What I Would Pay Eric Thames
On Tuesday, I ran a poll, asking what you would pay Eric Thames now, given what he’s done to MLB pitching — and the Reds — over the first three weeks of the season. When asked what kind of annual salary you’d agree to under the same three year term that he signed this winter, a majority of the responders (56%) selected $11-$15 million per year. The weighted average of all the votes came out to just under $15 million, so the crowd estimated that a fair three-year contract for Thames now would be something like $45 million.
And while I think there are valid concerns about the lack of information we have concerning how Thames will adjust as the league adjusts to him, I still think that number is overly conservative. If I were tasked with crafting an offer for Thames at this point, and followed the same constraint that he was only accepting three year offers to put it on the same scale as the one he signed this winter, I’d offer him the Edwin Encarnacion deal: $60 million over three years.
The primary issue with valuing Thames raised in the comments section of Tuesdsay’s post is his small sample of Major League success. He doesn’t even have 100 at-bats in the big leagues this year, and his 2011/2012 trials, he put up a replacement level performance in 684 PAs. These have been 90 great plate appearances, but the lasting memory of Chris Shelton’s 2006 April (.326/.404/.783, 196 wRC+ in 104 PA) lingers, and the analytical community has rightfully spent the last 20 years warning against rushing to judgment based on a month’s worth of success or failure.
But I think it’s also disingenuous to not acknowledge that Thames’ track record includes far more than just 90 plate appearances in the big leagues. The reality is that Eric Thames has been crushing baseballs for most of the last decade.
Back in 2008, Thames put himself on the map with a monster season at Pepperdine, and despite a late-season injury that caused him to slide to the seventh round, Baseball America rated him as the 90th best prospect headed into that draft.
A lefthanded hitter and thrower, Thames’ outstanding 2008 season at Pepperdine has drawn substantial attention from scouts. He was hitting .407 with 13 homers and 59 RBIs when he went down in late May with what scouts described as a hip flexor injury, though Pepperdine describes it as an upper-leg injury. An unsigned 39th-round pick of the Yankees in 2007, Thames has improved his stock considerably, improving his body over the years. He’s now a solidly built, muscular 6-foot, 205-pounder who physically resembles former White Sox outfielder Warren Newson. Thames’ primary tool is his bat, as he’s strong enough to hit effectively from an open, spread stance. Occasionally, Thames will drift into a habit of trying to lift, pull and jerk everything. He often over swings and whiffs on offspeed stuff, and is much more effective when he cuts down on his swing and attempts to use the entire field. In the outfield, Thames is an acceptable, average defensive left fielder, with acceptable speed and range. He has played some center field but profiles better defensively in left. His inconsistent and fringy arm strength also fits better in left. As a pro, Thames profiles as a potentially heavy-hitting left fielder with average to slightly below-average non-hitting tools.
The quad injury that caused him to slip in the draft came back to limit him to just 220 PAs in his 2009 debut, but when he was on the field, he ran a 153 wRC+ in high-A ball, a debut that earned the following write-up from BA after the season:
Thames’ draft stock skyrocketed when he hit .407 with 13 homers during his redshirt junior season at Pepperdine in 2008. But he tore a quadriceps muscle in his right leg shortly before the draft, causing him to fall to the Blue Jays in the seventh round. After signing for $150,000, he had surgery to repair his quad and didn’t make his pro debut in 2009. He pounded high Class A pitching, but missed all of July and a couple of weeks in August when his quad flared up on him again. Thames has a rock-solid build and is very strong. He has plus bat speed, a sound stroke and solid plate discipline. When he’s healthy and not holding back, he shows average speed. His arm is average as well, and he fits best defensively in left field. Assuming Thames is healthy in spring training, he could get a crack at making the Double-A roster.
They were right about Thames cracking Double-A in 2010, and finally healthy, Thames was one of the best hitters in the minors, running a 142 wRC+. In 2011, the Jays sent him to Triple-A, and he did what he’d done every year as a professional, putting up a 150 wRC+ that forced the Jays to summon him to the big leagues. In his first year against big league pitching, he ran a 107 wRC+, and he looked like a potential regular for the Jays heading into the 2012 season.
