Anthony Rendon: Injuries, underachievement highlight new signing

Anthony Rendon’s performance this season for the LA Angels has agent Scott Boras looking like a genius.

Boras helped Anthony Rendon negotiate a 7-year deal worth $245 million to play for the LA Angels in the offseason after 2019. So far, he has not earned it.

After nearing an MVP campaign in 2019, Rendon came back down to earth rather quickly in 2020, and looks even worse in 2021.

In 2019, Rendon hit .319/.412/.598 in a season where he was named an NL All-Star for the Washington Nationals, and won a Silver Slugger award. In 2020, he hit just .286/.418/.497.

What was most concerning about Rendon in 2020, however, wasn’t just those averages/percentages. It was that he wasn’t hitting for any extra bases.

In 2019, Rendon hit 34 home runs and 44 doubles. He hit 44 doubles in 2018 as well. The season before, he hit 41, and he’s approached 40 in multiple other seasons.

He hit just 11 doubles in the shortened season last year. That’s not the player the Angels signed. The player the Angels signed used to drive in every teammate who got on any of the three bases before him.

Rendon had 126 RBI in 2019, and drove in just 31 in 2020. Nine home runs in 2020 isn’t terrible (again, it was a 60-game season), however nobody pays a player $35 million per year (on average) to have a season like that.

In 2021, Rendon started off with that type of production again. After the first eight games of this year, Rendon hit .290/.378/.387. He hit just one home run and drove in just three.

His home run was his only extra base hit. He then suffered a left groin strain and missed over two weeks. When he came back, he went 2 for 16 in his first four games.

In his next three, however, he went 5 for 11 with a double, two home runs, and 5 RBI. He then fouled a ball off of his knee and hit the IL again with a knee contusion.

Since then, he’s been a huge let-down at the plate. From the time he came back through the end of May, which ended up being 18 games, he went 10 of 64 with just two extra base hits, both doubles.

His batting average has dropped to .213, and he gets on less than 30 percent of the time.

He has the second-highest average annual contract value in the entire MLB, and has a bWAR of 0.1 coming into June.

It’s looked like an absolute joke of a signing. Rendon has been a huge disappointment, and it’s not too early to start questioning if he can ever turn it around this year. It’s June, and the Angels are getting awful production out of a player they are paying the fourth-most average annual contract value of any player in the MLB.