Recently, in the wake of Oakland’s deal with Billy Butler for three years and $30 million, Dave Cameron wrote about right-handed power and — as that Butler deal, along with Michael Cuddyer’s before it, appeared to illustrate — the lengths to which teams are prepared to go this offseason towards acquiring it.
Last Thursday, the Diamondbacks signed Cuban outfielder Yasmany Tomas to a six year, $68 million contract that included an opt-out after the fourth year. While scouting reports suggest that Tomas appears to be a somewhat one-dimensional slugger, the power is apparently near the top of the scale, and one dimensional sluggers who can hit the ball 450 feet with regularity can still be quite valuable. And teams are certainly paying for right-handed power this winter.
This morning, the Mariners reportedly agreed to sign Nelson Cruz to a four year, $57 million contract. Like Tomas, Cruz is something of a one-dimensional slugger, offering significant power from the right side but doing little else to help a team win. Unlike Tomas, though, Cruz has a pretty solid MLB track record of success, including hitting 40 home runs in Baltimore last year; he hasn’t hit fewer than 24 homers in a season since 2008, when he played in just 31 games.
Tomas is 24, so the Diamondbacks signed him for his prime years. Cruz is 34, so the Mariners signed him for his decline years. Tomas is a bit of a lottery ticket, though, and could end up being nothing more than Dayan Viciedo, while Cruz seems to have a significantly lower chance of being completely worthless in 2015. Tomas probably has a bit more upside, given his age, but there’s significantly more variance in his expected production than there is with a guy like Cruz.
Over the next four years, the Mariners will pay Cruz $57 million. Over the same time period, the Diamondbacks will likely pay Tomas $35-$45 million, depending on how heavily they backloaded the contract, and then Tomas will have the option to become a free agent again. We should assume that he’ll exercise that option unless he’s either badly injured or kind of terrible, so from the Diamondbacks perspective, their deal with Tomas is only for four years if he turns out to be as good as they hope.
Based on these facts, I’m curious which player and which contract you might prefer. To that end, a couple of polls.
The Mariners have made no secret out of their desire to trade for a right-handed slugger, so perhaps this report from the Dominican newspaper El Caribe should not surprise us too much:
Nelson Cruz está cerca de firmar con Seattle por 57 millones de dólares http://t.co/Fsxcc2r04y
— El Caribe (@ElCaribeRD) December 1, 2014
You don’t have to be a Spanish expert to deduce that the report suggests that the Mariners are close to signing Nelson Cruz to a four year, $57 million contract. Ken Rosenthal has confirmed that the team is in “serious talks”, so it seems like a deal is probably going to get done.
The crowd and I both projected Cruz to sign for $45 million over three years, so it appears the Mariners won the bidding by adding a fourth year at an additional $12 million to the pile. Realistically, though, Cruz shouldn’t be expected to produce any value in his age-37 season, so while the team is spreading the $57 million out over four years, he’s going to have to justify the entirety of that figure over the next 2-3 seasons before he declines into nothing more than a bench player.
The forecasts are not optimistic. Steamer has Nelson Cruz projected for +1.5 WAR in 637 plate appearances in 2015, based on a 119 wRC+ and minimal defensive value. ZIPS sees the same level of offensive output, but because Dan gives a bigger boost to designated hitters to account for the DH penalty, he has the same production worth +2 WAR. The forecasts both think Cruz will return to something very close to his career performance, though, and that his career year at 2014 was an outlier and not a sustainable improvement.
If Cruz follows a traditional aging curve, he’d be expected to produce something like +3 to +5 WAR, depending on how you heavily you penalize a player for spending time at DH. At $57 million, even the high side of this looks like $11 million per win, while the low side of the projection would have him pushing $20 million per win. Oh, and the Mariners gave up the 21st pick in the draft to sign Cruz as well.
We’ll do a full write-up on Cruz to the Mariners in a bit, but this is an early contender for the worst signing of the off-season.
So, Jeff Samardzija isn’t going anywhere — tonight, at least — but the A’s are still making big moves. Per Ken Rosenthal:
Sources: Donaldson going to #BlueJays. Lawrie, RHP Kendall Graveman among those going to #Athletics.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 29, 2014
This is kind of a fascinating challenge trade. Josh Donaldson and Brett Lawrie are both third baseman by trade, but Donaldson is the better player and is actually under control for one year longer. Even though he’s a Super Two player, which means he’s going to get expensive in a hurry, he offers significantly more value than Lawrie going forward.
To make up the difference, the A’s are getting 24 year old RHP Sean Nolin, 23 year old RHP Kendall Graveman, and 18 year old shortstop Franklin Barreto. Both Nolin and Graveman have already reached the big leagues and could potentially help the A’s in 2015, but it seems like Barreto might be the key to this deal for Oakland; he was an offensive monster in the Northwest League, putting up a 141 wRC+ as a teenager in a league that is primarily filled with college-age competition.
Marc Hulet had ranked Barreto 11th on the Blue Jays list a year ago despite only playing complex ball to that point, and Baseball America had him at #5 on their recent list of the Blue Jays top 10 prospects. If the A’s see Barreto as something of a replacement for Addison Russell — though with a more delayed timeline, given his youth — then perhaps the return in talent was too much to turn down the downgrade from Donaldson to Lawrie. Or perhaps they don’t see a massive downgrade there at all, given Lawrie’s advantage in youth his own rather good performances (3.4 WAR per 600 PA) when he’s been on the field.
