His power stayed in full force though as Bryant managed 36 doubles, 40 home runs while knocking in 133 runs. You can tell age is finally starting to catch up with him a bit as he struck out a career high 142 times and swiped a career low of only 4 stolen bases. His season was good enough for his 7th All-Star selection while finishing 3rd in MVP voting and help lead his Jersey Shore club to their 2nd World Series appearance.
With his first season below hitting .300, Bryant took a swift drop in career numbers going from .3288 to .3246. While this is still good for 2nd all time, Paco Rosas increased his lead after a season where he hit .348. Bryant sits only 1 point ahead of Adam Mason who retired in 2013. Bryant remained in 2nd in career OPS where he has been since we started doing this tracking report 4 seasons ago. Jeff Cole and his crazy OBP lead by a healthy margin and Bryant dropped a few points, but Paco Rosas sits only 4 points behind Bryant while veteran slugger Shumei Yokoyama is the next active player in 5th.
A category where Bryant remained king though was in Slugging even though his .561 mark last season was the lowest of his career. Bryant once was the only player to hold a .600 slugging percentage, but that number has slowly lowered to .586. That number is still 23 points higher than the 2nd place Mel Fields and 33 points higher than the next active player in Jeff Cole.
Like I mentioned earlier, this was the first year since his rookie season where he only played a partial season that Bryant didn't reach the 200 hit plateau. His 188 hits did take him to 27th on the all time list and 22nd on the active player list. He reached the 1500 hit plateau in July and will reach the 300 double mark sometime early as he finished 2020 with 298 career 2-baggers. As for total bases, even though he tallied the lowest number of his career in a full season, he still lead the BSA with 356 and edged closer to Top 10 All-time in this category.
For the 4th time in his career Bryant reached the 40 HR plateau and for the 5th time knocked in more than 130 runs. With 297 career Homers, he looks to become only the 10th player to hit 300 in a career, following the latest player, CF Shizue Chouda who hit his 300th last May. In similar fashion he became the 9th player to knock in 1000 runs in a career reaching this mark in the middle of September. In both HR and RBI the only retired player ahead of Bryant is the leader John Crowe in both categories who retired in 2019. Sam Sagar who is nearing the end of his career, needs 19 RBI to tie Crowe, while Yokoyama starts the season behind Crowe by 74.
Bryant turned 33 in Spring Training and while the scouts have his ratings dropping a little, we have yet to see anything steep. He is to the point in the record books where not only his numbers matter but most of the players he is grouped with are also active. What is interesting is this is the last year he remains under contract with Jersey Shore after spending his entire career in the organization after being drafted in 2010 and receiving the 6 year contract in the summer of 2015. He has stated he would like to finish his career in Jersey and you have to assume D-Bag mamagement would love to watch their native son only wear one uniform for his career.
Current All-Time Rank. (Previous 3 years are in parenthesis)
BA: 2nd (2nd, 2nd, 1st): .3246
OPS: 2nd (2nd, 2nd, 2nd): .9673
SLG: 1st (1st, 1st, 1st): .5861
VORP: 9th (9th, 13th, 20th): 554.92
Hits: 27th (34th, 57th, 96th): 1582
Doubles: 42nd (57th, 82nd, NR): 298
Triples: 28th (46th, 75th, NR): 41
Triples: 28th (46th, 75th, NR): 41
Total Bases: 14th (23rd, 41st, 73rd): 2853
HR: 10th (15th, 20th, 35th): 297
RBI: 9th (19th, 32nd, 53rd): 1012
Runs: 22nd (28th, 55th, 86th): 890
WAR: 11th (13th, 18th, 24th): 54.38
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