Projecting Rafael Devers
Happy Rafael Devers Day!
The highly-touted 20-year-old is slated to make his big-league debut tonight, and will almost certainly provide Boston with a sizable upgrade at the hot corner. Devers slashed .300/.369/.575 at Double-A before hitting a cool .400/.447/.600 in a nine-game stint at Triple-A.
Devers’ biggest strength is his power. After putting up middling power numbers in years past, he smacked 20 homers and 20 doubles in the minors this year. Unlike many power hitters, Devers doesn’t strike out a ton — he’s kept his strikeout rate below 20% throughout his time in the minors.
Devers has quite an exceptional offensive profile, but it’s even more impressive when you consider he’s much more than his hitting. Not only does Devers play one of the more premium defensive positions, but he plays it quite well. He’s been three runs above average at third base this year by Clay Davenport’s numbers, and checked in at +19 (!) runs last year in High-A. Devers’ high-minors performance has been excellent across the board, which is all sorts of encouraging coming from a 20-year-old.
My KATOH system pegs him Devers 11.7 WAR over his first six seasons by the stats-only method and 15.3 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates his Baseball America ranking. Those marks place him sixth and fourth, respectively, among prospects.
To put some faces to Devers’ statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Devers’ 2017 performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues.
Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.
| Rank | Name | KATOH+ Proj. WAR | Actual WAR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Andy Marte | 13.0 | 0.3 |
| 2 | Sean Burroughs | 15.0 | 5.4 |
| 3 | Michael Cuddyer | 11.4 | 7.7 |
| 4 | Sean Burroughs | 15.8 | 5.4 |
| 5 | Mike Kelly | 7.8 | 1.1 |
| 6 | Ian Stewart | 8.5 | 3.1 |
| 7 | Kevin Young | 11.1 | 4.9 |
| 8 | Todd Walker | 14.3 | 4.6 |
| 9 | Edwin Encarnacion | 7.7 | 7.4 |
| 10 | Aramis Ramirez | 12.8 | 13.4 |
Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.
Sean Burroughs so nice, he’s in the Mahalanobis twice!
With two different KATOH projected WAR numbers, too
It’s going to be interesting to see how he does at first. He was clearly way too advanced for AA pitching, and was doing well at AAA too in his teeny 38 PAs. I wonder if he just needs a real challenge at this point to continue developing, or if he could have used some more time at AAA.
So why are the probability of outcomes and comps so different? That graph says 50/50 shot at “allstar” but those comps say frustrating could-have-been.
I realize they are not the same thing and the comp should not be taken predictively but usually there is more alignment so I’m curious what factors are contributing to such katoh love
Andy Marte and Sean Burroughs as top comparos does not equal warm and fuzzies. Hopefully he can adjust after the league gets a read on him. Burroughs and Marte couldn’t.
The bust comps don’t scare me – there’s always bust potential even for top prospects.
Cuddyer, Walker, and early-career E5 feel right for all I’ve read about Devers’ development up to this point – a decent player with some upside whose stock has risen recently. Maybe toss in Pablo Sandoval as a best-case scenario if you’re strong enough to handle that thought.
But then katoh is saying there’s a decent chance he’s Miguel Cabrera (23 war his first 6 seasons).
I’m wondering if that’s skewed by the defensive numbers that don’t seem to pass the sniff test, or if katoh really likes something about his bat. I guess I’d just expect the peak of this distribution to be 2 columns to the left.
Marte and Burroughs were both supreme prospects. Heck, I go back and look at their developmental path, and see the same kind of tasty promise as I was hearing back when they were prospects. Whatever caused them to fail are unique to them, but the comps confirm the quality of Devers’s prospect profile.
It should be noted that Burroughs most especially is a strange case. He moved up quickly and at a very young age, always doing well, and likely would have been the 2002 ROY if not for his MLB stint the previous year. For whatever reason, he got worse annually for a few seasons, and never got his mojo back.
Maybe we need to be honest with ourselves and realize that both came up during the baseball wild west of the late ’90s/early ’00s. Perhaps there was some degree of steroid/HGH/greenie use that, once cut off, left them unable to reach their previous heights. We most especially can’t rule out the impact of the end of amphetamine use in baseball. We can’t be sure this had anything to do with what happened to either player, but it’s pretty safe to say this won’t be an issue for Devers.
One thing to note is that KATOH is just looking at WAR totals for team-controlled years. The presence of Encarnacion on the Mahalanobis list would drag the average up by a bit if it included his post-arb breakout, in which about 75% of his career WAR is concentrated.
Also, the 20+ WAR chances for Devers look really good in comparison to each of the other outcomes individually, but if you sum the sub-20 categories you realize that mediocrity is a real possibility.
I’m glad the Davenport numbers back up what I’ve been telling people about Devers’ defense. I’ve seen him several times in person and found him to be perfectly capable at third, yet the prevailing narrative says otherwise, I think because people have misconstrued concerns about his thick lower body affecting future range with it being an issue now.
I think the potential issue is more about how continued physical development will affect his future fit at the position, more than how he plays it as he is now. Right now, he has more than enough physical ability with a fair degree of a lack of polish, and if you just assumed that he stayed the same physically and developed his technique he would probably be safe to pencil in as at least average defensively.
In reality, he is in a similar place that Bogaerts once was (different position, of course). They fit as they stood, but the assumption was that they would “beef up”, perhaps to the point of no longer being a fit at their spots.
Is it odd that 90% (or less if you don’t want to count Burroughs twice) of those comps under performed their KATOH+ Projected WAR?
I had no clue Devers was – kind of – out of shape. He looks like a Pablo Jr. No clue how that affects his ability to stay at third in the long term, but I was surprised by his chubby build. Maybe a MLB weight program will do wonders for him.
Wow, that is an extremely underwhelming comp list for a prospect who might have the best KATOH graph I’ve ever seen.
A 45% chance of putting up over 20 WAR! I agree, can’t remember another graph like that one.
#FreeDevers!