Red Sox Set Kung Fu Panda Free
Nearly a month ago, Dave Cameron opined that the Red Sox ought to cut ties with Pablo Sandoval. On Friday the Red Sox acquiesced.
Just two-and-a-half years into a five-year, $95-million deal, Sandoval was designated for assignment on Friday. In parts of three seasons in Boston, Sandoval produced three below-replacement-level marks, totaling -2.6 WAR. He’s owed about $49 million.
Dave noted many things on June 15, including Sandoval’s deterioration against left-handed pitching, but it’s interesting to note Sandoval is also a player quite effected by defensive shifts.
Wrote Dave:
In San Francisco, before every team started shifting on nearly every play, Sandoval was reasonably effective when hitting grounders, hitting .261 with a .282 SLG on GBs. Since arriving in Boston and having to adjust to life without the ability to pull the ball between the first and second baseman for a single, he’s hitting .188 with a .197 SLG. Without enough power to offset the GB-heavy batted ball profile, Sandoval is probably going to struggle to run a BABIP over .300 again.
If you’re looking for a silver lining here, if you’re looking for a reason to believe the Panda is not finished, Sandoval’s 96.2 mph average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives ranks 30th in the sport this season. But Sandoval posted the most extreme GB/FB ratios of his career in Boston — a 1.51 ratio in 2015 and a 1.68 mark this season — since his rookie year in San Francisco.
While Sandoval isn’t a slugger, he perhaps would have benefited from getting more balls off the ground.
Beyond the shifts vacuuming up his increasing number of ground balls, Sandvoal, who is just 30, was also losing core skills, revealed most notably by his zone contact and overall contact rates.
When we think about the Kung Fu Panda at his best, we recall one of the great bad-ball hitters of his generation, but his ability to damage pitches in and out of the zone has declined significant.
Consider his slugging percentage per swing with the Giants from 2008 to -13.
And since 2015 with the Red Sox:
Sandoval has been losing his ability to damage pitches in the zone and just out of the zone.
Sandoval was a player whose chief skills were eroding, a player who was hurt by shifts, and a player who lacked either the willingness or ability to change his batted-ball profile. He was a player who was out of shape and who had seen his defensive value deteriorate (-18 DRS in Boston at third base over 1,259 innings, essentially one full season).
The Red Sox now have the second-greatest amount of dead money on their hands in the sport’s history.
For now, Pablo Sandoval's contract includes the second largest sum of dead money in @MLB history, after Josh Hamilton ($68.4 million).
— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) July 14, 2017
While the Red Sox can afford the mistake, the evaluation error is of interest.
Sandoval agreed to terms with Boston after the Royals-Giants World Series matchup of 2014. If you recall back to that period, the game’s rising strikeout totals were receiving more and more attention. The alleged juiced ball had yet to arrive, and few hitters were paying attention to their launch angles or thinking about uppercut swings. That was our final pre-Statcast season.
There was this idea that the way to succeed in the high-strikeout, defensive-shift era was to load up on contact hitters who sprayed line drives around ballparks and limited strikeouts. And it was just in 2017 that Sandoval’s strikeout rate (22.0%) exceeded 14.5% in a single season for the first time in his career.
The Red Sox made a significant investment in low-power contact hitting in Sandoval. That’s not the kind of player who would excite many in today’s record home-run environment.
While few perhaps foresaw the depth and speed of Sandoval’s collapse in skills and performance — Sandoval averaged 2.5 WAR from 2012 to -14 in San Francisco — perhaps the Red Sox also invested too heavily in a skill set that was soon to become less valuable, as the game proceeded from a depressed run-scoring environment to a record home-run environment. Moreover, strikeouts keep increasing when singles have been less desirable as it’s more difficult to string together rallies. Perhaps, in this instance, the Red Sox bet too heavily on recent trends in the game and a player who seemed to combat them.
Free agency is risky. It’s always risky. But perhaps another lesson of the Sandoval signing is to remember the way the game is played today will not necessarily be the way it is played tomorrow.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
On the bright side, the conflict between buffet and baseball is now over
What conflict?
LMAO!
LMHAO!
Shouldn’t Prince Fielders contract with the Rangers count as the largest sum of dead money? They have to keep him on the 40 man roster to claim the insurance, but that is a huge amount with no gain on the field, plus a roster spot.
Edit: Looks like the Rangers only have to pay out about $36mil of the contract, so it’s not as big as I thought. My mistake.