This deal continues the Blue Jays desire to push chips into the middle on 2015, following up on their acquisition of Russell Martin. Lawrie is a talented player, but his long injury history made him difficult to depend on, and Donaldson is an immediate upgrade at third base. And since he’s under control through 2018, he’s certainly nothing like a rental. This move makes the Blue Jays immediately better, and from their perspective, the long-term risk of giving up three prospects wasn’t enough of a cost to pass up on acquiring maybe the best third baseman in baseball right now, or at least a guy who figures prominently in the discussion.
We’ll have a more full write-up on this later, but it’s certainly an interesting deal for both sides.
Update: Ken Rosenthal suggests the A’s are talking trade, but not Samardzija related.
Sources: Trade #Athletics are discussing does NOT involve Samardzija.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 29, 2014
So now you can speculate wildly about almost anything you want.
Well, this is interesting.
I am hearing rumblings that the #Athletics are close to a fairly significant deal that involves Jeff Samardzija.
— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) November 29, 2014
#Athletics would be getting back several pieces, and they're targeting hitters, an ML source tells me.
— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) November 29, 2014
Again, source tells me that #Athletics nearing major deal that involves Samardzija for several players, team targeting hitters.
— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) November 29, 2014
The A’s paid a very high price to land Samardzija last July, so if they’re going to move him this winter, it would figure that they’re getting a pretty nice return back; selling for pennies on the dollar wouldn’t seem to serve any purpose.
The most obvious fit would be with the Red Sox, who have every good right-handed hitter alive and no pitching to speak of. Yoenis Cespedes would be an interesting piece given that he just went from Oakland to Boston, but I’d imagine the Red Sox would have to sweeten the pot quite a bit to get the A’s to swap those two. And if the acquisitions of Billy Butler and Ike Davis were designed to push Brandon Moss back to the outfield, then Cespedes doesn’t necessarily fit the A’s needs anymore either.
What Oakland really needs is middle infield help. Of teams with depth at 2B/SS, the one most obviously in the market for a short-term rotation upgrade is the Rangers; perhaps the A’s are willing to bet on Jurickson Profar’s health, or really like Rougned Odor? It would be a pretty daring move to make that large of a trade within the division, but the pieces would seem to line up to some degree, and Billy Beane and Jon Daniels have made a number of trades together over the years.
Are there other fits out there that I’m not seeing? Feel free to speculate wildly, since we have limited information at this time. And you probably want to start following Susan Slusser on Twitter, if you weren’t already.
About two weeks ago, the Atlanta Baseball Club traded second baseman Tommy La Stella away to the Chicago Cubs for a small collection of international bonus slots and also right-hander Arodys Vizcaino. The move provided clues as to Atlanta’s dollar valuation of the aforementioned bonus slots relative to baseball’s free-agent market. What else it did was to create a vacancy at second base — a vacancy that prospect Jose Peraza is expected to fill eventually but also not immediately. None of the other options on Atlanta’s 40-man roster — Phil Gosselin, Ramiro Pena, Tyler Pastornicky, nor Elmer Reyes –are projected to produce a 1.0 WAR or greater per 550 plate appearances in 2015.
Atlanta went some way, it seems, to addressing their second-base depth earlier this week by signing former Yankees prospect Corban Joseph to a minor-league deal — and Joseph, it seems, is basically Tommy La Stella.
Consider, their projections for 2015, pro-rated to 550 plate appearances:
| Name | Age | Pos | PA | BB% | K% | HR | AVG | OBP | SLG | wRC+ | Off | Def | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corban Joseph | 26 | “2B” | 550 | 7.8% | 14.3% | 13 | .258 | .320 | .399 | 101 | 0.4 | -0.5 | 1.9 |
| Tommy La Stella | 26 | “2B” | 550 | 9.2% | 10.3% | 5 | .273 | .343 | .366 | 99 | -1.9 | -2.1 | 1.4 |
Like La Stella, Joseph enters his age-26 season. Like La Stella, his second-base defense is probably some combination of below-average but passable. And even though they profile differently in terms of walk-strikeout differential (where La Stella is better) and home-run power (where Joseph is), both are candidates to produce league-average batting lines — and candidates to do so, it should be noted, somewhat contrary to expectations.
Earlier today, the author published a pair of leaderboards featuring the top regressed hitting and pitching performances of the four Caribbean winter leagues. Among the other revelations present in that post was one on the topic of right-handed Dodgers prospect Jose De Leon, a pitcher who (a) was drafted in just the 24th round a couple years ago but features (b) above-average velocity and (c) something better than above-average strikeout rates over two years of affiliated baseball.
For much the same reason that he published a final statistical report last week for the Arizona Fall League, the author is publishing here a combined statistical report for the various Caribbean winter leagues — again, not necessarily because such reports are of great utility for evaluating players, but because they provide a means by which to participate in those leagues which doesn’t also require a substantial investment in transportation and lodging.
In this case, what the author has done is to identify the regressed hitting and pitching leaders in the Dominican Winter, Mexican Pacific, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan Leagues separately. What he’s then done is to combine the hitting and pitching leaders of those leagues into a pair of top-10 lists, which one can find below. Note: all ages are as of July 1, 2014.
Earlier this afternoon, Dave Cameron examined third baseman Kyle Seager’s seven-year, $100 million extension with Seattle — with particular emphasis on the realities of Seager’s value as compared to the perceptions of it. The realities are evident merely by inspecting Seager’s player page, which reveals that he’s produced three consecutive three-win seasons or better.
Last month, writing primarily about Dan Duquette’s Orioles, Jeff Sullivan observed the strong correlation between a team’s success and that same team’s ability to avoid players who produce negative WAR figures. As early as 2010, in fact, Jeff Zimmerman addressed a similar concept here with also similar findings. The conclusion of both pieces: avoiding blatant weaknesses/positional holes is probably just as relevant to a team’s success as acquiring or retaining superstar types — while also generally costing much less.