Mark Trumbo Is Still a Free Agent for Obvious Reasons
The forces of supply and demand appears to be bringing the offseason to a standstill when it comes to heavy hitters. Not many teams are looking for that type of player, and yet a number of them remain available. Edwin Encarnacion had to take less than he wanted, while Jose Bautista and Mark Trumbo headline a group of bat-first guys still available on the market. It’s a group that also includes Chris Carter, who was non-tendered by the Brewers, as well as Pedro Alvarez, Brandon Moss, and Mike Napoli. The qualifying offer hurts for Bautista and Trumbo, but the real reason Trumbo remains unsigned is that he isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and he probably isn’t even worth the $17.2 million attached to the qualifying offer.
There’s certainly some sort of market for Trumbo and the 47 homers he hit in 2016. As a player, though, he only does one thing really well, and it’s tough for him to compensate for his deficiencies with that one strength. It’s not just that Trumbo is a poor defender and baserunner, it’s that he isn’t even that good on offense. Last season, Trumbo’s on-base percentage was .316, below the league-average mark of .323 for non-pitchers. Sure, his .533 slugging percentage was very good, but it wasn’t among the top 10% of baseball, and when combined with his lackluster OBP, his 123 wRC+ ranked a respectable 40th out of 176 qualified players last season. While respectable, getting such little mileage out of 47 homers is a little disconcerting.
The graph below shows all of the players who have hit at least 40 homers since the end of World War II and their respective wRC+, with Trumbo highlighted.
Trumbo didn’t produce the worst offensive season ever for a player with at least 40 homers, but he wasn’t that far off. There are 295 qualified players who’ve recorded 40-homer seasons. They’ve averaged 155 wRC+, collectively. Trumbo, meanwhile, finds himself in the bottom 10%; just 16 players have recorded a lower wRC+ and only Ryan Howard in 2008 hit more home runs (48) with a lower wRC+ (120). The reason for Trumbo’s low wRC+ totals relative to his homers is a combination of walks, strikeouts, and a low batting average on balls in play.
Trumbo tends to strike out a lot, having recorded a 25% career average and a similar 25.5% last season. Strikeouts limit the number of balls in play a hitter gets, limiting the number of opportunities a player has to get on base. Trumbo hits a lot of fly balls (43% in 2016), and a decent percentage of those fly balls (13% in 2016) are of the infield variety, leading to essentially automatic outs. Trumbo doesn’t leg out a lot of infield hits, and his lifetime .288 BABIP and his .278 BABIP in 2016 are not the product of bad luck, but of Trumbo’s approach and strategy to get the ball in the air and hit a lot of homers.
Trumbo’s approach isn’t necessarily a poor one for him, but that low BABIP combined with a low walk rate means his on-base percentage is never going to be high. For Trumbo, it seems, this is the best way for him to be an effective hitter, as he told David Laurila last season:
I’m not [disciplined enough] in a lot of people’s eyes, but that’s the way I’m most efficient. I’ve tried both. I’ve tried to be a high-walk guy, and that version of me is not even a major-league-caliber player. I have opinions on plate discipline, and the best version of me is the one that’s aggressive. If I swing at a few pitches out of the zone, so be it.
Trumbo’s lifetime walk rate is just under 7%; last season it was 7.6%, still below league average. To put Trumbo’s walk rate in some practical terms: if he’d walked in 10.6% of his plate appearances last season instead of 7.6%, he would have gotten on base 20 more times. Those 20 walks are worth roughly the equivalent of seven homers. If he walked more, he could afford to hit fewer homers, but as he suggests above — and 2014 helped to prove — that approach isn’t likely to work for Trumbo, as he ends up trading away more home runs than the walks he receives.
If he can’t walk more or strike out any less — and if he isn’t going to hit for a higher BABIP — that means the offensive version of Mark Trumbo we just saw is very likely the best version of Mark Trumbo we will ever see. After subtracting a couple runs for Trumbo’s baserunning and accounting for his defense, it means that, at his very best, Trumbo is an average baseball player. The graph below is a similar one to the one seen above, except this plots 40-homer seasons against WAR.
Trumbo’s 2.2 WAR ranks 287th out of 295 seasons. Only one Jose Canseco in 1998 has authored a season with at least 42 homers and been worse overall than Trumbo was last season. Of course, 40-homer seasons are generally going to self-select good players having good seasons, but Trumbo’s 2016 is one of the least valuable in that club. Nor was Trumbo’s seasonal WAR figure unduly deflated by randomly poor defensive numbers. Trumbo split the season between the outfield and designated hitter, and his UZR in the outfield was right in line with his career numbers, where he has been roughly 10 runs below average over a full season for a corner outfielder. That figure plus the positional adjustment for corner outfield (-7.5 runs) is equivalent to the adjustment for designated hitter (-17.5), which means that making Trumbo a designated hitter isn’t going to save him any more runs as a player overall.
