Jason Heyward’s Latest Change Is Making a Difference
One could argue that, during the 2015-16 offseason, Jason Heyward was my hill. If that’s the case, I am now mostly dead. After producing almost six wins in his final campaign with the Cardinals, the outfielder recorded just a lone win in each of his first two seasons with Chicago.
I say mostly dead, though, because Heyward’s bat is showing some signs of life: since coming off the disabled list a month ago, he’s hitting .307/.347/.489 with a 124 wRC+. While that represents a hot streak for the Cubs version of Heyward, it pretty closely approximates what the team probably expected from Heyward when they signed him. Whatever the case, it is the best run he has produced since the joining the team.
Heyward’s swing changes have been frequent over the past few years. He has altered his mechanics nearly every season of his career. The Cubs hoped to unlock more power out of Heyward after he posted a 121 wRC+ for the Cardinals in a 2015 campaign during which he took a bunch of walks, limited his strikeouts, ran the bases well, and exhibited slightly below-average power. The Cubs weren’t wrong to try and unearth that version of Heyward. With his defense, baserunning, batting eye, and contact skills, the addition of a bit more power might have made Heyward an MVP candidate.
As you probably know, Heyward’s adjustments did not translate to on-field success for Heyward in 2016 (although the presence of a wrist injury almost certainly played a roll). As you probably also know, the Cubs won the World Series. I advocated for Heyward to continue playing in the playoffs despite his struggles. I noted his spectacular defense. With my bias showing, I looked for rays of hope and a potential rebound entering the 2017 season. I don’t think I was the only one. Eno Sarris wrote about Heyward’s work that offseason. Ken Rosenthal wrote about it, too. A few weeks into the season, optimism abounded, with Travis Sawchik wondering if Heyward’s changes were working and Sahadev Sharma finding hope early on. That hope gave way a bit with more hand injuries and a few stints on the disabled list, but there was even optimism in August that Heyward was getting better.
In the end, Heyward failed to amass 500 plate appearances, and while his 88 wRC+ was an improvement over his disastrous 2016 season, he was still a below-average player. Heading into the season with a new hitting coach, there was some optimism, but it was more tempered than in years past. With Heyward’s recent run of success, optimism reigns again. Given the changes he has made throughout his career, though, it is probably tough to find a reason why this breakout is real or why it will or won’t stick. This is what Joe Maddon had to say in an article from P.J. Mooney at the Athletic.
“There’s nothing new or different from him,” manager Joe Maddon said. “He’s just setting up better. His hands — you see how the ball’s coming off the bat — it’s kind of snapping. There’s no push in his swing. It’s all snap right now and that’s the difference.”
I’m no hitting expert, but the ball “kind of snapping” doesn’t appear to be too specific. He’s been changing his hand setup seemingly every other week for a few years. Maybe Heyward’s hands and wrists are healthier than they have been in a really long time. Maybe he’s just on a decent run for the first time in a while. One thing is for certain: Heyward has never hit this well as a Cub. The graph below shows Heyward’s rolling 40-game wRC+ going back to the 2015 season, before he joined the Cubs. The graph also includes zone rate. Pitchers will tell a hitter if they are afraid, and they haven’t been afraid of Heyward in some time.
When Heyward got hot in St. Louis, pitchers refused to throw him a lot of strikes. In early 2016, though, he began to see more pitches in the zone; as the summer wore on, pitchers challenged him even more frequently. That trend stuck through the 2017 season and the early part of this year, too. Zone rate, of course, doesn’t tell the whole story, but it can indicate how cautious pitchers are being with a hitter. In the case of Heyward, they were becoming less cautious.
Another way in which hitters frequently get themselves in trouble is if they begin to chase pitches. Heyward has typically been a selective hitter, but that hasn’t always correlated to success for him.
We see here that Heyward wasn’t swinging much outside the zone in 2015. Even when he was struggling in 2016, he was still fairly patient. Last year, he began reaching for pitches more, but he also hit better than he had in 2016. This season, as his hitting numbers get better, he’s swinging at more and more pitches out of the strike zone. What’s interesting about Heyward’s profile is that swinging at pitches outside the strike zone doesn’t hurt him much. What has hurt him at times is making contact outside the strike zone, as the graph below shows.
