up him to the lower 20's, but anything beyond that is unobtainable this season.
After 5 straight years of 37+ HR, Bryant fell back and only hit 36, his lowest total of any full season he has had in the big leagues. Last season he sat at #20 and those 36 pushed him up to 15th all time. He is done passing retired players as the only one ahead of him on the list is all-time leader John Crowe. Ahead of him is teammate John Warner, 2 ahead of him and current free agent Erroll Hughes who sits 6 ahead of him at 263.
After having a career low in RBI in 2018 with 119, he followed up with the 2nd lowest of his career at 126. While this is by no means a small number, it's a far cry from the 130+ numbers he put up in the 1st 4 years of his big league career. None the less he jumped from 32nd to 19th in RBI and 126 this season would put him over 1000 for his career. As of this point only 8 players have hit the 1000 RBI mark in BSA history. 39 doubles for the 2nd straight year moved him up 25 spots to 57th and 129 runs, the 2nd biggest mark in his career, helped him crack the Top 30 and number 28.
Bryant turned 32 during spring training and is no spring chicken when it comes to the BSA. We can only help he keeps up his good health and ages gracefully hopefully joining the Top 10 of BSA history in the upcoming years. But for now, we can only wait, watch and enjoy one of the best players of his era.
Current All-Time Rank. (Previous 2 years are in parenthesis)
BA: 2nd (1st, 2nd): .3288
OPS: 2nd (2nd, 2nd): .9730
SLG: 1st (1st, 1st): .5884
VORP: 9th (13th, 20th): 486.87
Hits: 34th (57th, 96th): 1397
Doubles: 57th (82nd, NR): 262
Total Bases: 23rd (41st, 73rd): 2500
HR: 15th (20th, 35th): 257
RBI: 19th (32nd, 53rd): 879
Runs: 28th (55th, 86th): 785
WAR: 13th (18th, 24th): 48.22
