Ferdinand "Fearless" Bracegirdle is 21 years old, earning $502,000, and he just went 9-for-23 with four home runs in the first week of the season. The Misty Mountain Hops first baseman has earned himself the Mordor Conference Player of the Week award, and here's the thing: nobody who watched 2052 is particularly surprised.
That is not a slight. It is, if anything, the more remarkable sentence. When a 21-year-old hits .327 with 36 home runs and puts up 3.2 WAR across AA, AAA and the majors in a season, the expectation should be that Year Two looks something like this — and still, watching him go .391 in the opening week, you find yourself doing the arithmetic twice just to make sure the calculator isn't being generous.
Mind you, the Hops are sitting at 5-7, which is not quite the launching pad anyone hoped for — and the injury news has not been kind to this organization this spring, as MESN has covered at some length. Bracegirdle is switch-hitting his way through lineups that appear genuinely uncertain about what to do with him, and the answer so far has been: not much. Four home runs in a week from a player earning pre-arbitration wages is the sort of thing that makes general managers in the Mordor Conference quietly check their own rosters for comparable assets and find the cupboard a bit bare.
I'll say this much: the .391 average will come down, because averages always come down, the way a fourth meal left on the windowsill will eventually go cold. That is not pessimism. That is meteorology. What doesn't come down — or needn't, if the foundation holds — is the underlying power, the plate discipline that made the 2052 numbers real rather than lucky, and whatever particular quality makes a player at this age look like he's already been doing this for eleven seasons.
The Hops need him to be this. The question the Mordor Conference is beginning to ask, quietly, is whether Fearless being this good might be a problem for everyone else.