Heyward’s best run of 2015 coincided with a contact rate below 70%, while his rough 2016 season was punctuated by several very high contact rates. His recent run has seen a lot more swings outside of the zone and a lot more whiffs there, as well. It’s possible Heyward is a victim of his own great hands. If those very quick hands are getting to balls out of the strike zone, he’s making contact on pitches with which he’s unlikely to succeed. Heyward put up a .240 wOBA on batted balls outside the zone in 2016 and 2017, ranking 206th out of 220 players with at least 100 batted balls, per Baseball Savant. His .321 wOBA on balls in the strike zone wasn’t great either, but making contact on balls out of the zone is not ideal.
When those quick hands allow Heyward to make contact in the strike zone, he can do some damage. In the clip below, we see Heyward getting around on an inside fastball at 99 mph.
The pitch is up a bit, but it is a 99-mph sinker from a pitcher who hadn’t given up a home run all year. Heyward’s quick hands create what Maddon called that “snap” when the ball hits the bat. In Heyward’s only year in St. Louis, his average exit velocity was 89 mph. In his first two seasons with the Cubs, Heyward averaged 86 mph. He’s back up at 89 mph this season — and, even better for Heyward, he’s hitting at more ideal launch angles. He pounded the ground in 2015 and hit the ball in the air more the past two seasons, albeit weakly. This year, he’s combined the hard contact with more line drives and flies, as seen in the chart below from Baseball Savant.
The bulk of those batted balls are between 0 and 20 degrees, and that’s where Heyward is going to make good contact. Heyward’s xwOBA is currently .363, about 40 points higher than his actual wOBA. If Heyward keeps hitting the ball with the same authority, he’s going to get better results than he is right now. It’s easy to think of Heyward as a bust given he signed a contract worth nearly $200 million. One of the more unique factors when Heyward hit free agency was his age. Heyward is still just 28 years old.
When Lorenzo Cain was 27 years old, he had an 80 wRC+ for the season, worse than Heyward last year. Cain, a late-bloomer, just got an $80 million deal through his age-36 season while Heyward will receive another $115 million or so (factoring in his deferred signing bonus) for the five years after this one. That contract will run out after Heyward’s age-33 season. The deal never pays Heyward more than $22 million per year, and even if the free-agent market cost is depressed or stagnant, the expectation for Heyward based on the contract is never more than a three-win player. His pace puts him pretty close to that mark right now. His projection puts him closer to 2.2 WAR. His potential is still well above that mark.
Contracts that look like busts early on rarely ever recover. That’s because players are generally out of their prime when they sign and decline has set in. Heyward’s youth puts him in a unique position to make up for lost time. It’s possible this last month is just a blip for a player who can’t quite recover. It’s also possible that this new Heyward is the old Heyward, and by the end of next season, we are talking about him as a potential free agent. As disappointing as his last few seasons have been at the plate, Heyward still has the opportunity to be a great player once again.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
I’d like to buy into this, but…An athletic guy who is 6’5 240 should be killing baseballs with even a conventional approach at the plate, not putting up the meek numbers Heyward puts up…or is projected to put up. It will prove to be a failed contract, despite what WAR might say. Theo Epstein knows it, too.
Stick to music, Thom Yorke.
Smells like nirvana?
“It will prove to be a failed contract, despite what WAR might say.”
Uhm, I think you’re on the wrong website or something…
The expectation, if you are paying a position player $22 million a year, is that they are more than a 3 win player. People kept repeating this about the Eric Hosmer contract too, and it was wrong then and it is wrong now. That’s franchise player money. I really wish that we would stop with that $/WAR figure as “expected” production because that’s not at all what that $/WAR figure measures (it is really measuring the efficiency of what people actually spent on the FA market, not expectations).
For most players that you are paying $22 million per year, you would expect more than 3 WAR in the early years, and much less in the later years. That is how contracts with even payments throughout are usually still back-loaded in terms of expected value.