Insurance is helping them pay for it, but it means they have to keep him on their 40-man roster in the offseason
Teams don’t always fill the 40 man. Any player put on it gets a pay bump and included in the union. That roster spot is a small deal compared to the 9 Mil or so the Rangers save annually.
It’s about time
It seems to me that Panda’s success depended heavily on a single asset: terrific reflexes that allowed him to hit any pitch and handle the “hot corner” adequately – without being particularly athletic otherwise. A sudden across-the-board loss of effectiveness is not awfully surprising.
It also wasn’t particularly surprising at the time of the contract despite vigorous defense of the deal here. It just happened faster (age 28) than expected.
You know what happens when you send pandas back into the wild without an extended acclimation program?
You just made The List?
I wonder if a team like the Padres or Giants, whose seasons are already done, might be interested in taking him on a minor league deal as a reclamation project. He looks done, but maybe the right hitting coach and training staff can get him right.
Or he could start a baseball team in Sichuan.
why exert any physical effort, other than lifting food to your mouth, if you’re going to get $49m anyway?
I think the bigger factor than his lack of adapting is his physical decline, he had several very bad injuries maybe related to his weight.
And his belt had to retire with a career ending injury.
RIP belt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAyXBruNHDk
Worst free agent signing ever
LAA at least got 3 WAR out of Hamilton before he kicked the bucket. So you could argue Pandas -2.6 WAR time in Boston was entirely dead money
You would think there should be some common sense that would of prevented teams from making these deals. To put it bluntly why on earth would teams sign large multiyear contracts to fat guys or drug addicts? How could that possibly end well? Fielder/Panda/Hamilton…I mean who could not see it coming? I thought Josh Hamilton was a great story, and was one of my favorite players, but cmon. Where is the underwriting department on these contracts? How was there not someone there that was like “cmon man they are gonna foreclose on these properties.”
In fairness to Prince…he had one very good season and two productive seasons before the catastrophic neck injury.
You seem to be implying that Hamilton’s decline is due to his drug addiction. What’s that based on?
Not saying he started using drugs, but more that his decline was based on years of drug abuse. He was never healthy his entire career, even his Mvp 8.4 war season he missed over a month. I don’t think there is a bigger what if in sports. A guy who could hit the ball farther and harder than Judge, throw a ball 100mph, a + runner, a prospect like the game has never seen before or since. His decline was certainly related to his body falling apart from drug abuse prior. The guy mid career became a 150lb Crack addict, and returned a few years later 90lbs heavier to put up one of the highest war per game seasons ever.
“His decline was certainly related to his body falling apart from drug abuse prior.”
Or maybe he’s yet another slugger who fell off a cliff in his early thirties. You can theorize that the multiple knee injuries were somehow related to drug abuse, but your belief is just that — a theory, not a fact.
Sort of. But the guy was a 150lb crack addict in his 20’s. Drug abuse is shown to have long term side effects on nerves and joints. Tremendous weight gain and loss is tough on the body. How is that a theory?
agree that this was the worst free agent signing ever. EVERYONE knew he was going to have a permanent residence at old country buffet as soon as he got his money.
Carl Crawford 3.4 bWAR for 142 million over 7 years comes close. David Prices deal – TBD
There is little evidence of that being Sandoval’s problem. He performed while overweight with the Giants, at times struggled when they had him on a weight program (not necessarily connected, but in his mind it was), and then he thought he could “do his thing” with Boston. By all accounts, he cared a LOT about his baseball performance and worked hard at it, but thought he could get away with being too heavy.
Once it became clear last season that that wasn’t the case, he willingly took his weight seriously for the first time in his career, and worked his butt off (literally) all offseason…and it didn’t make a difference.
Weight might have contributed to the skill losses, but erosion of skills is never pretty, and also should not be denied. Perhaps this was the inevitable result of a player with a unique and risky batting style.
Ever? Hamilton’s was for $125 million when the price of a win was less than it is today, and they paid him to play for their division rival. Crawford’s contract was almost $50 million more than Sandoval’s, and there was only about 5.5 WAR there there (again, signed when the price of a win was less). Pujols and Cabrera’s contracts are going to go down as terrible.
Zito’s $121 million dollar deal actually did put up almost 7 WAR with the Giants, but that was signed in 2007 so it deserves a mention too. Ryan Howard got $125 million around a similar time. Mo Vaughn’s contract had the highest annual value of any contract in MLB history when it was signed. In four seasons, he gave a little over 3 WAR. And Mike Hampton’s epically bad contract of $121 million in 2001 (!) netted about 9 WAR.
