Prince Fielder
Fielder retired at 32 with two discs left in his neck, robbing baseball of what should have been 500 home runs. His 319 career bombs in just 12 seasons put him on a Cooperstown trajectory before cervical fusion surgery ended everything.
The numbers tell the story of sustained excellence cut short. Six All-Star selections and three Silver Sluggers anchored by that monster 2011 campaign in Milwaukee — 38 homers, 120 RBIs, and a .981 OPS that ranked among the best in baseball. His 117 career OPS+ proves he was consistently above-average despite playing in an era when offense was down from the steroid peak.
Fielder's legacy lives in the what-ifs. He averaged 35 home runs per 162 games over his career, a pace that would have delivered 500-plus had his body cooperated. Instead, we're left with one of the more heartbreaking early exits in recent memory.
Career · Batting
12 seasons| Year | Team | G | AB | HR | RBI | AVG | OPS | OPS+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | MIL | 39 | 59 | 2 | 10 | .288 | .764 | 102 |
| 2006 | MIL | 157 | 569 | 28 | 81 | .271 | .831 | 108 |
| 2007 | MIL | 158 | 573 | 50 | 119 | .288 | 1.013 | 134 |
| 2008 | MIL | 159 | 588 | 34 | 102 | .276 | .879 | 117 |
| 2009 | MIL | 162 | 591 | 46 | 141 | .299 | 1.014 | 135 |
| 2010 | MIL | 161 | 578 | 32 | 83 | .261 | .871 | 120 |
| 2011 | MIL | 162 | 569 | 38 | 120 | .299 | .981 | 136 |
| 2012 | DET | 162 | 581 | 30 | 108 | .313 | .940 | 130 |
| 2013 | DET | 162 | 624 | 25 | 106 | .279 | .819 | 115 |
| 2014 | TEX | 42 | 150 | 3 | 16 | .247 | .720 | 103 |
| 2015 | TEX | 158 | 613 | 23 | 98 | .305 | .841 | 117 |
| 2016 | TEX | 89 | 326 | 8 | 44 | .212 | .626 | 85 |
| Career | 1611 | 5821 | 319 | 1028 | .283 | — | — | |
Every ball this hitter has put in play — how hard it left the bat, and at what angle. The red field behind the dots shows how much damage that kind of contact does, league-wide: the darker the red, the better things go for the hitter.
The field — league-average xwOBA (what a batted ball is typically worth: 0.0 is a sure out, ~2.0 a sure home run) for every exit-velocity × launch-angle combination, measured from 1.3 million regular-season balls in play since 2015. The dark ridge — balls hit 105+ mph at 25–30° — is the barrel zone, where contact becomes near-automatic extra bases.
The dots — this hitter’s career regular-season balls in play, grouped to a fine grid; a bigger dot means more batted balls at that exact combination. Dots piled onto the red ridge are damage; dots low on the pale field are weak or mishit contact. Spring training and the postseason are excluded.
Matchups, projections, comps — grounded in Lahman, Retrosheet, and Statcast.