And while you might be technically right that teams “expect” more than what they get, that is pedantic. The point the author was trying to make was clear: that due to Heyward’s youth he is more likely to avoid the late-contract downside that inflicts most 8-year contracts. He doesn’t necessarily need the upfront success in order to make the contract an above average one.* That is, if he has actually relearned how to hit, which I’m not really at all convinced is true.
*On the other hand, this is one more piece of evidence about why opt outs are so detrimental to teams, which should be clear to everyone by now. If Heyward does actually return to form, the Cubs would probably really want to keep him for the last four years of the deal. And not only will they not get to keep him in that case, but they will not even have gotten the great production on the front end of the deal. Add in the more likely scenario that this is a blip and the Cubs will be stuck with a below average player for four more years and boy that opt out looks awful for the Cubs.
Opt-outs seem to be very popular right now. But I suspect you are correct and that clubs will soon realize the downsides often out weigh the positives and the Market will correct accordingly.
I don’t think that was clear at all. Craig was taking a year-by-year value, not over the life of the whole contract. He’s arguing that he’s essentially a 3-win player now, and he’ll break even each year of the contract.
I think your interpretation makes sense–the expectation when Heyward was signed was that he was going to be great for a few years (he was coming off a 5.6 win season) and then eventually settle in to being okay as his athleticism declined. That’s a much better approximation of what market value was: A 5-win player for a couple years, a 4-win player for a couple of years, and then a 3-win player for a while, holding his value approximately to the end. But then by definition then 3 wins per $22 million is not market value (unless you think that the expected $/WAR has gone waaaaay up lately).
On a different note, I still don’t think the opt out was actually detrimental to the team. If the Cubs hadn’t given him the opt-out, they would have been stuck with his lousy contract anyway. And they likely would have paid him more money for the privilege of doing so. The player is going to perform well or badly no matter what contract you give him. An opt-out only is detrimental if you think the back half of the contract is still going to give you surplus value when you sign the player, and virtually no one thinks that.
If he doesn’t opt out, then I think you are right. And you are right that there usually is not a lot of upside in the backend of the contract, but there was for Heyward, because he was still going to be relatively young. And now the Cubs face the possibility (remote, yes) of getting lackluster results during the front end and then not getting the benefit of the back end. This only matters if Heyward re-emerges and really needs to take a step up in offense from his younger days because the defense will be worse.
I agree with TKDC’s first point.
Another point – which has some correlation with aging – is that a team should also expect position players to outperform the “revealed price per WAR” (as explained well by sadtrombone in a comment below) in seasons where they are healthy enough to play ~150 games. Some of the seasons that are going into that calculation are ones where players have playing time greatly limited by injuries, and it’s awfully optimistic for a team to think that it’s going to get 150 or more games from a player every season over a long-term contract.
No, the expectation is that if you pay a player $22 million a year and they generate more then 3 wins you are breaking even in the market. You break even in free agency more often than not, while developing solid young talent, that is the recipe for success. Its not Craig Edwards, or any other writer at fangraphs that sets the $/WAR figure. The market does that. And I would argue that currently $30+ million is franchise money in today’s game. You should still expect a good player at $22 million, but the starting price point in free agency for a franchise player is at least 10 million north of that.
That is not at all where that figure comes from. This is a persistent misconception around here, among both writers and commenters. That number is the amount of money in the contract divided by the *actual WAR produced*. That number comes from a series of calculation by Matt Swartz, here on fangraphs. You can look up how he did it if you like.
Let’s say, hypothetically, only three players sign a FA contract: Aplayer signs a contract worth $10 million dollars and they produce 1 WAR, one who signs for $20 million and put up 1 WAR, and one who signed for $5 million and also put up 1 WAR. You average them together, you get $10 million per win. That is the $/WAR figure listed here.
This means that every year that Albert Pujols keeps playing, that number keeps on going up. But last year, Logan Morrison pushed that number down just a little bit. If you define the $/WAR figure as “expected WAR” you are actually saying that the expectation changes as players perform better or worse, which really makes no sense at all.
So did teams “break even” more often than not in this scenario? Of course they did…one team broke even, one team came out ahead, and a third came out behind. But that’s just an artifact of how the $/WAR value is calculated: By definition, teams tend to “break even” when “breaking even” is defined as distance from a mean (unless a few teams get spectacularly lucky or unlucky).
