Coming into Thursday night’s game against the Mariners, Josh Naylor was sitting at exactly 500 career plate appearances. Lazy shorthand calls that a season — and he’s played 165 games in his career anyway — so it seems almost fair to start passing some kind of judgment on him.
It would be an unfair judgment of course since we’re talking about bits of three seasons between two teams, two leagues, and a globe-spanning pandemic. That’s not a fair situation to judge any young player, but the .251/.307/.386 line is there. It’s not exactly uplifting, especially when you’re considering a guy who’s supposed to be somewhere in the center of your offense’s production.