Can Jeimer Candelario Make Two Teams Very Happy This Year?

I don’t want to be rude, but here’s a fact of life: I pay less attention to the Nationals than the average team in Major League Baseball. It’s not because I have a grudge against them or anything; I went to college in Virginia and have a ton of family in the D.C. area, so I know an absolute ton of Nats fans. They’re just not that interesting at the moment, and there’s a lot of baseball to watch, so someone has to slide down the priority queue.

When I have paid attention to the Nationals, though, I’ve liked what I’ve seen. I thought they made some smart signings this offseason. They’ve done a good job of giving plenty of playing time to interesting players. Lane Thomas might never have found a regular home if the Nats hadn’t come calling, Joey Meneses is being given every chance to play out of a season-starting slump, and Hunter Harvey looks like a nice bullpen arm for the trade deadline.

In my chat this week, someone mentioned that the Tigers would be in the thick of the AL Central race if they’d merely held onto Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes. And that drove a realization for me: Candelario looks good again. Is he the real deal? Can some contending team plug him in at third base and have an All-Star–level contributor? Let’s find out.

When I looked into the Candelario signing last winter, I liked the bet on volatility, even if I saw some troubling signs in his 2022. That’s not exactly surprising; any time a player goes from a 3.9 WAR season to getting released by the Tigers, you can bet that something went terribly wrong in the interim. In Candelario’s case, what went wrong is a little bit of everything. He started chasing too often, which led to more strikeouts and fewer walks. It hurt his contact quality, too, because he was putting tough pitches into play more frequently. He even got a little bit unlucky. In other words, every little thing that could have backfired did.

Even at the time, I thought the Tigers should have tendered him a contract and kept him around. They gave Nick Maton the job instead, and Maton promptly played his way out of the role. Zach McKinstry is doing an admirable job at third these days, but he could be doing an admirable job anywhere on the diamond. Meanwhile, Candelario is hitting .261/.337/.478 and playing solid defense, at least as best as various advanced defensive metrics can discern. He’s already accumulated 2.6 WAR, which would be the highest mark among Tigers position players.

As was the case with his decline, Candelario’s resurgence seems to come from all over the place. Let’s answer the question that Nationals fans are surely wondering: is this performance real to the point where some team will send them a juicy prospect or two in exchange for his services down the stretch?

First stop: plate discipline. A lot of Candelario’s downfall last year came down to an overly aggressive approach at the plate. In ‘20 and ‘21, he’d chased pitches outside of the zone 31.7% of the time. In ‘22, that number shot up to 36.8%. This year, he’s back down to 32.6%, basically back to where he started. That slight increase is mirrored by swinging more often at pitches over the heart of the plate. In numerical terms, he swung at 76% of pitches down the middle in ‘20 and ‘21. In ‘22, he swung at 81%, but again, it came with a ton of chase. This year, he’s swinging at 77% of pitches down the middle.

The tradeoff between this year’s and last year’s approaches is one of the essential binds of hitting. Take a more aggressive mindset into your at-bats, and you’re likely to swing more at the juiciest pitches. You’re also likely to flail ineffectively at more pitchers’ pitches. Hitters generally exhibit the same pattern when they get more or less aggressive. Their zone swing rate changes less than their out-of-zone swing rate. Candelario didn’t quite fit this pattern last year: his zone and out-of-zone swing rates changed by roughly the same amount.

I looked into this tradeoff before and found a rough equilibrium. To offset the cost of chasing an extra 1% of the out-of-zone pitches he sees, the average batter needs to swing at 4% more of the in-zone pitches he sees. Adding four percentage points to your chase rate isn’t going to work out unless you’re able to channel it into far more aggression in the zone. Candelario didn’t last year, and his production suffered. This year, he’s swinging at far fewer tough pitches, and he’s back to his previous self.

