A Living Embodiment of the Idiom: “Penny-Wise but Pound-Foolish”

It remains a heartbreaking but immutable fact of baseball life that you cannot steal first base.

So over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw passed through waivers. He’s no longer on the 40-man roster and will start the season in Triple-A, despite having a guaranteed three years and $20.45 million remaining on his contract.

On this, the day (at least idiomatically) of Ezequiel Tovar’s contract extension, Straw serves as a solemn reminder of the dangers of getting too attached to a fast guy with questions about his bat.

For the first three years of his major league career, Straw served the role for which he was best suited: Pinch runner, defensive replacement, occasional emergency fill-in when George Springer or Carlos Correa got hurt. In 2021, the Astros, having let Springer walk, gave Straw 93 starts in center field in the first four months of the season. But around the trade deadline, then-Houston GM James Click figured he’d rather have a center fielder who could hit even a little and shipped Straw to Cleveland for Yainer Diaz and Phil Maton.

The trade worked fairly well; with (mostly) Chas McCormick in center, the Astros won the pennant in 2021 and the World Series the following year.

At the time of the trade, Straw was hitting .262/.339/.326, a wRC+ of 89. And in the two months after the trade, he hit .285/.362/.377, a wRC+ of 110. Straw is one of the fastest runners in baseball, and therefore possesses exceptional defensive range. He also has one of the lowest whiff rates in the game, and could draw a walk. At the time, the Guardians were building their entire team around speed and high contact rates, and Straw seemed to fit in.

So with one year left before arbitration, Straw signed on with the Guardians long-term: five years, $25 million guaranteed, with two club options that could keep him under team control through 2028 at a total value of $39.75 million. In 2021, Straw played 156 games with a wRC+ of 98. Ordinarily, that kind of offensive production wouldn’t have a team bending over backward to extend a 27-year-old former 12th-round pick with one full season as a major league starter.

But a player like Straw, who provides so much on the bases and on defense, doesn’t have to hit that much to be valuable. The going rate for a platoon player or middle reliever is $5 million a year; in a best-case scenario, Straw’s AAV would have been $5.68 million. And the year before, Straw had been a 3.2 WAR player. Even if he didn’t improve a lick for the rest of the 2020s, the Guardians had an enormous bargain on their hands.

A player like Straw doesn’t have to hit much, but he does have to hit some.

There’s a simple reason Straw is going to be the highest-paid member of the Columbus Clippers (I love Columbus; I hope Myles enjoys North Market and Mikey’s Late Night Slice) this year: He has a terminal lack of power that spread to the rest of his offensive game.

In three full seasons as a big league starter, here are Straw’s percentile ranks in xISO, according to Baseball Savant: third, first, first. There’s getting the bat knocked out of your hands, and then there’s this. If you let Straw add up his ISO figures from the past three seasons, that number (.199) would have ranked 46th among qualified hitters last season.

In 2021, Straw hit .271 with a .349 OBP. For a plus basestealer and a plus defensive center fielder, those numbers are fine even if he doesn’t hit a double all year. He’s contributing on both sides of the ball and once he’s on first, he can always steal second.

Unfortunately, there’s a point at which a hitter has so little power his plate discipline doesn’t matter. See, every pitcher in the league can hit the strike zone if he wants to. Guys at the bottom of the Zone% leaderboard tend to end up there because they try to skirt the edges of the zone in order to get hitters to swing at suboptimal pitches. They do that because they’re afraid of what happens if they leave a sleepy fastball or a cement-mixer slider over the heart of the plate: Best-case scenario, you have to run over and back up third base. More often, your mom calls to yell at you after the game because she saw you cursing into your glove on live TV.

Whether to throw in the zone involves a mental calculus that can be diagrammed out in the language of game theory. Or — to the eternal chagrin of John Nash — you can think of it more simply: If the pitcher throws a hittable pitch, what’s the hitter going to do about it?

The ability to do damage is by no means the only factor that determines how many pitches a hitter sees in the zone, but ISO has a higher correlation with zone rate than contact rate or even swing decisions (i.e. how likely a batter is to chase).

And between 2021 and 2023, pitchers determined that even if they gave Straw a meatball, the worst thing that would happen is a spirited groundball to shortstop. Straw can’t post an OBP around .350 anymore, because he isn’t seeing enough balls to draw that many walks.

In 2022, Straw won a Gold Glove, and his defensive numbers floated him to 2.1 WAR on the season. That’s ugly, but for a team committed to spending the bare minimum, like Cleveland, it’s workable. Kevin Kiermaier was the face of the Rays for years even though he barely hit in his last five seasons there. But when Straw’s defensive metrics slid back down toward normal last year, he could no longer sustain a wRC+ in the high 60s.

Is a player like that rosterable? Sure, as a fourth or fifth outfielder, in some contexts. Even if not, missing on a five-year, $25 million contract usually isn’t the end of the world. It sucks for the player, who usually ends up wasting the best years of his career in Triple-A. But the Red Sox hid Rusney Castillo and the Phillies hid Scott Kingery — are still hiding him, believe it or not — in the minors; they chose to eat their mistake and move on.

What if you’re not the Red Sox or Phillies? What if you’re the kind of the team that’s so desperate to reduce costs you can’t go year-to-year in arbitration with a player who doesn’t have enough pop to pull off the Ben Revere career arc?

Those mistakes add up. The Guardians are one of five teams with a projected Opening Day payroll under $100 million, and they have two stars: José Ramírez and Shane Bieber. Even considering both players are on massively below-market deals — Ramírez on an extension, Bieber through his final year of arbitration — they take up a huge percentage of Cleveland’s budget.

The thing is, tossing Straw in an oubliette lowers Cleveland’s effective spending even further. In December 2022, the Guardians signed Josh Bell to a two-year contract, then jettisoned him in a trade with the Marlins at last year’s deadline. In return, they received Jean Segura, whom they cut immediately. For expediency’s sake, let’s just look at the impact of that move on the team’s 2024 payroll. Rather than spending $16.5 million on a disappointing-but-useful player who still had some upside, the Guardians spent $8.5 million just to cut Segura. (Plus $2 million to buy out his 2025 option. Sorry I lied about focusing only on 2024.)

So now, between Straw and Segura, about one out of every six dollars the Guardians are spending on payroll this year is going to players who won’t help the team.

You know what? This feels like a good place to add a pie chart. We don’t get a lot of pie charts around here.

You can’t build a team like that!

The value proposition to signing pre-arbitration players to long extensions is to lock in a fixed price for a player who has big upside. The Braves’ contract with Spencer Strider is a perfect example, though they basically built their entire team that way. The Guardians locked in a player who at best would be a poor man’s Kiermaier. And now that it’s gone south, this team that budgets as much for its entire roster as the Rangers do for pitchers on the IL is out a substantial percentage of its resources. Baseball has a huge mythology about how smart teams can win on the cheap. But in order to do that, you have to make smart decisions.