I think you could sort of kind of argue that some of these contracts were only “as bad” as Panda’s instead of “worse”, since they did get some value out of it even though they paid more (and especially more given how much FA deals have gone up lately). Although Pujols and Cabera’s might wind up negative WAR territory too. And Ryan Howard had negative WAR for his $125 million extension in starting in 2012, so that was bad.
I think Pujols and Howard’s are clearly the two worst, and after that it’s worth a debate. I’d put Sandoval after Vaughn and Hampton and Hamilton and Cabrera’s too, and at about the same level as Crawford. Probably less bad than Zito and Kei Igawa or Chan Ho Park.
This sounds like a really good article for someone to write…
I think you could come up with different results depending on how you calculated the value. If you do a straight WAR/$, the negative WAR contracts such as Sandoval and Howard are among the worse. Another way would be to assign a realistic value for the WAR produced and calculate how much excess money is left. That would put Pujols in the running. He has produced 13.8 WAR for the Angels thus far, but he is negative so far this season and it’s hard to see any kind of comeback and he is still owed about a bazillion dollars. I think the second method is probably superior, since it more accurately tells you how much the team is hurt financially.
For any two contracts on the same team, Pujols and Hamilton are probably untouchable.
frangipard & Hank G: Your two comments go well together. I bet you could use different valuation regimes to come up with slightly different lists. I feel pretty confident that Howard’s $125 million negative WAR is going to come out at the top (bottom?) of most of them. Minus -2.2 WAR for $125 million in 2012 (2010 if you want to do it for when the contract was actually signed) is about as bad as it gets. Pujols contract is probably going to depend on whether the Angels DFA him soonish or if they continue running his negative WAR, because he has put up 9 fWAR up to this point. It’s not a stretch to think he could run himself back down into Mo Vaughn (3 WAR) territory if he plays out the contract with multiple below-replacement seasons at 600 PAs, although maybe he just stabilizes as a replacement level guy.
Problem is the position adjustments have a heavy bias against 1Bman. They are being paid for offense and Pujols is still contributing there. The adjustments knock off overv1 WAR for every 600 PA
Putting aside the accuracy of positional adjustments (which is a debate I’m sure we could have), an 81 rWRC+ is barely a “contribution” on offense. And he’s DHing, so even if you think he’s being penalized too much for DHing (since he could theoretically offer more value in the field) an average-fielding 1st baseman with below-average hitting doesn’t offer a lot of value either.
You can’t really count Neagle’s, though, since they were able to void it completely using the morals clause after he was caught with this prostitute: http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2006/0125/20060125_021334_ol25russell.jpg
pujols and howard are clearly the 2 worst? i would disagree on a number of levels. when the angels signed pujols, he was arguably the best player in baseball. while there were questions about his age, it *seemed* like he would inevitably break bonds home run record which would allow the angels to recoup some of the money down the road because of heightened attention to the team. plus he still had an ops north of .900 his last year in st.louis. virtually any time you sign a high level free agent, you’re going to overpay. i suppose if you’re going to do it, do it in style and sign one of the best in baseball over the past 50 years, not the best that particular offseason.
when the phillies extended ryan howard’s contract, he had just hit 200 homers the previous 4 seasons. was it an overpay? sure, but he had a skill set that few baseball players have an he helped the team to it’s first world series in a long time a couple years before. consider part of the contract a belated thank you gift.
when the red sox signed sandoval, he had no particular important skill set. he had easily been declining since 2011 and his lack of conditioning had been well documented. i *believe* he hired a personal trainer after the 2013 season specifically so he could get his next big fat contract (pun intended). he only hit 16 homers his last season in san fran, obviously didn’t steal bases and had an ops of .739. he fell into the category of an above average (historically) player becoming a free agent in a weak class. the fact that sabean didn’t heavily pursue him (offer him the dollars or more importantly length of contract boston did) that offseason should have screamed something. as you pointed out, he gave zito one of the worst pitching contracts of all time.
I would bet that any fair comparison would get the Zito deal out of the top 10. WAR might not have fairly valued him, compared to RA-9, and he did throw 180+ 5 times during the deal. Overpaid, sure, but solid rotation member, whereas many of the players on such a list are flat dead money.