Mark Trumbo just hit 47 homers but still only registered a 123 wRC+ and 2.2 WAR. Given the normal numbers for him elsewhere offensively in walks, strikeouts, and BABIP and the unlikely prospect of a change in approach, Trumbo’s 2016 offensively likely represents the absolute peak for what he can expect to do. His baserunning and defense cost him in total value and they aren’t likely to get any better, either. At age 31, he is at a level where we expect to see some decline offensively. As a result, Trumbo isn’t likely to provide any more value than the qualifying offer he received from the Orioles. Given his age and total value as a player, he certainly isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and because the team that signs him will lose a draft pick next season, he might not even be worth $10 million to sign. The current market is probably hurting Trumbo some, but his lack of value as a player should be hurting him more.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
How many of those other low value seasons are by Rockies players? Dante Bichette’s 1.8 WAR in 1995 comes to mind. Subtract or at least set aside those and Trumbo comes out even worse.
doesn’t wRC+ already account for park effects?
Yes, ergo Rockies players are likely to have low wRC+ with high traditional numbers.
I was thinking mostly of Bichette and Castilla, but the latter seems to have retained enough positional/defensive value to outpace Trumbo. In wRC+ there’s a few Galarraga and Castilla seasons in the vicinity.
And actually both of Arenado’s 40 hr seasons. I would have expected post-Humidor to have helped that equalize some but even CarGo’s 2015 40 hr season was only a 115 wRC+.
Of the 13 40+ hr seasons the franchise has seen, 9 were with seasons of 131 wRC+ or lower, 4 below 120, 2 below 110, even.
Heres a list of worst 40+ HR by wrC seasons ever. Littered with Rockies http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2016/1/18/10783202/worst-40-home-run-seasons-ever-albert-pujols-carlos-gonzalez-nolan-arenado
I wondered who had 40+HR and a wRC+ under 100 and went to a little trouble setting up a filter for it, when I could’ve just looked at the 2000 leaderboards. Or better yet, just looked at the 2000 stats for Ruben Sierra, Joe Carter, and Tony Batista. Should’ve known it would be one of them.
(Yes yes, Joe Carter retired in 1998, don’t @ me. If he had hung on two more years he would’ve hit 40 HRs in 2000 with a wRC+ under 100.)
List of 40+ HR with fewer than 3.0 WAR:
Ryan Howard 2008 48 HR 2.9 WAR
Mark Trumbo 2016 47 2.2
Jose Canseco 1998 46 1.3
Manny Ramirez 2005 45 2.9
Richie Sexson 2001 45 2.9
Tony Amas 1984 43 2.8
Curtis Granderson 2012 43 2.7
Khris Davis 2016 42 2.5
Dick Stuart 1963 42 2.4
Juan Gonzalez 1997 42 2.2
Greg Vaughan 1996 41 2.8
Tony Batista 2000 41 2.7
Adam Dunn 2012 41 2.0
Paul Konerko 2004 41 1.7
Jeff Buroughs 1977 41 1.3
Chris Carter 2016 41 0.9
Adam Dunn 2007 40 2.9
Sammy Sosa 2003 40 2.8
Jay Buhner 1995 40 2.6
Todd Frazier 2016 40 2.4
Carlos Gonzalez 2015 40 2.4
Albert Pujols 2015 40 1.9
Dante Bichette 1995 40 1.8
Adam Dunn 2006 40 1.5
Adam Dunn 2008 40 0.6
2 Notes:
1) Adam Dunn. Hooooo boy. He really sticks out with his 462 HR career with only 25.4 WAR (18.2 HR/WAR). Paul Konerko is even more extreme: 439 HR, 23.2 WAR (18.9 HR/WAR).
2) 2016 – most players of any season on this list with four.
Dave Kingman’s 1982 season (607 PA, 37 HR, -0.5 WAR (!!!)) deserves an honorable mention, despite falling three dingers short.
I did a little rough math (not wanting to find a WAR calculator…), and I think that turning 3 outs into 3 HR is worth about 0.6 WAR, so Kingman would have likely have finished just barely above replacement level with three additional homers.
It’s Tony Armas. You missed an r. Loved watching him hack away in a sox uni in the ’80’s. Good times.
Trumbo’s problem is that since 2012, he has been miscast as an OF when he plainly, clearly isn’t a major league caliber outfielder. He has no business in the OF. He’s not just bad, he’s awful. Yet the Angels signed Pujols and shoved him to the OF, the Dbacks traded for him even though they had Goldschmidt and then after a half season in Seattle, Baltimore signed him even though they had Chris Davis.