That didn’t go very well, as he didn’t hit for enough power to justify poor outfield defense, and Thames was shipped back to Triple-A at the end of May, having put up a 74 wRC+ in 160 PAs. And that was basically when the Jays gave up on him, as they traded him to Seattle at the deadline despite the fact that he’d run a 141 wRC+ after getting sent back down. Thames found his power in Seattle, launching 13 extra base hits and putting up a .220 ISO in 130 PAs, but his strikeout rate spiked up and his outfield defense wasn’t a great fit for Safeco Field.
The Mariners decided to stash him back in Triple-A for 2013, and he was okay, running a 129 wRC+, but they eventually shipped him to Baltimore (for Ty Kelly), and the Orioles weren’t impressed enough to give him a call-up, as he struggled to an 89 wRC+ in 149 PAs in Norfolk. He got claimed on waivers by the Astros after the season, but faced with the prospect of being in his fourth organization in a year and a half, he chose to go to Korea instead, signing with the NC Dinos of the KBO. You know what happened when he got there.
So, to recap, Thames was one of the best hitters in college, then hit at every level of the minor leagues between 2009 and 2012. He didn’t hit for enough power or make enough contact in 2012, then struggled after getting shipped back to the minors in 2013, but went to Korea and became the best hitter in a league specializing in throwing breaking balls, the kind of pitch he had the most trouble with previously. And now, armed with a very different approach at the plate, he’s destroying Major League pitching.
Out of the last 10 years, Thames has been a good hitter for about about 8.5 of them, with just his 290 PAs in the big leagues in 2012 and his 398 PAs in Triple-A in 2013 standing out as the only time he hasn’t been one of the best hitters in his league. He hit in college, hit in the minors, hit in the Majors as a rookie, hit in Korea, and now he’s hitting in the Majors again.
The preponderance of evidence suggests that Thames can really hit. He’s really strong (and he’s been that way for a long time, baseless-PED accusations aside) and hits the ball hard with regularity, but he also makes more contact than a lot of other sluggers, and in the KBO and this trip through the big leagues, he’s showed a high-level understanding of the strike zone. With that combination of skills, it would be a surprise if he didn’t hit well.
Even putting aside his KBO performances and how those numbers should be included into a projection of his future performance, Thames now has a career 114 wrC+ in the majors. To put that in some context, that puts him in the same range as Kendrys Morales (113 wRC+), who got a 3 year, $33 million contract this winter for his age 34-36 seasons. And yet, the consensus from Tuesday’s post was that Thames is worth just a few million per year more than Morales, despite being four years younger, being able to play the field, and having recent performances that suggest his career numbers are underselling what we should expect going forward.
Of course, the Morales contract was the outlier for 1B/DH types this winter, and it could be argued that it was an above-market contract based on all the similar guys who signed after him, but Morales is something close to Thames’ downside. If Thames’ current plate discipline is a total mirage that disappears as pitchers adjust to him, and he becomes a lower-OBP slugger on the wrong side of 30, well, that’s what Morales is (plus a few more years and without the ability to play 1B regularly) and our crowdsourced contract estimates suggested he was worth 2/$20M headed into the winter.
So if his reasonable downside is Morales, and the crowd thought Morales was worth 2/$20M for his 34-35 seasons, how do we justify only 3/$45M for Thames now? That’s valuing him similarly to Mark Trumbo (3/$37.5M, plus a draft pick). It puts him a little under what Scott Kazmir got two years ago, and a little over what Melky Cabrera got three years ago. These aren’t risk-free, guaranteed stars. 3/$45M in this economy gets you a flawed back end starter or a borderline everyday position player in decline.
Right now, we have enough evidence that Thames can hit to suggest he’s better than any of those guys were when they were free agents. Realistically, the most similarly skilled hitter to hit free agency in recent years is Encarnacion, who got 3/$60M for his 34-36 seasons after turning down 4/$80M from the Blue Jays. Our projections saw Thames and Encarnacion as similar hitters before the season started, and the updated projections that account for Thames’ hot start have moved him into the range of Manny Machado and Kris Bryant.
