Chris Taylor Returns to LA to Provide Certainty, Flexibility

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ brand is synonymous with superstars. It’s Clayton Kershaw, Mookie Betts, and deadline trades for Max Scherzer. Have a problem that needs a hammer? The Dodgers will bring two hammers, and they’ll have Walker Buehler on standby just in case. Those are the perks of having both one of the shrewdest front offices in baseball and one of the highest payrolls in the sport every year.

It’s funny, then, that Chris Taylor is one of the team’s greatest success stories. Taylor came to the Dodgers as an afterthought, in exchange for Zach Lee, a minor league pitcher who made all of 14 starts in the Seattle system before the team waived him. Six years later, Taylor is again headed to Los Angeles — but this time he’s doing it as a very rich man rather than a career minor leaguer. He and the Dodgers agreed to a four-year contract worth $60 million, as Ken Rosenthal reported. The deal also contains a team option for a fifth year.

All of that stuff I said at the top about the Dodgers and stars? It’s true, but the Los Angeles roster relies on positional versatility to make everything work. Taylor is the poster boy for this style: he played at least 50 innings at second, third, short, left, center, and right last year. Corey Seager injury? Taylor can fill in. Strange lineup with Max Muncy at second and Cody Bellinger at first? Taylor can flip to center — or to third base if Justin Turner needs a breather. Seager is gone, but with Trea Turner as a one-for-one replacement, Taylor will likely continue to get near-everyday playing time without a true home in the field.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand how valuable a versatile position player can be, but I find it interesting to compare how the Dodgers use Taylor to how a lesser team might. On most teams, he’d just slot into a regular position. Most teams play bad or bad-ish players at plenty of positions. There’s not much reason to shift your guy around if he’s just the best option at multiple spots.

Because the Dodgers have so many excellent options, they don’t quite do that. If Taylor were merely an outfielder, he wouldn’t fit the team nearly as well. They’d be picking between him and AJ Pollock on many days, at least if you think Bellinger will be the team’s everyday center fielder upon Muncy’s return from injury. Taylor would be an incredible asset as a fourth outfielder, but that’s not a guy worthy of the contract he just signed.

Likewise, if he were infield-only, he’d get reps as a backup at all three positions, or perhaps form the weak part of a platoon with Gavin Lux. Again, he’d be a luxuriously great utility infielder, but he’d probably be looking at 300 or so plate appearances, not 550.

Because of his omnipresent defensive competence, though, Taylor lets the Dodgers essentially roster nine starters, with eight of them on the field nearly every day. That concept might sound weird — why have more starters on your team than positions? — but there are no Cal Ripkens in baseball these days. Between Taylor’s chameleonic talents and Bellinger’s strange first base/center field pairing, the Dodgers can juggle starter-level players between innumerable combinations while mostly keeping the guys they want on the field.

Of course, that’s not Taylor’s only use. When the team faces injury — as they will at the start of next year while Muncy rehabs from a torn UCL — the team just turns into a regular team, with Taylor and Bellinger shifting around as necessary to make a normal-looking complement of positions. Having the choice of one or the other depending on what’s best for the team is just another benefit of signing someone so versatile.

If you wanted to create a Taylor-esque impact — an above-average player who’s available on demand if any starter goes down, the best second option at each of six positions, and a guy who fills in often enough across the diamond to get starter playing time — you’d need to spread the role across two or three players. They’d all need to be good, too! That’s no trivial expense. To enact what the Dodgers have done in the past few years, you need someone like Taylor or several flexible starters across the diamond.

Could they get to it some other way? I mean, maybe! The team is blessed with several players who can handle multiple positions at least on an interim basis. Muncy has played his fair share of second base, Lux is capable of looking overwhelmed while standing in center, and Bellinger is still quite versatile. The permutations wouldn’t come easy, though; adding Taylor to the mix makes most any lineup solid defensively, whereas some of the other “multi-positional” types don’t manage that feat.

It might sound like I’m more interested in Taylor for where he stands than what he does at the plate. That’s kind of true, in that he’s more competent bat than world-beater. In the last five years, he’s compiled a 116 wRC+ for the Dodgers. In each year, he’s been between the fifth and 10-best hitter on the team. That’s enough to get paid — clearly — but he’s hardly Juan Soto with the bat.

Taylor’s big transformation upon moving to Los Angeles was adding power, and he leaned further into it this year, producing a career-high fly ball rate and 20 home runs. I’m skeptical he’ll maintain that batted ball distribution next year, but it suited him well, and more line drives and fly balls would obviously make him more valuable.

That change didn’t seem to affect his plate discipline overly much — he strikes out more than average, but only slightly so, and takes his walks in offset. I don’t expect Taylor to have a career-best season at 31, but I also don’t expect him to fall apart overnight. ZiPS roughly concurs:

If the Dodgers had a deeper crop of hitting prospects, I’d be less excited to see them re-sign Taylor. You can approximate the Taylor role by plugging in a pile of pre-arb players with complementary skillsets and spend your free agency money on another impact talent. The farm system doesn’t look ready to provide that, though, and Taylor is likely to be a better hitter and defender in any case. Plus, it’s an imperfect way of replicating Taylor’s contributions — giving interesting prospects part-time major league roles implies some wasted opportunity to give them more at-bats.

At the start of this offseason, I thought the Dodgers would want to sign Corey Seager to keep their deep-with-stars model going. I realize now, however, that having a glue guy to help turn a pile of good baseball players into a team that can run out a coherent lineup day in and day out is just as crucial to the Dodgers’ identity.

As a bonus, Taylor’s deal is quite reasonable. Both my predictions and the crowdsourced ones have been low on most contracts signed so far this offseason. Taylor’s was right on top of both my and the crowd’s estimates, which looks to me like a discount given the increased spending appetite. Is that a hometown discount? It could be, given that he reportedly told other teams money wasn’t the driving factor. The Dodgers were also the team that could use him best, though — an excellent match of player comfort and team utility.

With yesterday’s lockout, we’ve entered an extended period where most baseball news will be replete with law-speak and spin. I’m glad that Taylor and the Dodgers managed one big free agent signing to entertain fans before the fallow period. Taylor gets to surf and have a beer with the boys, just like he wants to. The Dodgers get to keep their spinning position-player machine going. Everyone’s a winner here.