The Marlins Extend Their Shortstop
On Wednesday, Miguel Rojas and the Miami Marlins agreed on a two-year extension, covering Rojas’s final year of salary arbitration and a year of free agent eligibility. The exact financial terms are undisclosed, but it appears that the contract’s guarantee is roughly in the $10-million range. The Marlins also get an option to get a third year from Rojas in 2022.
Miami currently stands in last place in the National League in WAR for hitters at 2.3. Your offense doesn’t reach those depths of sadness without being able to point your fingers at a lot of players, but Rojas is one of the few in the lineup who doesn’t shoulder a share of the blame. As of Thursday morning, Rojas has hit .285/.335/.383 in 2019, good for 1.9 WAR. He hasn’t been able to leverage the hitter-friendly environment for a boost in home runs — at five homers, he looks an easy bet to miss 2018’s total of 11 — but he has established himself as a top-tier defender this season.
Defensive numbers can break your heart due to the large sample sizes needed and the potential disagreement among the multiple advanced defensive stats. While that’s always less than ideal, it’s also natural given the difficult nature of evaluating defensive performance. You can count errors a player makes, but errors are a small source of ineffectiveness, and the differences among players are small enough that if fielding percentage were the primary way to measure defense, defense would be almost irrelevant in evaluating players.
To count range, you essentially need to tally events that did not happen. I can easily track that I ate four tacos this week, all on Monday. Estimating the number of tacos I didn’t eat on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is a much less certain task. Measuring plays not made on defense is a dirty job and requires some framework for objective guesswork, but it’s not a task that can be avoided.
(Incidentally, I kind of want tacos now. That’s what Dan gets for wrapping up an article near lunchtime.)
Moving past this delicious intermission, Rojas has added nearly 1,000 more innings of quality defense in 2019. Another thousand innings at shortstop gets Rojas to the 3,000 mark, giving the Marlins a lot more certainty as to his defensive value at shortstop. This is obviously important given that Rojas’s bat isn’t enough to make him a league-average player on its own. He’s now at +10.2 runs per 150 games in UZR and well into the teens per Baseball Info Solutions. Essentially, Rojas has firmly established himself in the top-tier of defensive shortstops. He is not a young player, but he should maintain this defensive value for the years this contract covers. Rojas’s extension likely guarantees that he’s defeated his roster nemesis, the currently injured JT Riddle, in their bid for shortstop supremacy.
While a 30-year-old shortstop may be an odd choice for the Marlins to extend, I’m not sure the Marlins have the luxury of being able to act exactly like a traditional rebuilding team. Miami has to rebuild a fan base as much as it has to rebuild a roster, and given how the team has treated their fans during the organization’s nearly three-decade existence, the former might be the more daunting challenge. One could rightly argue that it would have been far better for the Marlins to draw the line at keeping Giancarlo Stanton’s contract or extending Christian Yelich or J.T. Realmuto or Marcell Ozuna, and I would agree.
That being said, signing Rojas to an extension is better than not doing so, and the real test will come when the Marlins have the decision to pay or trade any franchise players they may develop over the next five years. This signing is a milestone on the right track for the Marlins, but there’s a long, long way to go.
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | SB | OPS+ | DR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | .266 | .315 | .357 | 448 | 47 | 119 | 21 | 1 | 6 | 45 | 28 | 54 | 6 | 83 | 10 | 2.2 |
| 2021 | .263 | .315 | .355 | 392 | 41 | 103 | 19 | 1 | 5 | 40 | 26 | 46 | 5 | 82 | 8 | 1.9 |
| 2022 | .260 | .310 | .352 | 366 | 37 | 95 | 17 | 1 | 5 | 36 | 23 | 42 | 6 | 80 | 7 | 1.6 |
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.
“To count range, you essentially need to tally events that did not happen. I can easily track that I ate four tacos this week, all on Monday. Estimating the number of tacos I didn’t eat on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is a much less certain task. Measuring plays not made on defense is a dirty job and requires some framework for objective guesswork, but it’s not a task that can be avoided.”
New stat idea: Tacos Saved over Replacement (TSR)
Personally, I am (not) sorry about being well in the negative for TSR this uh…week, month, year…
I saw that and immediately started thinking of a “Taco Range” stat. # of taco options within easy walking distance or delivery, and then the number of tacos eaten, normalized over a larger sample.
So if Dan ate four tacos on Monday (sounds like a good day?) but none the rest of the week we just need to know the number of taco places that were accessible to him, calculate it out, and then compare to Jay Jaffe, Craig Edwards, Ben Clemens, Devan Fink, etc. Then you get a good measure of Taco Range.
I live in San Francisco, but I actually don’t eat that many tacos (more of a burrito guy) which makes my Tacos per Taco Opportunity truly abysmal.
The burritos in San Francisco are excellent. I remember walking into a taqueria and grabbing a burrito and saying “damn, this is pretty much the best burrito I’ve had.” Later I passed another, and was like “I just had the best burrito at San Francisco’s version of Qdoba, wtf.” I can’t even imagine what else is out there.
Yeah it’s pretty excellent. I’ve only lived here a few months but the food has been top notch.
I think from now on, I’m just going to count the tacos I didn’t have.
Also, seems like a solid signing regardless of location on the win spectrum – league average-ish for two years and $10M.
