Texas Signs Marcus Semien for Seven
Marcus Semien finally landed his long-term contract over the weekend, coming to an agreement on a seven-year, $175 million deal with the Rangers. The tritagonist of the AL MVP race in both 2021 and ’19 hit .265/.334/.538 with 6.6 WAR for the Blue Jays in 2021, playing in all 162 games for just the second time in his career.
Marcus Semien's deal with the Texas Rangers is for seven years and $175 million, a source familiar with the agreement tells ESPN.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 28, 2021
The exact distribution of the money is not yet public, so we don’t know about opt-outs, options, buyouts, incentives, and the like. But whatever the fine print says, this is a big contract, and one that it looked like Semien would never be able to land. A late bloomer, he was not widely considered a top prospect around baseball, though he ranked 31st in the inaugural ZiPS Top 100 Prospects before the 2014 season after terrific all-around performances in ’13 for Triple-A Charlotte and Double-A Birmingham. But it was the outlier here, and the White Sox of the time were not a particularly imaginative organization. They didn’t see him, then error-prone, as a shortstop, and in any case, Alexei Ramirez had an ironclad hold on the position. This was the era in which the Sox seemed determined to play Gordon Beckham at second indefinitely, despite any performance-based reason for that strategy, and little attempt was made to find a role for Semien on the roster. He, along with Chris Bassitt and a couple others, was shipped off to Oakland after the 2014 season for Jeff Samardzija.
Oakland has never shied away from being the Island of Misfit Toys and found a better use for Semien, and like Marco Scutaro, a stathead darling from a decade prior, he turned out to be a low-cost, league-average infielder. With the help of Ron Washington, he improved immensely with the glove and nearly put up his first 4-WAR season in 2018. When his power broke out, as it did the following season, he was a legitimate contender for the AL MVP award.
The next time you hear bemoaning about how players always have career years right before they hit free agency, remember to keep the example of Semien in your mind. He finally made it the market after 2020, his age-29 season, but was coming off a relatively unimpressive follow-up to his MVP-caliber ’19, hitting .223/.305/.374. It was hardly a lousy year by any stretch — his 1.2 WAR represented a 3.1 WAR pace over a full campaign — but it was one to get the word “fluke” out there.
With the hope of a bounceback season in a year not drastically shortened by a raging pandemic, he signed a one-year deal with Toronto worth $18 million, positioning him to get one more chance to land a big deal. That bet paid off, and while the shape of his contribution changed between ’19 and ’21 — less batting average, an easier defensive position, more power — a second big season answered a lot of questions about just how good a player he was.
When evaluating the contract, though, it cannot be forgotten that late bloomer or not, Semien is 31, not 26. He was solid enough defensively in his first year at second that he should be able to play at least somewhere in the middle infield for the bulk of the contract. The Rangers have not yet indicated whether they consider him a shortstop or a second baseman in 2022, but I’m having ZiPS project him as a second baseman given the presence of Isiah Kiner-Falefa and the rumors about the Rangers being in on another shortstop, such as Trevor Story.
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SB | OPS+ | DR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | .269 | .342 | .491 | 613 | 103 | 165 | 34 | 3 | 32 | 84 | 67 | 13 | 120 | 6 | 4.7 |
| 2023 | .265 | .336 | .483 | 578 | 95 | 153 | 33 | 3 | 29 | 78 | 62 | 11 | 116 | 5 | 4.1 |
| 2024 | .260 | .330 | .461 | 553 | 87 | 144 | 30 | 3 | 25 | 71 | 57 | 11 | 109 | 4 | 3.3 |
| 2025 | .255 | .322 | .444 | 525 | 79 | 134 | 27 | 3 | 22 | 63 | 51 | 9 | 103 | 3 | 2.5 |
| 2026 | .252 | .315 | .429 | 492 | 70 | 124 | 24 | 3 | 19 | 56 | 45 | 8 | 97 | 1 | 1.9 |
| 2027 | .246 | .303 | .401 | 459 | 61 | 113 | 20 | 3 | 15 | 48 | 37 | 7 | 87 | 0 | 1.0 |
| 2028 | .239 | .292 | .374 | 364 | 45 | 87 | 15 | 2 | 10 | 34 | 27 | 5 | 77 | -2 | 0.1 |
In contrast to The Ballpark in Arlington, Globe Life Field appears to be a relatively neutral field, so there’s no particular advantage or disadvantage for Semien based on his skill set. ZiPS think it’s likely that he has already had his best season, but the Rangers aren’t paying him as if they expect him to average 4 WAR per season; at $7.3 million a win in 2022 and 3% growth, that would imply a contract worth about $224 million. Based on these assumptions, Texas is paying a player it expects to average 3.1 WAR over the next seven years. In other words, if Semien maintains just his 2020 performance level, that would be enough to make the contract about break-even in this context.
