Astros Land Jed Lowrie
Here’s some news.
Astros have agreed to terms on a three-year contract with free agent shortstop/infielder Jed Lowrie
— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) December 15, 2014
And maybe we should have seen this coming. After all, this is what the Astros shortstop depth chart currently looks like.
#28 Astros
| Name | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | Bat | BsR | Fld | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jonathan Villar | 420 | .230 | .298 | .349 | .290 | -7.5 | 1.1 | -6.9 | 0.5 |
| Marwin Gonzalez | 175 | .244 | .288 | .350 | .284 | -3.9 | -0.2 | -1.2 | 0.2 |
| Gregorio Petit | 105 | .245 | .287 | .348 | .282 | -2.5 | 0.0 | -0.2 | 0.2 |
| Total | 700 | .236 | .294 | .349 | .287 | -14.0 | 0.9 | -8.4 | 1.0 |
And here’s their third base depth chart.
#29 Astros
| Name | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | Bat | BsR | Fld | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Dominguez | 595 | .233 | .282 | .382 | .293 | -9.0 | -1.4 | -2.6 | 0.9 |
| Gregorio Petit | 70 | .245 | .287 | .348 | .282 | -1.7 | 0.0 | -0.1 | 0.1 |
| Marwin Gonzalez | 35 | .244 | .288 | .350 | .284 | -0.8 | 0.0 | -0.2 | 0.0 |
| Total | 700 | .235 | .283 | .377 | .292 | -11.5 | -1.4 | -2.9 | 1.0 |
The big numbers in the upper left corners represent where the Astros ranked in our positional depth charts, with data from the Steamer forecasts for 2015. At both shortstop and third base, the Astros looked to be about as bad as any team in baseball. Jed Lowrie has primarily played shortstop to this point in his career, but his defense is declining to where a move off the position seems inevitable at some point, and perhaps he profiles better at second or third base.
Second base is taken in Houston, but third base clearly is not, so the Astros are free to let Lowrie try to prove he can still play shortstop in 2015, and if it doesn’t work, they have an alternative position open as well. And that seems to be the plan.
The Jed Lowrie deal is worth more than $20 million guaranteed, source says. He’s there to play shortstop, not third base.
— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) December 15, 2014
Drelich clarifies that the deal is for $23 million over three years, with a fourth year option that could bring it to $28 million over four. That’s a bit less than both the crowd and myself expected, as I had Lowrie at 2/$22M and the crowd guessed 3/$30M. As a roughly average player, this seems like one of the nicer bargains of the winter so far, given what other average players have been signing for.
Of course, Lowrie isn’t any kind of star, and his health issues make this a bit of a risk for the Astros, but even if he declines or misses a bit of time, he’ll still be a significant improvement over the in-house alternatives, and that will be true whether he plays shortstop or third base going forward.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Annnnnd there are now no more bats available via free agency
did rios and rasmus sign?
Oh, and what about Morse, too. Isn’t he still around?
Well, actually…
Hi Dave, thanks for this article.
As I read Eminor3rd’s comment above and at the risk of being annoyingly forward when the content on Fangraphs is free, I wonder if someone at Fangraphs might be able to prepare a simple post that indicates (1) all remaining free agents and (2) where all signed free agents have landed?
Just food for thought as it would be interesting to sum all of these very detailed and comprehensive posts on individuals signings into one post that again sets out the remaining free agents and the clubs with which free agents have signed.
Thanks as always for your work on this blog – the stuff you churned out during the winter meetings was not only comprehensive but astonishingly fast – I read a number of other baseball content websites in addition to this one, and you beat pretty much all of them in getting your analysis to the readers in an extraordinarily timely fashion.
Dave, following on what Yelp said, maybe in the offseason you can post something once per week called Free Agent Tracker and this has the signed / unsigned information?
Maybe the post could be once every two weeks if things are slow as opposed to once per week, but you get the idea.
I too thank you for your tremendous (and incredibly timely) analysis.
They have just that!
http://www.fangraphs.com/freeagents.aspx?sign=all&pos=all&nteam=all&oteam=all
I assume he plays SS until Correa is ready in mid 2016 before moving to 3B
Odd that no context and “win curve” was mentioned here (I guess it doesn’t work in Lunhow’s favor)
Steamer(with 0.5/yr aging): 1.7.1.2,0.7
At 7.5mil/win, this translates to ~28mil. He got paid 23mil. This is one of the nicer bargains of the winter?
Big discrepancy on defense for fWAR (+6) v. rWAR (-10), which makes all the difference here.
If you’re down (or neutral) on his SS defense, he projects to < or ~1 WAR, so <$15m.
I think it’s a nice bargain. And one thing about your numbers is that Steamer only projects 113 games for him, so they’re factoring in some injuries. I’m not sure it’s fair to him to take away half a win from that projection, because that seems to be double counting the injuries. But then again, he’s missed an awful lot of games in his career so maybe they should be triple counted.
When did we jump the number up to $7.5M a year? The $7M was already very suspect. It sure seems like that number gets out of hand whenever someone is trying to justify a signing.
It seems to me that if the average WAR purchased through free agency was costing $7.5M a piece, payrolls would all have to be over $200M.
7.5 has been used based off of this year’s signings and 2015 WAR projections. It’s been rounded down a bit to reflect that the market might get more bargains as hold outs realize their high dollar dreams are pipe-generated.
Your last sentence makes little sense, but suffice it to say that the 7.5 million dollar amount only refers to free agents signing this offseason.
And what exactly is “suspect” about the $7 million number? Your gut doesn’t think it’s correct, or maybe that it just goes against what you know to be correct? I’ll take the people (like FG authors) who show their work over someone expressing an opinion, any day of the week.
That’s the number Dave’s been floating around for a while, which I think has just been adopted without any validation. I chose it because it would make this deal as favorable as possible (in terms of being a bargain) If you drop it to 7mil (or eventually less I think), the deal looks even less like a “nice bargain”.
Fangpraphs still uses about 5.5mil on the player pages for 2014, instead of the 6mil that every writer seems to quote as gospel. This then jumped to 7mil this offseason (round # syndrome) which then jumped to 7.5mil (“inflation on the inflation”).
I suspect the 7.5mil will end up being overstated, pretty much like every # floated during the first month or two of the past few offseasons when the inflation narrative is in full effect. There will be inflation, but 7.5mil is 25% inflation if you buy into the 6 mil 2014 figure. If you use the figure on the Fangraph value pages it would be over 33% inflation. Those inflation rates seem a touch aggressive, but people seem comfortable with it I guess.
With all the gaping holes at 2B hard to believe no contender offered more than that (CWS, Tor, Ana …), I wonder if he took less to stay at SS and in Houston.
i forgot the jays did not have 23 million over 3 years to spare………….
Seriously, what an easy solution that would have been for them.