Neyer: Wait, Ryan Hanigan is HOW underrated?

I’m not ashamed. It’s the computer age. Nerds are in. They’re still in, right?

So I’m watching MLB Network’s “Top 10 Right Now”, hosted by Brian Kenny and focusing on catchers, when Bill James shows up with his Top 10 list ...

Kenny: “Bit of a surprise here, Bill. You throw this right out at us: Ryan Hanigan of the Cincinnati Reds. Why Hanigan?”

James: “With Ben Zobrist, those two are the most underrated players in baseball. I mean, Hanigan’s on-base percentage is not only good, it’s very, very good. He’s hit .260, .270 or better every year of his career. He walks a lot. He throws extremely well. The Cincinnati Reds’ ERA with Hanigan catching last year was 3.04; when he wasn’t catching, it was up around 3.8. Maybe Ben Zobrist is the most underrated player in baseball, but Ryan Hanigan may be the most underrated player in baseball.”

It’s hard for me to believe that a part-time player is the second-most underrated player in the game, unless you can make the case that management’s holding him down; that he’d be an All-Star if the Reds would just play him as often as he deserves. In the meantime, though, I think I’ll stick with Alex Gordon, who somehow ranks fifth in the majors in Wins Above Replacement (Wins+) over the last two seasons. Even if the method is generous—and I will note that Baseball-Reference.com’s Wins+ has him fifth, too—dropping Gordon to 10th or 15th or 20th would still have him much higher than almost everybody in the baseball world would guess. So I’m going to go with this ranking:

1. Alex Gordon
2. Ben Zobrist
3. Austin Jackson
4. Erick Aybar