Red Sox Sign Chris Young the Shorter
According to Ken Rosenthal, the Red Sox have added to their outfield depth today.
Sources: #RedSox in agreement with free-agent outfielder Chris Young on a multi-year contract, pending a physical.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 30, 2015
Chris Young the hitter is one of the better fourth outfielders in baseball today, combining the ability to play all three outfield spots with some lefty-mashing abilities, making him a very nice platoon partner and capable reserve who won’t drag the offense down too far if pushed into regular duty. He gave the Yankees 350 quality plate appearances in just that role last year, putting up +1.2 WAR as a useful part-time player, and now he’ll take his skills to Fenway Park to provide depth behind the young OF trio of Rusney Castillo, Mookie Betts, and Jackie Bradley Jr.
With Betts and Castillo both being right-handed, it would seem that — barring a trade — most of Young’s playing time may come as part of a job-share with Bradley. Or, alternately, the team could be looking at trading Rusney Castillo and replacing him with a left-handed hitting outfielder; they’ve been rumored to have interest in Alex Gordon and Jason Heyward at different points this winter, and while you’re not going to platoon either of those guys, having Young around would be more useful if two of the three OFs were lefties.
Or, potentially, they just might like Young’s fit in their ballpark. After all, he’s about as extreme a pull hitter as there is in baseball.
| Field | wOBA |
| Pull | 0.496 |
| Center | 0.291 |
| Oppo | 0.156 |
Young is also one of the game’s most extreme fly ball hitters, and since Fenway inflates the value of fly balls to left field, Young’s skillset could work better in Boston than places without a Green Monster to bounce balls off of. So perhaps this isn’t as much about a roster fit as it is a skillset fit.
We don’t have terms of the deal just yet, but the FG crowd had Young down for a two year, $12 million deal in the crowdsourcing project, which sounds about right to me.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
I too agree with the idea to trade Castillo. I just don’t know what you can get for a 28 year old slightly above average outfielder. He is also owed 5/$56.5M or 4/$43M.
Maybe he has a hot start and you swap him for pitching.
As a side note, Young slashed .384/.381/.767 when pulling the ball.
This may be a stupid question, but how can his OBP be lower than his AVG?
He hit a sac fly (which lowers your AVG but not OBP), but had no BB’s or HBP’s to make up for it. Weird things happen in 147 PA samples.
*lowers your OBP but not your AVG.
It’s not actually weird that he didn’t have any walks or HBP to make up for it. That slash line is only when he pulls the ball so it automatically excludes all PA where he doesn’t make contact.