The Comeback Player of the Year Award is generally given to
a player who has not only a great season but has a great story behind their
great season. For example, if a player misses a bulk of the previous season or
seasons due to injury they are generally a candidate for the award if they come
back the next season and have a strong season. Remember when Bartolo Colon
basically came out of retirement for the New York Yankees only to shock the
baseball world by showing that he could not only still pitch, but still pitch
effectively at the Major League level? Or remember last season when Greg
Holland returned from missing the 2016 season with Tommy John surgery to lead
the National League for a chunk of the seasons in saves in 2017? Those are the
kind of stories that win you a Comeback Player of the Year Award, and here are
my 2018 stories.
I know I am reaching way out in left field on this one, but
you almost have to with any of these sorts of predictions at this stage in the
year. No one knows who is going to come back healthy, and nobody knows who is
going to be the “next big thing” in Major League Baseball. So why not go bold?
Why not predict that Tim Lincecum will not only make the Major League roster at
some point in the 2017 season with the pitching-starved Texas Rangers, but why
not predict that he will do well for the team in whatever role they use him in?
It could happen, and according to my predictions it will happen. The Freak is
back, likely as a reliever, and he wants some more hardware for his shelves at
home.
The National League version was a little harder to come up
with, so I decided to go bold once again in predicting that David Wright
finally makes his way back onto the field with the New York Mets. At this point
Wright doesn’t even have to be all that effective to earn to award, the story
in itself of him working his way back to the Major League level would be story
enough. Wright is currently working on trying to get back to the Mets after
undergoing shoulder surgery in September of 2017 and an additional surgery on
his lower back in October of 2017. Currently at the time of this writing Wright
has been shut down from baseball activities for at least eight weeks, but if
the Mets former third baseman can make it back by June or July he would easily
be the story of the second half around Major League Baseball.