If “the market” truly was the one setting the $/WAR figure, then the expected WAR would have to be equal to the actual amount of WAR produced. It’s much more reasonable to set the $/WAR figure based on projected WAR from a projection system that we think reflects the GM’s thought process well.
If we’re judging outcomes after the fact, then an ex post measure makes more sense than an ex ante measure- i.e. the contract ended up a better value than other FA contracts handed out that year, etc.
You seem to be making a point about the winner’s curse- that the winning bidder is the one with the highest expectations, so if you asked each GM who signed a FA contract about the FA contract they signed, they would expect a much lower $/WAR figure. But if you surveyed those same GMs about all FA contracts handed out, they might very well end up at the same $/WAR figure that we calculate after the fact. So in that sense, GMs will rarely be satisfied with the outcome of a FA contract.
I would argue your first paragraph is more or less correct, but I’m not sure it is relevant here. If you’re a judging whether a team has made a good investment retrospectively, then you don’t necessarily need to deal with expectations at all. It doesn’t even enter it to it. Nor do you have to deal with “market value.” If you pay more than what is considered “market rate” at the time and the player goes on to wildly outperform the contract, that’s a good contract. No need to deal with anything else.
That’s why I think it’s important to distinguish that this has to do with efficiency of spending, rather than “market rate”.
I’m not sure about the winner’s curse, although it wasn’t the point I was going for. The point I’m trying to make is that “revealed preference” doesn’t mean much when people don’t have a good idea of what they’re getting. Manski has a paper on this that is really good. I’ll post it here.
https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/4797-final.pdf
Let’s say, hypothetically, only three players sign a FA contract: Aplayer signs a contract worth $10 million dollars and they produce 1 WAR, one who signs for $20 million and put up 1 WAR, and one who signed for $5 million and also put up 1 WAR. You average them together, you get $10 million per win. That is the $/WAR figure listed here.
How is that paragraph in contradiction with my assertion that the market sets the $/WAR number? And like any number set by the market, it can fluctuate year to year. (There was a decent amount of digital ink spilled on the topic this past off-season) Writers throw out numbers like 9 million per Win as current free agency rates, because in a given year its a fair approximation of what you can expect to pay on the free agent market to acquire a player. Like most stats, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation, but it is close enough to evaluate how efficiently a club is spending their free agency dollars.
Oof, I posted this and I must have misread something. $22 million is closer to market value than I thought (I thought it was using a $9 million/WAR figure, not $7 million/WAR). So v2micca is correct that it is closer to market value than not (assuming an average of 3 WAR per year, which is unlikely).
All that being said, I stand by the rest of my response.
Mostly dead? You need a miracle.
Have fun storming the castle.
I’m not dead yet. I feel happy
So far in June, .273/.310/.473, 110 wRC+, 5.8 BB% and 13.8 K%. His OBP/BB% has declined each month, while his power and K’s are up so far in June. He has also been terrible against LHP, .190/.244/.286, 43 wRC+ on the year which is well below his career averages. I don’t know, I am still not impressed given his contract.
Love the guy but never liked the contract ($$ and length…..this goes for any team signing guys to mega contracts as the team doesn’t get their money’s worth)
Do teams on average get worse value on large contracts than medium or small ones? You can be most efficient by simply sitting out the FA market, but you also are less likely to win.
Matt Swartz claims that you don’t, on average. I think the idea is that for every Max Scherzer out there, you have an Albert Pujols to balance it out.
I’ve always been a big Heyward backer, and I’m thrilled to see his bat come around. But the issue now is that his defense is no longer rating as super elite. UZR’s recent adjustments tamped down his historic defensive values, and it rated him a mere 7.1 UZR in RF (10.4 UZR/150) in 2017. He had some positive CF value too, but he wan’t blowing the positional adjustment out of the water as he had in the past. This year he’s barely outstripping the RF positional adjustment again (though I think some of that has to do with a few early season fluke fly balls he lost in the sun or just plain dropped). Either way, the trend is not encouraging.