I feel like Igawa and Park are worse than Zito, since Igawa did absolutely nothing and Park’s $/WAR ratio was even worse than Hampton’s fantastically bad contract (but $121 million in 2001 was so staggering…). But Zito’s contract was so large…I mean, that was a staggering sum of money. Soriano signed a $136 million contract that same winter and was largely considered a massive sinkhole almost as soon as the ink was dry, and he produced something like 19 WAR over the contract. Man, Zito’s contract was big, and they did not get much out of it. Being in the #11-#15 range of bad contracts is nothing to brag about.
You are right. When comparing contracts over time you have to adjust for revenue and payroll inflation. 100 million 15 years ago is like 50 million today in MLB .
You have it backwards.
By my math, the Red Sox are paying, or have paid, around $76m this season to players who don’t play on the Red Sox (if you include the signing bonus for Moncada, which may be stretching the numbers). Among those players… Craig, Castillo, Sandoval, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, Ryan Hanigan and the $2m “Bonilla Check” to Manny Ramirez
Gonzalez and Crawford are no longer on the books, because the 2012 trade is no longer on the books, because it was fully paid off in 2014. I’m about 75% certain than Hanigan was a free agent after last year, but of course I could be wrong. And including Moncada is definitely cheating: his signing bonus is effectively a part of Sale’s salary that isn’t going to Sale and doesn’t count against the luxury tax.
There’s money going to Manny Ramirez??
Yes, and for another 10 years apparently. $2M roughly, annually.
Its deferred money no longer on the books
Even if there’s money still going to Manny, I doubt any reasonable Red Sox fan would complain too much.
Affected. He’s quite affected by defensive shifts. If he was the one doing the shifting, he might have effected a shift on somebody else.
This is going to seriously set back whoever is writing the bottom-5 trade value article.
he was a player that lacked either the willingness or ability to put down the double cheeseburger.
It’s ok, they can just slot in Shaw, they’ll be fine oh wait
As a Red Sox fan I was tempted to downvote, but decided not to be a dick.
If only they didn’t trade him along with a pair of prospects for a relief pitcher who won’t have pitched a regular season inning for the red sox so far,( looking at you, Tyler Thornburg).
The contract and his performance in Boston–symbolized by the belt-buckle incident–make him a pariah, but let’s not forget how popular and well-liked he was as a Giant. He was a cult-hero akin to John Kruk. And who can forget his performance in the 2012 World Series? I’m glad I had the opportunity to see him play.
Another man’s . . .
Yeah, I don’t get all the negativity and fat phobia here, on this site of all places. Hindsight is always 20-20. And rather than reveling in Panda’s decline and fall, I’d rather celebrate what a wonderfully unique player he was in his heyday.
but it wasn’t hindsight. it’s not like he was going to dedicate himself to staying in shape once he signed a guaranteed 5-year nearly $100m contract.
I’ve never thought the fat argument held much water. There have been effective, heavy players in the past and there will be more in the future. I always felt the Sox got into casual fan mode with Panda and paid for past post season heroics.
Fat players who dont have much of a work effort getting fatter and lazier after getting a huge contract and not having to play for a new contract. Shocker.
Panda ate himself to the point he could not compete. Lost a bit of weight but he hurt his knee on a routine GB because he was still carrying too much weight. That weight gets harder to carry in your 30’s even if you can get away with it in the 20’s.
The evidence of decline was already visible even before he got to Boston. Thats why Ben C is out of a job. Not a good move
There were other reasons to think Boston wasn’t going to get what they expected, although his game fell apart too fast for these to matter much:
1. Sandoval was extremely well suited to his original home park, perhaps more so than any other long-term Giant, based on home/away splits — .313/.853 at home with SF, .277/.771 on the road.
2. His SF numbers were inflated by the inferior league. With SF, Panda hit .297/.818 vs. NL teams, but .270/.746 vs. AL teams (88 games). Against AL East teams, he’d hit .194/.605 (22 games).
Just a bad idea from the get-go.
1 more for the bad contracts pile:
Darren Dreifort in 2000 offseason: 5 years and 57 million, 215 replacement level innings. A guy with potential that couldn’t stay healthy enough to earn the contract.
Sandoval’s sudden drop off made me think to do this. I went to Baseball-Reference and looked at his most similar players through age 27 (His last year in SF and his last above replacement level.) to see what happened to them going forward.
1. Richie Hebner
Continued being an average player for a few years before becoming a bench player. Didn’t really lose his bat completely for another decade, though.