Now, that’s tougher than it sounds. Semien is likely entering his decline years, and a lot of star infielders around his age do not go particularly gracefully. ZiPS uses large cohorts of players for comparison, so individual player comps aren’t greatly important to an overall projection, but Semien’s top 10 give a note of caution. Lou Whitaker aged very well, but the other nine of Ryne Sandberg, Don Money, John Valentin, Bobby Doerr, Chris Sabo, Miguel Tejada, Bill Madlock, Bill Elliott, and Ken Boyer almost invariably didn’t.
What this means is that you shouldn’t consider Semien’s deal like you would Manny Machado’s. You can make an argument for any team being in a position where the latter would have been beneficial, because he projected to be good for so long that even rebuilding teams would get peak Machado when they were winning games again, as happened with the Padres. At 31, most of Semien’s rest-of-career contributions are likely to come in the next two to four years.
In the end, this feels a bit like the right deal but the wrong team. It appears that the Rangers will be one of the most active teams in free agency this winter, but if they want to win almost immediately, they have to be, and even a normal spending spree may not be enough to make them a real contender quickly. Even with Semien in the fold, our depth charts still have Texas as not quite a 75-win team on average. Running projections for the rest of the NL West, ZiPS doesn’t feel much differently, giving Texas a current projection, based on the current rosters (plus Semien), of 74.3 wins. Signing Story and Kevin Gausman and Max Scherzer would still leave the Rangers about an 85-win team. In other words, they may be in such a deep hole that their ability to spend their way to quick contention is just on the edge of plausibility.
Don’t get me wrong; this deal is a far better idea than the ill-conceived past notions this franchise had in signing Shin-Soo Choo and the willingness to spend for most of Prince Fielder’s remaining Tigers contract. But the Rangers have a monumental and expensive task ahead of them if they’re going to challenge for the top of the AL West in the next couple of years. As for Semien, a player with a career trajectory that tends to fall through the cracks under baseball’s system of free agency, it’s great to see him manage to get his big payday after all.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Happy that Semien got paid, but I don’t think this is going to work out particularly well for the Rangers. dWAR often falls off a cliff for players and he has been an above average hitter in 2 seasons of his career. But if he maintains his defensive value for a few years than it may not be too bad.
Agreed.
Good for Marcus. Weird move by Texas.
My goodness. I’m glad Semien got paid. Good for him.
I hate everything about this for the Rangers, though. Semien is old enough that he only really makes sense on a win-now team and the Rangers are the opposite of that. It’s about two years too long. He isn’t a good fit at shortstop, and at second he blocks a surprising number of their best prospects. If they were going to overpay, I’d much rather they overpay on Story. Although it sounds like they might do that as well.
About those last couple of points–the Rangers seem to really love defensively fringey infield prospects, getting three of them in the Joey Gallo deal in addition to drafting Justin Foscue (and if they decide Davis Wendzel is a shortstop and Aaron Zavala is a third basemen, them too). I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t land Story and just decide to play Semien at shortstop anyway. Because, why not.
Well, at least Semien seems like a decent enough fellow. Good for him.