His RF UZR since 2014: 19.4, 15.3, 12.0, 7.1, 2.2 (after more than 40% of the season).
DRS likes him more than UZR, but even there there is still a lot of decline. Since 2014: 26, 22, 14, 18, 5.
Statcast/OAA has him at the following since 2016: 15, 11, 1. Now this is just range, and those first two years are each top 10 among all OF. But the trend line continues to slope downward.
He still looks very good out there and I think he’ll be well above average by year’s end. But it seems likely that the metrics are picking up some amount of decline, and since he’s getting into his late 20s you’d expect some decline from here on out. Not sure even a return to his old offensive form will salvage the remaining years on the contract at this point. I do think he’s still very useful as a platoon bat though, and I think that’s where you’ll see the Cubs going over the back half of the deal.
There aren’t a lot of big bodied outfielders succeeding on defense in their 30s. I think you are right that he needs to do a little more than simply return to form in order to have good value on the back end of the contract, and if he does get better to where he is more of a 125 wRC+ guy, he likely opts out, as he could look at a player with a fairly similar past in Justin Upton (early riser, some ups and downs though no downs like Heyward, similar age) and the money he got.
I don’t think Heyward will opt out under any circumstances. His remaining contract is similar to the Upton deal, and I can’t really imagine another team offering him even that much. The Cubs might be able to trade 50% of the contract or something, but I think they just need to make the best of the situation, which is really not terrible. He’s a good clubhouse guy, he hits RH pitchers at an above average rate, he contributes on defense even if not at the level he used to. There are worse players to be stuck with.
I’m not as certain as ballskwok, but I’d be surprised to see Heyward opt out after 2019.
He’ll have 4 years / $86 million left on his contract at that point and be 30 years old. Teams won’t forget that 2016 and 2017 happened. My impression is also that Heyward garners a fair amount of skepticism from scouts, because of the near constant swing changes and (probably) because he’s almost never shown the power that people intuitively expect from a hitter who is 6’5″, 240. I could also see the possible comp of Alex Gordon cratering from age 32 onward scaring some teams away.
Hopefully he’ll be able to exceed his old offensive form before his range becomes mediocre. That’s exactly what Dwight Evans did at about the same age, and it kept him from becoming a platoon bat for the rest of his career.
The Cubs desperately need Heyward’s bat to come around for his contract to not devolve into Titantic scale disaster. While Jason has been a below average player for the Cubs, his superior defense has prevented him from going full on replacement level. Unfortunately, age and injuries appear to be catching up and his defense has declined for 3 straight seasons. Unless current trends alter course, he might even be a liability in right field by the end of his contract. The Cubs desperately need his bat to wake up and compensate for his declining defense.
So, I get down-voted quite heavily, yet it seems most all other comments agree with me.
SSS. Voters > commenters.
In your first comment you basically said the contract would be bad forever regardless of evidence to the contrary. <— That's what you're getting dinged for.
"Heyward might turn it around, but the contract will probably still end up an albatross for the Cubs." This is quite different than your "It will prove to be a failed contract, despite what WAR might say."
It's the same sentiment: We're most likely going to look back on Heyward's contract unfavorably. It's just that yours says it's definite, and (here's where you lose a crowd of people who know and understand evidence and numbers) even if there is evidence against your point you reject that evidence and will stand by your opinion.
This, or people think they are a shitty band. One or the other. Could be either one. Nobody really knows.*
*It’s the first one.
Jason Heyward is only 28?? Hope the changes stick for him, thought he was an almost surefire HOFer after his rookie year.
i know, a lot of people had very high expectations for him following that magical rookie season. Sadly, he has never quite lived up to the potential he flashed his first year in the majors.
So glad to see this change. It’s like Kemp and Muncy – someone you never expected to be a major contributor has seriously stepped up as a hitter.
Let’s hope it continues.
role not roll
I think Heyward’s recent run of success is a function of his timing being better than it was previously. He was previously so late that his normal swing was like he was defensively poking at the ball, which I think is similar to what Maddon is saying. You can see great rhythm in the swing in the GIF, on the other hand. He looks ready and he uncoils, rather than not being set up in time and defensively poking at it as a result.