Even if we thought the projections were overly optimistic, you have to deflate them past a point of reasonableness to get him from his current .370 rest-of-season forecast down to where a 3/$45M offer would be a good balance of risk and reward. Trumbo, who got the equivalent of that offer once you factor in the cost of the draft pick surrendered to sign him, is projected for a .330 wOBA over the rest of the season, and it’s not like he’s adding value in the field.
Thames is better than Trumbo. Thames is a lot better than Morales. And yet, we’re still thinking he should get paid like he’s in their class?
Eric Thames is a good hitter. He might be a great hitter. In this day and age, even with the risks associated with his small sample success in the big leagues, he’s a $20 million per year player.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Dave,
Where would he rank in your trade value list? Does he crack the top 50?
With that contract and Dave’s description of his abilities, above, it would seem incredible to believe he won’t crack the top 50.
My reaction was the same, but I was hoping Dave would weigh in because if you look at last year’s number 45 (Julio Teheran), he’s projected for 13.9 WAR at $37.3M.
At a straight $8M/WAR(I’m lazy), we’re looking at $73.9M in surplus value.
Well, Dave thinks he’s worth 60M over three years. He’s only getting paid 16M over three years. That means his trade value is currently 60-16=44M.
There’s a lot more that goes into trade value then just contract tho. You can’t just say he’s making 44m less than he should and say that that’s his value
I can think of only two other things that play a role in one’s trade value.
1. Is the player a star or not? I think teams are willing to pay a premium if they’re getting a guy like a Chris Sale or David Price.
2. The other thing that I noticed is the fact that teams value righty power bats more than they probably should.
Can anyone think of anything else?
But the trade value of a player is still mostly determined by the difference between what a player is worth vs. what he’s owed.
So if you would give him the EE deal, his trade value would be something around $45M for the 3 years, and then possibly another $15M for the club option year.
$60M in surplus value was worth a 60 FV hitter or 65 FV pitcher per here (http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/valuing-the-2017-top-100-prospects/). Which was a top 7-20 ranked hitting prospect or any pitching prospect.
That’s a lot of trade value.
I was thinking about this, and how this relates to our desire to “win” a deal in free agency. Logically, if you think someone is worth 100M in value, wouldn’t you be willing to go that high? Or do you only want to do deals that give you a certain amount of projected surplus value? Logically, if you think someone will produce $100M of WAR and you’re only willing to go to $65 million, what you’re saying is that you’re willing to pay 2/3rds of your projection for one reason or another.
You’d want to give them less if possible mainly because injuries and decline happen at different rates for everybody. Also, you’re saving money but that’s an obvious one.
Given the well-known anchoring cognitive bias that all humans are vulnerable to, it wouldn’t be surprising that the crowd put too much weight on the contract he got from the Brewers in making the determination. I picked $11-15mn in the poll and in retrospect think I fell into that trap, somehow managing to ignore that I’d thought it was a good deal for the Brewers at the time.
Perhaps all of the great analytical work on sample size in baseball means we as a community are better at correcting for recency bias than other well-known cognitive biases?
This is a very good point. If all of baseball looked at him without the last 4 weeks of information and said $5 million was what he is worth, it is likely that in answering the question, one is more likely to think that something around $15 million would be enough to win (THREE TIMES AS MUCH!), so why go higher than that? I disagree, and pretty much agree that Dave is right that he’d get more (though I maintain my issues with how the poll and comparisons were done).
I did the exact same thing.
You asked what we, individual fans, would pay. You did not ask what he’d actually get. This completely biases the comparison with the off-season crowd sourcing project, where all the questions ask what a player will actually receive, not what a fan says they’d pay.
ETA: For myself, I said $11-15 million, but specifically said that I knew that would not be enough to get him.
I think Dave’s point is he is worth 3/60. So if you said you would only give him 3 and 35-45, he would probably say you are valuing him too low.
Doesn’t it make sense that the “crowd sourced” answer is always far below the actual market price for a FA?
The FA generally goes to the high bidder. If we knew what the average contract offer was for the 30 MLB teams, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was very close to the community estimates. If we were bidding, Thames wouldn’t go to the average bigger, he’d go the the 95th%-ile bidder.