2. Hank Blalock
He had been a decent starter (though never as good as Sandoval once was) early in his career but his batting line got worse every year of his career through age 25. In his age 26 season he became a bench player and recovered his bat for two years before losing it completely.
3. Carney Lansford
He was probably a better player through age 27 than Sandoval. He was awful at 28 and then recovered to be a good player for another four years.
4. Aramis Ramirez
He played for another decade as an average-or-better player whose poor defense was made up for by an above-average bat.
5. Chet Lemon
He was good for another six years. He had more room for error because of his defensive value as a center fielder, but he was actually an average hitter even in his final season.
6. Mike Sweeney
Unlike Sandoval, his age-27 season was in the midst of his prime. He dropped off pretty suddenly after age 31.
7. Larry Parrish
He wasn’t very good even before age 28. He had a two-year run where he was pretty good at ages 24-25, then became a replacement level player for a few years. However, he then bounced back to post a few good seasons (albeit interspersed with awful ones) in his 30s.
8. Robin Ventura
He was always better than Sandoval and stayed effective through age 35.
9. Jim Tabor
He had an up-and-down early career that peaked at age 27, then missed his age-28 season due to military service. He returned to put up one mediocre season and one below replacement level.
10. Al Oliver
His age-27 season was a real breakout. He had been decent before, but he was a considerably better player at ages 27-35 than he had been earlier. After a below-average season at age 36, he declined and became a below replacement level player for a few years.
I know the physique is a lot of what people will look at with Snadoval, but I thought it was interesting to see if players with similar profiles dropped off at all like he did. Jim Tabor and Hank Blalock are the closest things to Sandoval, but neither suffered anywhere near the fall Sandoval has.
And I know similarity scores are silly and really just for fun. So was this post.
In addition to everything written in this article, it also must be noted that he collapsed defensively.
I looked at some of the FA deals mentioned in this thread to see what they’d look like when adjusting for inflation and payroll. This is quick-and-dirty, but I indexed each year’s median team payroll to 2017. The method suggests that these historical albatross contracts would be equivalent to the following today (WAR totals over life of contract):
Howard (2012 PHI): $125/5 = $183.6/5 ($36.7/yr), -4.5 WAR
Sandoval (2015 BOS): $95/5 = $109.9/5 ($22.0/yr), -2.0 WAR
Jones (2008 LAD): $36.2/2 = $59.1/2 ($29.6/yr), -1.3 WAR
Sutter (1985 ATL): $10/6 = $124.9/6 ($20.8/yr), -0.4 WAR
Schmidt (2007 LAD): $47/3 = $72.5/3 ($24.2/yr), -0.4 WAR
Dreifort (2001 LAD): $55/5 = $112.2/5 ($22.4/yr), 0.4 WAR, $280.6/WAR
Park (2002 TEX): $65/5 = $135.6/5 ($27.1/yr), 0.7 WAR, $193.8/WAR
Upton (2013 ATL): $72/5 = $102.7/5 ($20.5/yr), 0.8 WAR, $128.4/WAR
Vaughn (1999 ANA): $80/6 = $209.5/6 ($34.9/yr), 2.4 WAR, $87.3/WAR
Garland (1977 CLE): $2.3/10 = $285.5/10 ($28.6/yr), 3.3 WAR, $86.5/WAR
Zito (2007 SFG): $126/7 = $194.5/7 ($27.8/yr), 2.3 WAR, $84.6/WAR
Neagle (2001 COL): $51/5 = $104.1/5 ($20.8/yr), 1.6 WAR, $65.0/WAR (*terminated early)
Bay (2010 NYM): $66/4 = $100.9/4 ($25.2/yr), 1.9 WAR, $53.1/WAR (*terminated early)
Hamilton (2013 LAA): $125/5 = $178.4/5 ($35.7/yr), 3.4 WAR, $52.5/WAR
Fielder (2012 DET): $214/9 = $314.3/9 ($34.9/yr), 7.0 WAR, $44.9/WAR
Hampton (2001 COL): $121/8 = $246.9/8 ($30.9/yr), 6.9 WAR, $35.8/WAR
Pujols (2012 LAA): $240/10 = $352.5/10 ($35.3/yr), 13.8 WAR, $25.5/WAR
Ramirez (2009 LAD): $45/2 = $69.5/2 ($34.7/yr), 3.0 WAR, $23.2/WAR