Story’s arm is scary
I agree with all of that but my first thought was that it was a lot like the Jayson Werth deal with the Nationals in 2010. I thought that team was lousy and should not be signing 32 y/o players to 7 year deals, but they were competitive as soon as 2012 and from then on finished no worse than 2nd any year he was there.
Although, IIRC, the Nationals in 2010 had a stronger farm system than Texas does now. A lot stronger.
The only way I see this making sense is if there are teams that like defensively fringey second base prospects as much as the Rangers do and they can swap guys like Duran, Foscue, and Josh Smith for other guys that will help them win in the next couple of years.
They might have an Ian Desmond lurking somewhere on their roster currently and maybe there’s a Jordan Zimmerman hanging out in the minors too. But there are probably no Bryce Harpers or Stephen Strasburgs waiting in the wings. Sure, Jack Leiter or Josh Jung are really good prospects, but the chances that anyone turns into Bryce Harper or Stephen Strasburg is extremely small, even with the scouting reports they came with. And it’s pretty hard to convince a team to trade you a Gio Gonzalez-type these days.
The premise that a farm should be judged exclusively by Top 20 prospects is wrong. I also think your assessment of TEX farm is a year or two stale.
Haven’t the Rangers and Rays completed a few trades like that? In either direction?
More “I can’t believe this” thoughts:
I saw someone note that Semien didn’t get an opt-out. Why would he want an opt-out with this contract?
You know that Boras is going to come back and say “well, if Marcus Semien got 7 years, then you should be giving Corey Seager 11 years.”
For all the complaints from the owners about losing money, they sure aren’t acting like it. I thought the starting pitching market was hot but this is arguably as wild as anything we’ve seen there.
I think the only free agent deal I actually like so far is the Tigers’ deal with E-Rod. I guess I also like the Mets’ deals for Canha and Marte.
I’ve seen you make multiple references now to the “owners losing money” bit.
Are you happy owners are spending money, or not? Your comments don’t seem to make any sense particularly as they are coming in articles about how well free agents are getting paid.
I don’t think this would have bothered me quite so much before the pseudo-lockout last year when the owners decided that playing more games would actually be worse for them. All the whining about the huge, huge losses they took (and in some cases owners are still complaining) was really something.
I’d like to see some changes in the collective bargaining agreement so that young guys can actually get paid, and it’s wildly obvious that there are huge amounts of money in the game (although not necessarily allocated well across teams) because free agents are getting bonkers deals. Pitchers coming off TJ are getting better pillow deals than the QO, in some cases much better. A team that won 60 games has decided to sign a 31-year old to a 7 year contract. Michael Wacha not only got a guaranteed contract after yet another uninspiring year, his salary more than doubled. This is what it looks like when ownership has way too much money.
So no, I’m not very happy about this. There’s going to be a lockout in a few days. Hopefully it will be lifted in a couple of months and we won’t miss any baseball. But we’re about 18 months away from owners whining about how hard it is to pay players, and potentially another 2-3 months away from it starting up again.
The impending work stoppage is the only part of it that really bothers me. It is the owner’s money. If they don’t want to spend it, they don’t have to spend it. That is up to them and I will deal with it. But when that results in no baseball it pisses me off and I won’t believe all their talk of losing money when they do stuff like…everything you listed.
Everything about the owners’ stance in collective bargaining has been the owners trying to save themselves from their own decisions and paper over inadequate revenue sharing agreements. It’s really telling that the players can say what they want openly (we want more money to players earlier in their career) and the owners can’t (we want to collude but we have to settle for the next best thing).
I’d say that almost everything about the player’s stance is trying to get back things they gave away in the past and almost immediately regretted, which is what has served to funnel money away from younger players. So they need saving from their prior decisions as well. From a PR standpoint, the players are in a better spot since most everybody can see the collusion when it happens, but labor negotiations rarely result in one side giving something back that they won in the past without also getting a concession from the other side for the future, so the players are in a tough spot at the bargaining table.