Since he’s their second best position player and they may have the lowest payroll in MLB next year, the contract makes sense. But based on their recent history, they’ll give him away the next time he slumps. The Marlins’ internal valuation of players seems to change pretty quickly.
I’m not sure I get the point of this. There seems like zero upside here, so what’s the point for the marlins?
What I mean is that there seems like no realistic path for Rojas to outperform this deal enough to either become a trade chip or to actually push the marlins to another level. He seems like a reasonable bet to earn about what the contract calls for, but why bother to lock someone like that up ahead of time, then? If you really like him, you could probably sign him as a free agent to the same deal. He doesn’t seem to be anyone a contending team would be interested in as a starting shortstop, so you wouldn’t anticipate a ton of competition out there. Jose Iglesias is a reasonably similar player and he ended up with a minor league contract this offseason.
I’m glad for Rojas to lock in some earnings, but it seems like the team would be better served spending money on players who have more upside.
Maybe trying to get the players’ union off their backs about running super-low payrolls? Or clubs that pay into revenue sharing for similar reasons?
This signing does nothing to reduce the amount of money the Marlins can allocate to players with potentially higher upside.
I don’t entirely disagree. But unless Brian Anderson or Alcantra (or even Pablo Lopez) is willing to sign an extension now, they don’t have any better way to spend their money. Since it’s the Marlins, I expected them to just save the money.
How do you know how much upside there is before we know dollar amounts and terms of the option and such?
In any case, there is presumably some value in locking in players for long-term budgeting.
There is perhaps some extra trade value with the extra 1-2 years in the contract (and possibly 3 if he warrants a QO).
There is perhaps some value in knowing that you don’t have to go to an arbitration hearing and bad-mouth your own players to the arbitors to try and get them to agree to your figure.
There is perhaps some value in a one-time negotiation with a player to get up to 4 years of service time.
Even though we don’t know what the exact number is, let’s just roll with the guess that it’s $10m. I’ll even spot ya some if you want to say it’s $8m.
Rojas is coming of a +1 WAR season last year and he’s at +1.9 now. This past offseason saw the following contracts go to shortstops or shortstop-adjacent players:
– Jose Iglesias – 1/$2.5m minor league deal (coming off 1.7 and 2.5 WAR seasons)
– Asdrubal Cabrera – 1/$3.5m (coming off 1.4 and 2.6 WAR seasons)
– Tim Beckham – 1/$1.75m (coming of 3.4 and -.5 WAR seasons)
– Freddy Galvis – 1/$5m (coming off 1.5 and 1.2 WAR seasons)
– Jordy Mercer – 1/$5.25m (coming off a 1.5 and 1 WAR seasons)
(other relevant middle infield types last offseason included Dozier getting $9m, Derek Dietrich signing a minor league deal, Schoop getting $7.5m, etc.).
Whatever your preference order is on those players, they all carried roughly similar recent value to Rojas. The market has clearly shown you can scoop a similar player for similar money via free agency. So why lock it in now? You could have just resigned him for the same amount after next season or tossed the same money at any of a number of similar players.
The only way there’s upside is if you think he’s all of a sudden going to start hitting for power (unlikely given his exit velocities), walking a bunch (unlikely since he can’t burn pitchers with power), or becomes Andrelton in the field (equally unlikely since Andrelton is a ninja in baseball clothes). If those unlikely things don’t happen then he just continues to be a neat second division shortstop or a pretty nice utility man on a better team. And there has been basically zero market for that type of player via trade the last couple of years, so he doesn’t seem like much of a trade chip.
I’m being critical here even though I really like Rojas. I think there’s a definite place for a solid defender who can play multiple positions and doesn’t strike out often. I would just think that type of player is better suited to a utility role on a contender than getting extended before free agency by a team that won’t be winning anything while he’s around.
Actually he was better than Simmons defensively this season on paper depending on where you look. Rojas is first amount all Ss in UZR/150 and 4th in DRS in 2019.
There are no real upside plays in free agency and they have like 5 ppl on the mlb roster that have upside enough to be above average ml’ers. They have no salaries on the books for 2021 which is really all this is about as you aren’t going to non tender him.
It’s a good idea to have an exceptional defensive shortstop (highest uzr/150 in baseball) when your trying to develop pitchers. The Marlins also have a very good defensive catcher, so it’s fair to say they are maximizing the development of their biggest strength this year which was young starting pitching with upside.
I like it, no real harm. They need a SS for at least a year before Chisholm and he would have made 5 mil anyway. This buys that and he’s a chip at the 2021 deadline for a team that needs a SS, or even a utility guy that will give you a 40 or 35+ fv. It’s not flashy but I think a net gain overall.
The number of tacos you didn’t have is x-4, of course. Why bother attempting to solve for x when that’s a perfectly mathematically acceptable answer?
Good signing. They don’t have any great SS prospect ready to replace him (Jazz looks a ways off), so keeping a sturdy glove around for an interesting group of young pitchers seems good to me. Plus, I guess any familiar face for fans is a win. Marlins rebuild and city rebuild is fascinating to me still.
The Rojas signing is not just about his numbers. He is an excellent shortstop and plays all four infield positions equally well. He is also a clutch hitter. But above all he is a leader in the clubhouse.
He will be good influence on the young prospects coming up like Jesus Sánchez, Lewin Díaz and Isan Diaz. It is significant to note this is the first player extension of the Jeter era and if he follows up by extending Brian Anderson it will become a significant step in healing the relationship with the MIAMI fan base.