I see a couple comments like this, both in this post and the poll post, and I think you are misinterpreting the article.
Dave titled the article “What I would pay Eric Thames” not “What I think Eric Thames would Actually Receive Today”
In other words, Dave compared apples-to-apples, and you’re upset that he didn’t compare oranges-to-oranges.
No, that’s not what this comment said. I often have this same thought with contract estimate discussions here. The crowd is usually low on average, but almost by definition so are all real-world bids except the winning one. This article is about Dave’s personal opinion, but it’s based on yesterday’s crowd-sourced poll, which makes it a pretty relevant forum for this good point.
“What I think Eric Thames would Actually Receive Today”
by Jeff Sullivan – April 28, 2017
are the brewers going to trade him?
Not right away. He’s got a several years on a cheap contract, and that combined with the insane production so far will make his price tag sky-high. Some teams would almost literally have to “give away the farm” system for that. But with the limited track record, no one is going to even entertain meeting that price.
From 2015-2017 Chris Carter has been worth 1.2 WAR over 301 games and so far this year Eric Thames has been worth 1.9 in just 21 games. I guess Milwaukee knew what they were doing.
I don’t think anyone thought he was going to hit in MLB like he did in Korea, and that’s what he’s doing. Probably not even the Brewers. They had the right idea, but they didn’t really know exactly what they were doing. But this makes you think that enterprising GMs will be more aggressive about bringing over the truly elite Korean players.
I agree with the idea that Milwaukee know what they are doing; but I don’t think they (or anyone) knew they were going to replace Carter’s value in c a few weeks.
I think they knew that the level of risk here for a team in there position replacing a player like Carter was worth the upshot of a similar power profile with fewer K’s.
They probably had “low risk, possibly medium reward, small chance of high reward” in mind. (To put it in very obtuse, very cliche’d terms).
Thanks for your thoughts Dave! Great article, I think the EE comp is spot on.
Good rationale and well-explained. Nice work!
Interesting analysis. I wanted to throw another factor in there. Dave’s valuation is based on what he thinks Thames’s MLB projected production would earn. But I think, if MLB suddenly voided his contract and made him FA right now, a ML front office, in deciding on an offer to Thames, would apply two additional standards: first, normalize his numbers to ML equivalents, and second, place greater weight on his past ML performance (mediocre, slight negative WAR) than his college hitting. The valuation might have been higher if Thames was actually Korean–grew up in that system, and put up those eye-popping numbers through his career.
But Reds.
Sonny L pegged this perfectly yesterday. Wherever you are, take a bow–you and Dave are in sync. (And I totally agree with both of you on this, but that’s not as important)
Whenever I hear the comparisons to other hot starts (like Trevor Story or Chris Shelton or whatever), I see stats that are totally different than what Thames is doing. To whit: Chris Shelton’s amazing April was really Shelton’s amazing first half of April. He hit 9 homers in the first 13 games hitting .471 with a 1.1716 OPS. But during that time he had a 16:1 K:BB! It was clearly an unsustainable hot streak. Then the rest of the month he hit .146 with one more homer and was the mediocre player that he always was. Thames’ consistency and plate discipline all look perfectly like what you’d want to see. Of course he is not a .400 hitter or prime Barry Bonds, but the core of this “hot” April belies an excellent hitter much more than a random hot streak.
The question isn’t so much whether or not Thames is a quality hitter. It’s whether or not he is a monstrously powerful hitter. He never hit more than 16.5% of his fly balls for home runs at any stop in the minor leagues, and even as recently as 2013 he only posted a 10.3% HR/FB rate over three minor league stops. He’s currently sitting at 52.4%. Where you think that HR/FB% sits from here on out largely determines what you believe that he is worth. Given his track record and that only seventeen major league hitters topped 20% last season, a pretty massive correction is to be expected.
Dave equating him with Edwin Encarnacion is pretty reasonable given that EE usually sits just under 20%, but Encarnacion hits a higher percentage of fly balls and obviously has a much more extensive track record of major league success. Personally, there’s no way I would even consider giving Thames $60 million over three years based on just 90 plate appearances.
