Brett Lawrie’s Search for Past Success Moves to Chicago

When the top 100 prospects in the game were ranked by Baseball America during the summer of 2010, Brett Lawrie was 26 spots ahead of Mike Trout. Both received a large cup of coffee in the majors during 2011 – Lawrie produced 2.6 WAR in just 46 games, while Trout put up 0.7 WAR in 40 – and there was a lot of optimism that we were witnessing two stars in the making: these were the athletic, ultra-talented position players of the future for two franchises.

Four years have passed since those brief debuts, and we know the history of both players has been quite different: Trout has produced a stunning 37.8 WAR, establishing himself as a perennial candidate for best player in baseball, while Lawrie has produced 6.2 WAR in a series of injury-interrupted, slightly above average seasons.

Being compared to Trout is unfair for basically every player in the game, but the point is this: early success doesn’t always mean continued success, mostly because baseball is about how well you adjust, not necessarily how much raw talent you have. A lot can change in the course of four seasons, especially when we’re trying to evaluate young players.

Because of the content of the four years since his debut, we view Lawrie through a certain lens: he was a top prospect, but he’s not a top major-leaguer. He’s had his chance, the thinking goes, and this is what he’s done with it. Major-league baseball is a boiling hot cauldron into which young men are thrown, and they either develop sufficiently thick skin to handle the heat or they don’t. It’s been over four seasons, and this is who he is.

Something complicates that viewpoint, however, and it’s that Lawrie will have just turned 26 when Opening Day rolls around in 2016. It might seem like he’s been around a long time, but he’s still young, and youthful players who were once top prospects are given a longer leash to figure things out. Now, after two separate opportunities to put everything together, Lawrie is headed from Oakland to the south side of Chicago in return for two relief pitchers, Zack Erwin and J.B. Wendelken.

For Oakland, the writing was on the wall after their recent reacquisition of Jed Lowrie, leaving too many options in the infield following Danny Valencia’s strong 2015 campaign. They continue to rebuild their system with Erwin, a lefty who ended last season in A-ball having exhibited great command and two plus breaking/offspeed pitches, and Wendelken, a nearly major-league-ready right-hander who ranked in the top-40 among qualified minor-league relievers in strikeout-to-walk ratio. The latter could possibly make an impact in the A’s bullpen during 2016, according to GM David Forst.

The A’s have to be at least somewhat disappointed to be moving on from Lawrie, however, given that there was certainly a hope he might reach some of his potential if able to stay healthy during 2015. After being a large part of the deal that sent Josh Donaldson to the Toronto Blue Jays in the offseason after 2014 (Franklin Barreto merits mention, of course), Lawrie’s performance for Oakland was an indicator of their possible return in the trade. Even though the A’s didn’t get what they hoped for out of the third baseman, tying the final judgement of the A’s/Blue Jays Donaldson trade to this latest deal would be misguided: Barreto was the key to the Donaldson deal (not to mention the additions of Sean Nolin and Kendall Graveman), and it will be years before we have a handle on how he will pan out.

Lawrie did stay healthy in 2015, playing a career-high 149 games for the A’s, but he took a step back on both sides of the ball. Defensively, he posted his first below average season by UZR/150 at third base (-15.8) while also spending over 350 innings of the season at second base (-15.8 as well). Given the noise inherent in one season of defensive statistics and his above-average track record, we should take this news with a grain of salt, but he did show a propensity toward ill-advised attempts in the field.

Offensively, plate discipline was the main culprit: the combination of an inability to lay off pitches out of the zone while posting lower contact rates caused his walk rate to drop for the third year in a row (his three year trend from 2013 to -15: 6.8%, 5.7%, 4.7%) along with a vast increase in strikeout rate (15.4%, 17.4%, 23.9%). Pitchers exploited this tendency, feeding him a steady diet of breaking pitches: he received the fourth-lowest rate of fastballs among qualified hitters, and even saw ten breaking balls in a row on two separate occasions.

Ironically, his attempt to adjust to this pitching approach might have made him more susceptible when fastballs were thrown, as he accounted for the fifth-lowest qualified run value against four-seamers. A cursory examination of his plate discipline numbers show a few notable developments in 2015:

Brett Lawrie Plate Discipline Statistics, 2012-2015
Season O-Swing% Z-Swing% Swing% O-Contact% Z-Contact% Contact% SwStr%
2012 31.7% 66.9% 48.3% 70.5% 90.5% 83.6% 7.9%
2013 30.3% 67.3% 47.5% 70.5% 88.2% 82.1% 8.3%
2014 33.1% 66.3% 50.0% 66.9% 89.2% 82.0% 8.8%
2015 36.1% 64.0% 49.3% 61.1% 84.6% 75.5% 11.9%

An increase in O-Swing% and a coinciding decrease in Z-Swing% tell the story of a hitter who couldn’t quite get a handle on the way he was being pitched, and the decrease in contact rate only made matters worse. It’s not often a fourth-year player shows these sorts of changes in their approach: plate discipline statistics are both among the most stable stats year-to-year, and also tend to improve as a player ages. Whatever the mental or mechanical reasons behind these shifts, it’s clear Lawrie was searching for something at the plate for most or all of 2015. The goal of the White Sox will be to get those trends moving in the other direction next season.

Despite these issues, Lawrie has been an above-average bat for the past few years, and his youth and upside are going to keep buying him playing time in the near future, especially now that Gordon Beckham has moved on to Atlanta. With two more years of team control, the White Sox have little to lose from taking this chance on him.

Lawrie will continue to chase the elusive success he had in his first stint in the majors during the end of 2011, even as the memory of that high time becomes fades more completely as the seasons pass. Is this all that Brett Lawrie will ever be? The reason we keep coming back is that we don’t know. Just like all things in baseball, we can hope there’s more. Next season.





Owen Watson writes for FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. Follow him on Twitter @ohwatson.

37 Comments
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Allan G
8 years ago

Hard to say that Barreto was the key to the Donaldson deal.

He was certainly a big part of it, but Lawrie was the centerpiece.

Gregory
8 years ago
Reply to  Allan G

You are arguing that your perception of established names is gospel?

Joey D
8 years ago
Reply to  Allan G

I disagree. Lawrie was the player Oakland needed to be able to pull the trigger because he offered an immediate fill-in. But At the time Sean Nolin was of high-value to Oakland, as was Barretto and Graveman.

dl80
8 years ago
Reply to  Joey D

Unfortunately for the A’s, both Graveman and Nolin have turned out to be big piles of meh. Just decent 5th tarters, maybe, if everything goes right.

In reality, neither one ever had even decent minor league numbers. A 7.0 K rate (or worse) in the high minors is not a predictor of success in the majors.

Barreto looks quite good, though, luckily for the A’s.

Oakland Pro
8 years ago
Reply to  dl80

Nolin got hurt shortly after getting acquired by the A’s, and lost something like 4-5MPH on his fastball. Graveman still profiles similarly to Doug Fister, and still has some upside.