The fact that teams are willing to spend now that they will start a season with full capacity for the first time since 2019 is not an evidence for ‘teams were crying poor.’
Rather, I would consider it as evidence that they were actually poor during the pandemic (as most businesses were).
1. Owners don’t spend money when there is no crowd:
“Oh, they are just crying poor and using the crowd as an excuse to not pay the players”
2. A. Owners back to spending money when there is crowd:
“See, this proves that owners were just being greedy”
2. B. Owners still don’t spend money when there is crowd:
“Just as I was saying, having no crowd was just an excuse. Owners just didn’t want to pay the players”
It is not too hard to create a narrative that supports your opinion, but it does not mean it is valid.
To be fair, they actually didn’t show a ton of evidence of spending restraint in the 2020-2021 offseason either.
Really, aside from Yu Darvish and Mike Moustakas’s first free agent contract with the Royals back in 2017? I think? We haven’t had a ton of evidence that MLB owners collectively have resource constraints.
I’ve seen Guardians (ugh!) fans who think they can sign Jose Ramirez to this sort of extension, roughly 7 years and $175. Even if that were possible before this deal, it’s clearly not now, given that Ramirez will be a year younger than Semien when he hits free agency and has a better track record.
Yeah, Ramirez is on pace to be a Hall of Famer, looking to have around 45 WAR at age 30. He’s never put up a full season where he was below average at any part of the game: hit, run, or field. In the last six, he’s had *one* season where his full-season pace was below 4.5 WAR. If he doesn’t fall apart or get badly injured in the next two years, I’d I’d fully expect a free agent deal of close to $30M AAV. But even more than that, I’ll be surprised if he’s still with Cleveland in 2023.
I think that if they gave him 7 years and $175M now after guaranteeing that his current options are picked up he’d consider it (at the minimum). But it’s not at all clear Cleveland would do that.
Since everyone sees where this is going, the obvious move would be to trade him now but most of the teams that would make a big trade like this have already emptied their farm system. So next offseason it is.
For some reason, I was thinking that this was the last year of his contract. But there’s still an option for 2013 which means he’ll hit free agency the same age as Semien. (They’ve already picked up the 2022 option.) And barring a huge injury that would put him out of action for a long time, hard to see Cleveland not picking up the 2023 option. Even if he has a down year, he’s worth a $13 million gamble. So I’m not sure that Cleveland guaranteeing the 2023 option gets them much.
As for trading him, I suppose it’s possible that they could trade him mid-year 2022 if the season goes sideways.
Ramirez is the most underrated player in the game -bar none- with the most team friendly contract. Knowing Cleveland, they’ll show him the door like so many before him. On the open market, he’d be worth his weight in gold, whether in $$ or player capital.
Would have thought the Mets would have signed him to get their payroll up to 250.lol
Broke out “tritagonist” in the second sentence. Bold. I usually wait until the third paragraph.
Second basemen and shortstops are often the deuteragonist of the plays they are involved in, so the second sentence seemed apt in this case.
I can never remember whether “tritagonist” and “deuteragonist” refers to the second/third protagonist or antagonist. But you could write Semien into the plot either way and it would still be interesting.
It’s uh… neutral? My understanding is that the agonist part is just “actor”, literally and figuratively (this all from Greek theater), so sans a textual antecedent of pro- or ant-, I think it’s just the second/third in the succession. Bear in mind, this is all based on my memory and I might be making it up.
Two desperate parties came together. Boras knows how to get the most for his own pockets
In what sense was Semien a “desperate party”?
Gotta believe deals like this, not to mention the rumored 3/$120 or 4/$160 for Scherzer, are going to help the players in upcoming CBA negotiations. I mean, how can the owners cry poor with very recent evidence like this???
I’ve always enjoyed Szymborski’s number crunching but when he forced me to look up tritagonist I realized he’s the Shohei Ohtani of Sabermetricians — numbers and letters both. Long may your cats rule.