But I think that’s part of the point – it’s not “just 90 PA”, it’s 90 eye-popping PA plus being nicknamed “God” in Korea, plus being a former top prospect and mashing the minors before. Basically, he always had talent, and seems to have put it together, so you have to count it for more than just 90 PA.
Dave cited Baseball America rating Thames “as the 90th best prospect headed into that draft,” which means he was considered a likely third round selection. I think you might have misread that as him being the 90th best prospect in the minor leagues. Plenty of quality players have come out of the third round but you don’t expect to get a quality player out of the third round, so calling him a “former top prospect” is inaccurate. Thames never cracked BA’s top ten list for Blue Jays prospects, much less their top 100 prospects among all minor leaguers. Also, keep in mind that the KBO is a significant step down from the NPB. There have only been a few KBO players to have significant success in the major leagues, and as far as I know, Thames would be the first U.S. player to achieve that. None of this is to say that Thames is a fluke, but there are very valid reasons to be skeptical of his hot start.
If you knew how to analyze exit velocity, you might change your tune.
Given that Eric Thames is outside the top fifty hitters in average exit velocity, I think you might want to reevaluate that comment.
We in fact do not “know” how to analyze exit velocity. It is a rather recent development in baseball analysis, and it is still not fully understood how it does not always correlate with performance.
Thanks for this update, Dave. Even before I read your several articles on the Thames Phenomenon, I thought he got shafted at the gate, that his agent did him no favors in negotiations. The contract is not even front-loaded. A 1-yr contract should have been the max if Thames just wanted to get back in the league. A now HOFer who wanted to play on grass once gave a GM a blank check and told him to put his own number in. I don’t expect the Brewers to do the right thing in this day and age, but if Thames continues to be Thames, they will only have him for 3-yrs and that would be a bad business decision, unless he starts riding dirt bikes. (:-)
I don’t think that at the time, the contract seemed like a bad deal for Thames. Thames’ big requirement was that the team clear out a spot for him to play every day, and the Brewers did that. Most teams were not going to do that for a guy who was last seen in the league totally out of rhythm, playing overseas for several years, 30 years old, etc. Nobody had any idea that he was going to do this, and when the projections came back it seemed kind of high. So who does that leave? Well, the A’s, Padres, and Rays were the only teams interested–all bargain hunter-type teams. The Blue Jays and Mariners had history with Thames and wasn’t interested. You can say that the Angels, Marlins, Rangers, Rockies, Red Sox, Royals, and any number of other teams *should* have been willing to drive up the price and jettison their first basemen and given player opt outs but that’s not what happened. Even now, a lot of people are incredulous. I don’t even know that Thames or his agent even knew he was going to succeed.
I thin he made $1.25 millon in Korea last year, so I’m sure he’s happy with his contract. He’s set for life and he’s playing on the big stage. The Brewers gave him his shot and it was obviously the best offer he had on the table, all things considered, so I don’t see how you fault the agent. All 30 teams had a shot, and I’m sure they all got a phone call. Thames is living the dream in all senses of the phrase. Can’t imagine why he would have any reason to be upset with how things have turned out.
The fact is that he is not making much more than that this year since his contract is backended. The Brewers invested little in him but the clearing out of Carter. As Dave’s several articles have demonstrated, there was little question about his ability to hit. He has done so at every level. It was also demonstrated that Thames never got the opportunity to play every day w/o qualifications. Nonetheless, talent evaluation in baseball has not evolved much since 1947.
Don’t retroactively rewrite history. There were plenty of questions about his ability to hit, since he hit at every level…except for the 684 ABs at the MLB level.
Huh?
It’s important to look back at what people were saying at the time. I looked for articles posted between October 1st and November 28th of last year (the announcement of his signing was on the 29th). This seemed to be pretty standard:
http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2016/11/20/eric-thames-is-drawing-interest-from-mlb-clubs-again/
No one was saying he was going to be this good. People are talking about him as a calculated risk. I mean there are still people who are dismissing his value even after he’s put this up, saying he’s on PEDs or he just hit the Reds really hard.