On the other hand, UZR has him actually being an above average 1B. Wherever he signs, he needs to play 1B. I would think that a slightly above average defensive 1B would come out much better in the WAR dept than an atrocious OF and a 3 year deal suddenly looks workable for him to me.
Yes. This.
Well said.
Plus 5 uzr at 1st is a scratch right fielder. So it would be a 10 run swing which is a rough equivalent of a little less than 1 war. So we can say he would have been a 3 war player last year, entering decline coming off likely a career year with a q.o. attached.
Exactly!
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=1b&stats=fld&lg=all&qual=3000&type=1&season=2016&month=0&season1=2010&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=24,d
Not worth a multi-year deal?? I don’t get why we should care that he had just 2.2 fWar last season bc he’s a bad OFer. At 1B, he might be a 3+ win player. A 123 RC+ is nothing to be dismissive of, IMO. Problem is lack of openings at 1B and he prob wants to play the field. That and of course the draft pick penalty he’s having to fund.
“Problem is lack of openings at 1B and he prob wants to play the field. That and of course the draft pick penalty he’s having to fund.”
Those reasons considered together are reason enough to not be worth a multi-year deal.
Everything in this realm is always circumstantial, but Trumbo’s ability, all other things being equal, normally gets paid.
The Rays need a 1B and a right handed bat. They are likely doing their usual “let the market come to us” approach and see what they can get just prior to pitchers and catchers reporting.
After paying an aging Astrubel Cabrera $7M a couple years ago wouldn’t be surprised to see them make an offer at some point.
Isn’t Miller slotted to play 1B? Seems like they could use an OF corner more – Bautista…
He’ll prob relent on the playing the field part and go back to the O’s for something like 3/42M when all is said done.
As an O’s fan I sure hope not, they can almost certainly acquire a better player for cheaper, somone will cave and overpay for Trumbo I just hope it isn’t the orioles, hell, trey mancini may be capable of racking up 2 WAR as OF/DH at the league minimum.
Wait, now Trey Mancini might hit 47 HRs? I like Mancini a lot FTR, but this seems high on the Trumbo dismiss meter to me. In fact, re-signing Trumbo won’t stop the O’s from giving Mancini a shot to play some LF.
It isnt about the home runs, its the fact that other than the ability to hit home runs he brings nothing to the table as a baseball player.
And what, now 3/42M is a lot? What is going to prevent the O’s from doing if they gave Trumbo that deal?
General rule of thumb for agents: if your client is traded for Steve Clevenger the previous winter, take the QO.
Especially at 17million! That’s a lot of scratch.
fangraphs talks about hitting almost 50 dingers like it’s some paltry accomplishment. He had a near MVP season, he’ll get paid in the end. http://twtwsports.blogspot.com/2016/10/mark-trumbo-for-mvp.html
Very relieved your blog is satire.
No, the article isn’t dismissive of the dingers, just of the notion that “dingers uber alles” is a good way to evaluate player contributions to winning. The dingers are great, but everything else is somewhere between below average and awful, making him an average player even with the dingers.
No one evaluates great defensive players by ignoring their offense, why would anyone evaluate players with great power by ignoring everything they do poorly?
“Near MVP season”
Trumbo MVP votes: 0 points
Let’s expand to both leagues, 40 home run hitters:
Trumbo: 0 points, 47 homers
Dozier: 9 points, 43 homers
Cruz: 6 points, 43 homers
Encarnacion: 7 points, 42 homers
Davis: 0 points, 42 homers
Arenado: 199 points, 41 homers
Carter: 0 points, 41 homers
1 player in that list is an above average defender. That player is the only 40+ home run player to receive even a 5th place vote.
TWTW is joking, his article is Satire and pretty funny. I down voted too soon. If you are reading this TWTW: I am just so, so very sorry. Like, really really sorry. I was far too hasty.
True. But one needs to learn to present oneself in a way that does not actively prevent people from wanting to click the link.
That article was amazing thanks for sharing!
I think it’s lovely you created some Skip Bayless-style fake accounts to cheer you on 🙂
I’d just as soon have Chris Carter at a cheaper price and fewer years. Heck, I might take Carter at the same price and years.
Carter is 11 months younger, but near enough that it’s not a big difference. Last year is the first that Trumbo has had more power than Carter, but let’s call it about even.
They are both bad on defense and should be at first base or DH.
Carter walks more and strikes out more but Trumbo (usually) runs a better BABIP. Carter’s .271 career BABIP is likely a product of hitting 50% fly balls. He’s a bit better than Trumbo at not hitting as many infield flies, at least.
