Congratulations to Marwin González and Jon Lester: 2018's Truly Mediocre Players

If each baseball season is a chapter in a greater volume—or a few seconds in an eventual mammoth documentary project from Ken Burns, take your pick—it isn’t too hard to guess how we’ll remember 2018. It’ll be because of the brilliance of Mike Trout, Mookie Betts and José Ramírez; the winless wonder of Jacob deGrom; the two-way marvel of Shohei Ohtani and maybe even the astoundingly bad performance of Chris Davis. The players who will stand out from this year are, simply, the players who stood out the most. It’s the same principle that has forever tied Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to 1998, Bob Gibson to 1969, Joe DiMaggio to 1941; it is, for the most part, just how memory tends to work.

And it…