For the record, I do nothing as well as Shohei Ohtani does the whole baseball thing.
Bummer, he was on my list of guys I want the Nats to pursue. The deal is weirdly long, but I think he will be a surplus value for3 or 4 years, then not so much.
I don’t get this deal from the Rangers perspective. They are so far off from contending that this makes more sense if there was a salary cap with a defined floor and ceiling, and they needed to add enough payroll $$ to ensure they exceed the floor. But this is not the NHL, this is MLB. Makes me wonder what the new CBA will look like…
Even then, I can actually think of a situation where that happened in the NHL, when Dallas was in bankruptcy and operating at the cap floor. They’d infamously bought out Sean Avery’s contract a few years earlier and were still paying him every year; when his deal finally came off the books, they just traded for a depth forward making barely a million, for future considerations, to stay above the cap floor.
I’m a Rangers fan and I’m honestly kinda baffled at the excitement of even the savvy fans. “Signing Story and Kevin Gausman and Max Scherzer would still leave the Rangers about an 85-win team.” That’s soul-crushing. So far it’s Semien, Seager and Gray (and Kole Calhoun). They haven’t even gotten a Gausman or a Scherzer, much less both. Gray’s career numbers are actually _WORSE_ on the road than at Coors, he’s not going to suddenly become an ace. He’s questionable even as a #3.
I keep trying to remind myself there are still more moves to be made, but right now I’m not sure you can say they’re a lock to even finish significantly above .500. They had pretty much zero money on the books after next year, so the best theory I can come up with is that, given the owners’ desperation to get folks into the new park, they’re trying to convince DFW the team will be worth seeing in person again.
I would be ecstatic to be wrong, hopefully I’m just being an Eeyore, but it’s so odd to see a team finally commit to the scorched-earth rebuild, and then floor the brake and turn a 180 a year into it. Leiter’s ETA is 2023, that will be what, Seager’s age-29 or age-30 season? They finally realized it was time to tear the house down to the foundation, and they did that—but now instead of buying lumber and nails, they’re buying designer sofas and smart refrigerators. What the heck is going on? Someone play devil’s advocate for me and talk me off the ledge.
I want to hate on this deal for the Rangers, but I don’t think it really HURTS anything. They’re in a big market and they don’t have a bunch of other big contracts, so having Semien is not going to prevent them from making other moves going forward. Also, they having absolutely nothing at the major league level and coming through the minors. They might have the worst present organizational depth chart in the whole league. So Semien is not blocking any prospects or otherwise negatively effecting the roster. I agree that it’s not really going to get them anywhere in particular, but I don’t see it hurting anything.
I’ve enjoyed watching Semien’s breakout and then re-breakout during 2021, so I’m glad for him that he’s getting the big bucks. However, this is probably a contract that will be one of the worst in the game in a few years, and the Rangers certainly didn’t seem to be the team that made the most sense to sign him.
I guess in a way it is good to see the Rangers spending on premium talent (not half-assing it like with the aforementioned Choo and Fielder, or their previous attempts to “win now” by signing Kyle Gibson or trading for Corey Kluber), but this seems to me at least to be making a big signing for making a big signing’s sake. Signing for marketability reasons and whatnot, and those deals usually don’t work out very well at all. And while they also signed Jon Gray (a very good baseball move on a good deal IMO), they supplement the Semien signing offensively by signing Kole Calhoun (yes, I understand some other moves may happen, but was there really such a rush to sign Calhoun at this point? He likely could have been available in February), so I worry that this new attempt to “win now” will fall flat again. They might have some shiny new toys, but I don’t see it leading to many more wins, which is probably the worst place for a team to be.
What to make of the fact that his OPS was 100 points higher at the Buffalo and Dunedin band boxes than in Toronto? Just noise?
Love the deal for the Rangers. And before you “surplus value” and “know your window” whip me to death, hear me out… A big market team with a decent + proximate farm understands that it needs some talent. If everything breaks right (player development, win variances) this (and subsequent moves) could be what pushes them into the playoffs in any of the next 3 years. If things don’t break right, a bad team spends $ to get better… a win either way.
