A Midseason Check-in on Rookie Third Basemen

I don’t know if this happens to my colleagues, but I get attached to the players I write about. I can’t help it. Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “Things separate from their stories have no meaning,” and I’ve found that learning a player’s story, even if it’s just the story of why they need to lay off the slider, is enough to imbue them with an extra layer of meaning. Last year, I wrote about Jose Altuve after both the ALDS and the ALCS. It made me feel more connected to him, and during the World Series, whenever he came to the plate when my fiancée was in the room, I’d say, “That’s my little guy!” I really said that (and she really married me anyway).

Back in spring training, I wrote up our Positional Power Rankings for third base. It was a real crash course. We had projections for 149 different third basemen, and I needed to learn enough about each of them to articulate an opinion on what they’d do this year and why. I learned a lot about what I value when it comes to player performance. The exercise also informed the way I’ve watched the game this year. Diving deep into a league of third basemen, I formed attachments to all these players, especially the young ones, as I read prospect evaluations and beat reports and thought about their potential. Now that we’re nearing the halfway mark, here’s an update on the rookies I’ve been rooting for.

Josh Jung – 122 wRC+, 1.9 WAR

Jung’s WAR makes him the sixth-most valuable third baseman in the game thus far. He’s also played in 76 of the Rangers’ 79 games. That’s something of a relief, because coming into the season, it was hard to know what to expect from him at all on that front. Injuries limited him to 78 games in 2021 and 57 games (26 of them at the big-league level) in ’22. He wasn’t fully healthy in those 57 games, and he seemed to lose his sense of the strike zone.

This year, he’s chasing a bit less and swinging at many more strikes. As a result, his walk rate has increased from 3.9% to 6.1%, and his strikeout rate has dropped from 38.2% to 27.7%. Those still aren’t good numbers, and they’re a far cry from his more-walks-than-strikeouts Texas Tech days, but combine them with some of the most consistently good contact in the game, and they’ll play just fine. We have Jung’s soft contact rate at 7.7%, third-best among all qualified players. Meanwhile, his 49% hard-hit rate and 91.5 mph average exit velocity put him in the top fifth of the league. He doesn’t destroy the ball, but all that solid contact makes his .340 BABIP look pretty reasonable.

Jung’s defense is also earning positive marks from three of the four major defensive metrics (DRP doesn’t love his arm). Sports Info Solutions has him leading all third basemen with 13 “Good Fielding Plays.”

Maikel Garcia – 93 wRC+, 1.5 WAR

Garcia was not one of those 149 different third basemen — nine of them Royals — with a preseason projection in our Positional Power Rankings, though he did show up at shortstop. Up until May 1, the Royals had accrued all of 0.2 WAR at third base, tied for 22nd in baseball. Since May 2, the day Garcia was called up, they’re at 2.1, second overall. The 23-year-old’s contributions have mostly come on the defensive end: In just 298 innings at third base, he has 10 OAA, tied for the lead. On a per-inning basis, all of the defensive metrics rank him highly. That part’s not a surprise.

The surprise is that Garcia is running an 88th-percentile hard-hit rate and an 85th-percentile average exit velocity. A little over a year ago, our evaluators had all but given up on the possibility that he would ever find some power. The thing is, they’re still not wrong. Among the 280 players with at least 150 plate appearances, Garcia’s 6.5-degree average launch angle is 27th-lowest; 44% of his hard-hit balls have been grounders. To give you a frame of reference, that’s just two percentage points lower than noted groundball enthusiast Ke’Bryan Hayes. Garcia also possesses a fantastic eye and great contact ability, so pitchers have thus far been happy to throw the ball over the plate and let him hit a grounder somewhere. That’s how someone with an 85th-percentile average exit velocity ends up with an in-zone rate of 54.1%, third-highest among players with at least 150 PAs.

It’s still early in Garcia’s career, but right now it’s easier to imagine his hard-hit rate coming back down to earth than his launch angle rising away from it. In the meantime, he is doing an excellent Hayes impression, running a 93 wRC+ and a .103 ISO — perfectly good for a solid shortstop moonlighting as a superlative third baseman.

Gunnar Henderson – 124 wRC+, 1.6 WAR

After a brilliant minor league season capped by an impressive 34-game showing in Baltimore last year, Henderson came into 2023 as the game’s top prospect. He struggled to start the season, but he’s running a 188 wRC+ in June. When discussing his slow start, Esteban Rivera singled out his worrisome in-zone contact rate as a big culprit. Let’s check in on it:

Sure enough, just a week after Esteban’s article, Henderson started whiffing less in the zone and quickly caught fire. That’s not to say there’s nothing left to be concerned about in his profile; he’s still chasing and striking out more than he did last year. But as long as he’s crushing the ball to all fields and walking at a 12.6% clip, there won’t be many complaints.

Spencer Steer – 126 wRC+, 1.2 WAR

With Joey Votto returning from injury, Matt McLain and Elly De La Cruz getting called up and Christian Encarnacion-Strand treating Triple-A the way Godzilla treats major metropolitan areas, there’s a real crunch in the Cincinnati infield. It’s a good problem for the Reds to have. At the start of the season, we expected Steer to see the lion’s share of the third base playing time. So far, he’s spent most of his time at first base, but the influx of talent (and the apparent readiness of Encarnacion-Strand) means that he’ll likely start seeing more time at DH and in the outfield.

The defense is always going to be an issue for Steer, so he needs to hit. That he has, despite faltering for a couple weeks following a minor knee injury, though he’s outperforming his peripherals a bit. He’s running a 126 wRC+, but DRC+, which measures contributions and not just results, has him at 108. Still, he’s making great swing decisions, which have resulted in great walk and strikeout rates, which in turn allows him to use his abundance of solid but not spectacular contact (the Jungian archetype) into enough hits to be successful.

Coming into the season, that’s exactly how we imagined Steer could succeed. But it’s not the reason that I’ve decided to join the Spencer Steer Society. I’m hopping on board because of the way he celebrates hitting a single. After he rounds first and returns to the bag, he gives first base coach Collin Cowgill a low five, then the two turn sideways, lean in, and touch helmets. He’s not the only player to celebrate this way with Cowgill, but Steer just does it so tenderly. When Tyler Stephenson singles, it can be borderline violent. Steer is so gentle that sometimes it almost looks like he’s leaning in to nuzzle Cowgill. Come join us.

Brett Baty – 91 wRC+, 0.5 WAR

Baty tore up spring training and Triple-A before his April callup, but the long and short of it is that he’s still hitting the ball on the ground too much. Once you reduce the plate appearance minimum to 200, he’s ninth in GB/FB and 22nd in groundball rate. That’s how you turn a 48.1% hard-hit rate and a 91.2 mph average exit velocity into an expected slugging percentage in the 40th percentile.

That issue had followed Baty throughout the minors, but last year, he finally seemed to make enough changes to put it behind him. Per Eric Longenhagen, “The identifiable visual tweak to the swing, the shift in batted ball profile, and Baty’s dramatic uptick in home runs in 2022 are all indications that he’s dialed in the details that have kept him vacillating between several FV tiers for the last couple of years.” The team finally committed fully to Baty, too, sending Eduardo Escobar to the Angels for prospects last week.

It’s still early, and there’s still plenty to dream on. Baty has proven that he can hit the ball hard at the big-league level, which is not nothing, and even though it’s deserted him this year, the ability to elevate the ball isn’t that far back in the rearview mirror. He’s not running much of a platoon split, and he’s also been the victim of some bad batted ball luck thus far. Baty is performing at just a hair below league average as he tries to figure things out. There have been greater crimes.

All stats are as of Tuesday, June 27.