Daily Graphing – Frank Thomas

by
November 5, 2005

After playing 15 years in Chicago, the White Sox bought out Frank Thomas's contract for 3.5 million dollars making him a free agent. The White Sox would have had to pay him 10 million dollars this season, which apparently they thought was a bit steep considering his recent injury history and age. He'll be 38 years old next season and he has only played in 108 games the past two years. What should teams looking to acquire Frank Thomas expect from him next season?

ISO

Despite his age, Frank Thomas remains a real home run threat. Taking a look at his Isolated Power (ISO), it looks as though he has just as much power as he ever has. While healthy last year, he actually had the most home runs per at bat of any player in baseball.

KP

The power has come at a price though, as he struck out nearly 30% of the time. I somewhat attribute this to his limited playing time last season, but the worrisome trend is still there. Fortunately, his walk rate remains one of the best in the majors.

BBP

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

I think Frank Thomas be one of the bargain acquisitions this off season. Any team that is willing to take a chance on him should be greatly rewarded if he can remain healthy.





 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

Comments are closed.