I also think your view of this deal is one of framework exclusively. For those who prefer their fandom of the armchair GM variety, there are questions as to why the Rangers would do this. For those who like good baseball and want to see their team or bad teams improve, this is an answer.
Would you not love Seager or Correa even more?
On the one hand, I would much rather the Rangers give a 10 year, $300M deal to Carlos Correa than 7/$175M to Semien. On the other hand, this deal makes me wonder whether they could have landed Correa on a 10 year, $300M deal. They probably could. But after this, who knows?
I would. But judging this deal (which did happen) against other hypotheticals assumes that we have layers of knowledge that we clearly do not. And that all players / deals are fungible, which has proven false time and time again.
In this simulation the Rangers got Semien for these deal terms. And I love it.
Well put.
I need to go look up farm system rankings – you mentioned they have a “decent and proximate farm” whereas a previous commenter mentioned they have “absolutely nothing…coming through the minors.” Those can’t both be correct.
TEX is short on top-shelf prospects, but long depth. Most rankings had them in the high teens or low 20s coming into the season and dramatic improvement through 2021 on a combination of a) strong draft, b) high % of top 30 having strong seasons, c) trade deadline sales, and d) very little top 30 promotions.
So BA had them #11 midseason and I am guessing that moves up a few notches into the 2022 pre-season rankings. TEX has a long list of serviceable depth which should see MLB time on the field and on the mound 2022-2024. If a few names outperform their current projections (a big if, given TEX track record) this could be a fantastic group: Jung, Duran, Leiter, Winn, White, Carter, Foscue, Smith, Vanasco, etc.
They have a lot of interesting players, enough that you would easily consider it an above-average system. Leiter and Jung are very good prospects, potentially FV55 level. Yerry Rodriguez has upside and has performed decently, which is about all you can hope for with a pitching prospect. Cole Winn might be a #4. Davis Wendzel looks like he could be a decent utility guy. Evan Carter and Owen White and Dane Acker are a long way off but look promising.
The two big problems are this:
1) They’ve now blocked three of their best prospects with Semien. One of them might hit enough to play left field, and one of them might have had to move there anyway with the crowd at second base. But it’s certainly not ideal.
2) The major league roster is a disaster. Dane Dunning, Spencer Howard, and Nathaniel Lowe were the only three players you could even dream about before the Semien and Gray signings. Their projected depth chart has Willie Calhoun at DH, who has put up a cool -1.7 wins so far in his career. Billy McKinney, who I think got DFA’d 3 times in the last year, is in left field. They had to sign Kole Calhoun to play right field. They absolutely earned that 60 win season last year.
I certainly don’t think I’d say the farm system is bad. But it’s not strong enough to compensate for the major league roster. So they’ve got a lot of work left to do.
Who did they block? It looks to me like they still have third and short wide open for the taking. And if one of the prospects can only play second, but hits a ton, they can always move Semien to short.
It’s impossible to know what a farm system will be ex-ante. So it’s fine to just say we see it differently and point out that it will likely be a Top 10 system entering 2022 in most ordinal rankings.
That said, to address your 2 points:
1) The framework of prospects being “blocked” is incredibly flawed and isn’t relevant for TEX — I am highly unconcerned/unconvinced by this point
2) I don’t understand what point you are making here re: their farm, but yea — the 26 man is starting at low point… they were bad in 2021 and no magical baseball unicorns were found in ensuing 2 months
I probably exaggerated saying they have “nothing,”but I’m a bit of a hater on their system and in the context of Semien’s signing I don’t see any effect in terms of blocking any prospects. I just don’t care for their MI prospects, who all seem to have substantial flaws (e.g. foscue and duran’s contact, everyone’s defense). That’s the kinda depth, for me, where you hope one of them turns into a regular, not the kind where you want to really keep space clear for them to get a multiple seasons of full time big league development.