It honestly might be as simple as that, but I thought I’d continue my investigation to see whether anything else has changed. The truth is: not really. His barrel rate has ticked down, but his line drive and sweet spot rates have ticked up, so you might intuit that he’s swinging slightly less hard in an attempt to make more consistent elevated contact. Just one problem with that: his maximum and 95th-percentile exit velocities are stable from year to year. We don’t have public bat speed metrics yet, but the circumstantial evidence points to Candelario swinging roughly the same as he always has. Mostly, he seems to be engaging in similar process and getting similar results in a slightly different way.

Down the line, the story looks roughly the same. Candelario basically looks a lot like his 2021 self. He’s pouncing on fastballs like he did at the best of times and laying off sliders easily, a skill he’s always possessed. I think his power is likely to regress somewhat — he’s had some unlikely doubles this year — but I also think he might strike out less frequently as the year goes on given his swinging and called strike rates. In the end, I peg him as roughly 15% better than the average hitter, which is a pretty nice skillset for an adequate defensive third baseman.

Now, whether he’s an adequate third baseman or not is a complicated question. If you ask Statcast, he’s spectacular, in the 94th percentile for outs above average despite a weak throwing arm. You can drill down into more specifics, and Candelario’s biggest improvement has come when moving to his left, toward first base. He was quite poor at that particular skill in 2022, and generally speaking hasn’t been great when he’s been forced to move a ton in any direction.

I watched a lot of Candelario fielding plays to try to figure out what happened here, and I’ll level with you: I think he was just in his own head last year. He made 11 errors in under 1,000 innings in the field. If he’d instead committed errors at his career rate, he would have made about eight instead. That doesn’t quite account for all the plays he missed, either; I saw plenty of examples where he had a poor reaction that led to a tough play, or gave up on a ball when he didn’t field it cleanly. It’s reductive, but I think a lot of this just comes down to the fact that it’s a lot less fun to play defense when you’re hitting .217/.272/.361 for a bad team.

To the extent that I think there’s something measurably different about his defense this year compared to earlier in his career, it’s a definite positive. He got deployed as a pseudo-shortstop in shifted orientations before this year, and to be frank, he was bad at it. Stated mathematically, he was five outs below average when deployed in a standard shortstop orientation from 2016 through ’21 — and four outs above average overall. Remove those tough plays that he doesn’t have to make anymore, and the numbers start looking meaningfully better.

Who could use this new and rejuvenated version of Candelario? Off the top of my head, I see the Yankees, Angels (if Anthony Rendon is hurt), Marlins, Phillies (depending on how they feel about Darick Hall), Brewers, and Diamondbacks as potential matches. He’s not a perfect fit everywhere, but good offensive production and scratch defense at a reasonably tough position is a really nice package. To the extent that the money matters, he’s also on an attractive deal, and the Nats could even eat a lot of the remaining amount to sweeten the pot.

What might Candelario fetch in return? Brandon Drury got traded for Victor Acosta (40 FV) at the deadline last year. Christian Vázquez — not exactly a perfect comp but a rental putting up solid numbers — got traded for Enmanuel Valdez (45 FV) and Wilyer Abreu (40 FV). Andrew Benintendi, who was having an almost perfectly Candelarian season at the time he got traded, fetched three prospects (40+, 40+, and 40 FVs). Maybe none of these are perfect analogs for what the Nationals will get back, but they’re probably at least in the right ballpark.

That may sound like a pretty minor thing to be writing about. Oh, the Nationals are going to get a few prospects who may or may not ever make the majors? Oh, some contending team is going to get an above-average infielder for two months? Boring! But these little moves add up. An extra few prospects here, a reclamation project that turns into a solid reliever there, and pretty soon you’re putting a good major league team on the field sooner than expected. There’s a lot of randomness involved in building a baseball team. You never know how the guys you acquire will turn out. But tiny edges repeated over and over give you a much better shot at success. Signing players like Candelario, and then getting something out of them, makes me think that the Nationals understand their competitive position. For a team that’s clearly not playoff-bound in the immediate future, that’s about the best you can hope for.