Because of the walks, Carter has also been more consistent over the past four years, producing a wRC+ between 104 and 125. Trumbo has been all over the place, from 90 to 123.
I’d rather have Carter and take a near-guaranteed average offensive season with the small chance of a flukey high BABIP season rather than Trumbo with the hopes that his 2016 power surge is for real.
This was my thought as well. i can’t fathom why you’d pay significantly more for Trumbo when Carter is sitting there, likely available at a fraction of the cost.
Is Trumbo, like, a renowned “good teammate” and is Carter known as a “problem in the clubhouse”?
Another thing that hurts Rusty Trumbo is the league wide Power spike. Homer’s just are not as a scarce a commodity as they were a few years ago.
Best season comps to
Trumbo ’16 age 32: (47 HR, 0.316 OBP / 0.533 SLG / 0.850 OPS)
Joe Carter (TOR) in ’94 age 34: (27 HR, 0.317 / 0.524 / 0.841)
Jose Canseco (TOR) in ’98 age 34: (46 HR, 0.318 / 0.518 / 0.836)
Tony Armas (BOS) in ’84 age 30: (43 HR, 0.300 / 0.531 / 0.831)
Dick Stuart (BOS) in ’63 age 30: (42 HR, 0.312 / 0.521 / 0.833)
Joe had 2 maybe 3 more productive years. Dick had 2 more. Jose and Tony only had one more productive year.
Trumbo’s skillset plays well in places like Boston, Toronto, Texas, Anaheim, Colorado, and Baltimore.
Given Colorado just singed Desmond, Toronto signed Morales, Anaheim has Pujols entrenched at DH / 1B, and Boston plays Hanley Ramirez at 1B.
The only logical home he has is either in Baltimore or Texas, where he could get 3 years at $25 – 33M, with expectation 3rd year is a wash. Toronto, could be a dark horse.
Agree on Boston and I’ll give you Anaheim since they are stuck with Pujols at DH and would probably rather roll with CJ Cron at league min and 2 years of arbitration than pay Trumbo. However, I don’t think anybody truly believes Colorado signed Desmond to play 1B and Toronto’s 1B at the moment appears to be Justin Smoak who has 0.3 career WAR in 2887 PA (well, either him or Steve Pearce who is a utility guy who has never started more than 47 games at any position in a single year and has massive platoon splits). Don’t know that I would say those two teams are set at 1B.
“Trumbo split the season between the outfield and designated hitter, and his UZR in the outfield was right in line with his career numbers, where he has been roughly 10 runs below average over a full season for a corner outfielder. That figure plus the positional adjustment for corner outfield (-7.5 runs) is equivalent to the adjustment for designated hitter (-17.5), which means that making Trumbo a designated hitter isn’t going to save him any more runs as a player overall.”
However, he’s been worth 6 runs ABOVE average at 1B per season in his career, so with the -12.5 1B positional adjustment, he’d be worth an additional win vs. OF or DH. Hence the perceived fit in Colorado, where his hitting profile may play up more than the average hitter, and he can mercifully move Desmond into a Zobrist role, and they only have to give up a 2nd round pick.
The Rox have 5 OFers already and need to move someone to 1B now or deal someone… before even considering Trumbo. And moving someone in this market is way easier said than done. They don’t want to give anyone away, and adding Trumbo now will just reduce their leverage.
Who is the 5th? Blackmon in CF, Cargo in RF, Dahl and Parra splitting time in LF (especially if Dahl struggles). Desmond is the super-utility guy that plays a little bit everywhere.
“Sure, his .533 slugging percentage was very good, but it wasn’t among the top 10% of baseball.”
Trumbo was 17th in baseball in slugging. What did you mean to say by this?
He should have specified “among qualified hitters”, which would make that statement unambiguously true.
I absolutely love Trumbo’s answer: “I have opinions on plate discipline.” In other words, I’m not an idiot, I know I’d be a better player if I hit dangers AND drew a lot of walks. But when I try to do that I mess with the one skill that is actually keeping me in the game.
Seems like a good reminder that some players don’t merely need to be informed that taking a walk is a good thing. Most guys are maxing out one or two skills just to hang around, and a lot of them know it. I dunno, engenders a bit of humility on the part of the enlightened fan.
And whatever the case, one of the smartest answers I’ve ever read from a player. I’m officially rooting for him.
*dingers. Dammit, I wasn’t always this southern.
FWIW, Trumbo’s rank in LD/FB exit velocity (min. 100 BIP and omitting sub-80 mph BIP): 2nd in MLB (100.1 mph), 0.4 mph behind Nelson Cruz.
There’s a lot of people claiming Trumbo should get a multi-year deal and not a single person has named a team that would and should be making that offer.
Toronto