Player development is unpredictable. But I very much agree with you here.
That said, I think all of your concerns are already baked into the industry analysis of their farm and its rankings — many shots on goal; no Top 20 / high probability shots.
I mean it’s not so much that you have to keep space open for their many second base prospects, since probably only one of them works out. It’s just that a surprising amount of the value in their system is tied up in the fact that one of them will probably work out, and none of them have the arm or range for shortstop (or the arm for third base). I’m not sure any of their bats look nearly as good in left field.
It’s not the biggest deal in the world but the farm system does look quite a bit weaker when you realize that three of their top seven prospects are probably going to need to be traded it makes the system less exciting.
This is a get people in the seats move by the Rangers. If they sign Story, it’s a get even more people in the seats move by the Rangers. Winning would be nice, but far from a guarantee.
I think this is a mistake for the Rangers, particularly as there still were younger and more elite SS options out there. This smacks of a desperation “throw money at Jason Werth to show we are serious” move, and overpaying to this extent would only make sense if they had whiffed on the other guys first.
I don’t mind the acquisition itself, it just feels like a wild overpay
The Jayson Werth signing completely worked though. If you ask the Nationals, even with hindsight they do that deal 100 times out of a 100.
I don’t think it worked because Werth was worth that contract or because it lured other FA there, it worked because they had a pipeline of really good prospects and Werth happened to be present when they arrived.
Exactly. It’s like saying Jason Heyward’s contract worked out because they happened to win while he was there.
What would adding Gallo back do to their win totals??? Probably not much but still questioning that move considering their clear want to be contending in the next 2 years
I can’t help but wonder how reliable Marcus Semien’s offensive projection is going forward. He has two above average hitting seasons in the majors (2019 and 2021), and those are also the only two seasons where he has a hard hit% above 35% for his career. His 2021 41.3% hard hit rate was way above both his 2020 (28.6%) and his career (34.2%), and also significantly up from his previous career year in 2019 (37.2%). He also out-performed his xwOBA pretty significantly last year (.368 wOBA to a .331 xwOBA) with an xSLG 85 points below his actual SLG. I wonder how much of that SLG had to do with playing home games in Buffalo and Dunadin and some more favorable AL East parks. Feels like moving to a neutral home park could really sap some power.
Was thinking the same thing. And he doesn’t have much of a supporting cast to hit around him. Not that it’s rocket science but 2021 was his career year. ZIPS regression in his 2022 power numbers seem reasonable…maybe even a bit too high on HRs.
Agreed … Adolis Garcia and Nate Lowe aren’t exactly Stanton and Judge when it comes to batting lineup support. Rangers better keep on spending.
Well said – I think when we look back it will be pretty clear that 2021 was a career year for Semien, it will just become a question of how much he’ll hang onto those improvements, how much those improvements were “real” versus how much was a function of playing in some AAA and spring training bandboxes for part of the season, and how quickly some of his skills erode as he enters his mid-30s.
You would certainly rather erode from a “5 WAR” true talent than a “4 WAR” or “3.5 WAR” starting point, and you would rather erode at a smooth and steady 0.5 WAR per year then crash out in year three…but man those career comps cited in the article don’t bode particularly well.
Happy for Semien. But kinda bummed a fringe competitor (specifically the Angels) missed an opportunity to sign him.
What are the Rangers doing? I like Semien, he seems like a good guy, but seven years? Talk about setting the market for guys like Correa & Seager. Those two owe him a nice Christmas gift.
Seems that one of them liked him so much he joined the team. The Rangers are up to something…
Where the projection may fall down is having players like Chris Sabo and Bobby Doerr in it.
Sabo was already in horrid decline as of 31, and Doerr was dealing with WW2 era sports medicine. I wouldn’t consider either as appropriate tenants of Semien’s cohort, and if they’re as close as we can get for his top ten, that’s at least suggestive of how unusual a player he is.
Remember, these are very small parts of a large group.