Even the articles after he signed were things like: “You might think this is crazy, but here’s why this is a good gamble.” Nobody was banking on him being the best hitter in baseball (or 2nd, whatever he is now) through the first month of games.
Dave, is this the 1B the Astros might need?
Right now, he’s the 1B that everybody needs.
Point taken. I was thinking along the lines of Dave’s post from 4/11. Should they turn their attention from Quintana to Thames and become a softball team?
I get your point Dave, but almost every MLB guy hits like that in the minor leagues. And plenty of them flunk out. Travis Snider went (in wRC+)…
2006 (R): 165
2007 (A): 151
2008 (A+): 149
2008 (AA): 121
2008 (AAA): 146
2008 (MLB): 110
2009 (AAA): 186
His lifetime MLB wRC+ is 93. So your whole minor league argument is flawed, because a LOT of players, both success stories and failed prospects, hit really well in the minor leagues. Hell, Snider came back to hit 161 wRC+ in 2012 (AAA).
Beyond that, I’d like to point out that you’re arguing over what amounts to you projecting him for 0.5 WAR/yr more than the crowd, maybe 0.75. With the variability in the WAR calculation, where it’s been said that you should approximate it to the nearest integer (I believe it was in a chat, I’ll have to find the link), we’re really talking about nothing here. The difference between what you’re paying him and what the crowd is paying him is the difference between a slightly more aggressive aging curve, or a month’s worth of injuries.
Also, this was the article I was referring to when I mentioned the limitation of specifying WAR:
http://www.fangraphs.com/library/war/limitations-war/
(From Paragraph 3) “Due to the uncertainties in all defensive stats these days, you should not take WAR as perfectly precise right down to the decimal point — under the right circumstances, a +3.8 win player could be more valuable to their team than a +4.1 win player.”
I was going to point this out, too.
Especially if you are a 1B in MLB,
you almost surely destroyed college and minor leagues with your bat.
That really does not provide us with any useful information.
On the other hand, I wholeheartedly disagree that the difference in contract value is “nothing”.
No MLB player or teams would say $5m/year is nothing
because it is within the variance of WAR calculation.
There IS a massive difference between teams’ valuation of players
worth $15m/year and $20m/year.
It’s certainly not true that “almost every MLB guy” hits like Thames in the minors. A lot of the first basemen do. But I would turn the question around. How does Thames’s minor-league slash line of .305/.383/.508/.892 compare to that of the BEST current first basemen?
The top six 1Bs by OPS+ in the past 5 years (min. 1,000 PAs) are Miggy, Votto, Goldschmidt, Abreu, Freeman and Rizzo. Abreu was in Cuba, so who knows. Miggy’s minor-league line was well below Thames, but he started so young and was in the bigs by 20, so that’s hard to compare. Goldschmidt was much better than Thames. But Votto, Freeman and Rizzo were very much like Thames in the minors.
The point is, Thames’s past is consistent with many guys who became very good MLB hitters. His first stint in MLB was mediocre (96 OPS+), but that was just over a full year’s play. Chris Davis (who ravaged the minors) had a worse MLB line than Thames in more PAs over his first 4 years (94 OPS+), then he blossomed. Goldschmidt’s first 2 years were pretty good (124 OPS+), but he’s exploded since then. Rizzo’s first 2-plus years showed a 101 OPS+, and Freeman’s showed 113; then they blew up.
Time will tell with Thames. But if he were to keep hitting very well, it would be no anomaly.
How many “flame-out” 1Bmen hit like Thames tho? A lot more than the ones who succeeded in the bigs.
Chris Charter minor-league slash line: .283/.378/.535 (.913)
ThamesGraphs.
He looks pretty good defensively as well and he is faster than I expected so I think he is likely a plus baserunner.
But lets be honest here, the Shelton comparison is simply not fair. It keys in on the HRs way too much. Kind of like looking at Story and Arenado last year who both had big HR Aprils. The game of baseball at its most basic level is a battle of the strike zone and that is a battle Thames has been winning. Shelton and Story weren’t winning that battle in their big Aprils, Arenado was. I don’t know how many HRs Thames is going to hit but his approach at the plate looks solid which means his floor is probably pretty high.
This whole fabricated argument about how much he is worth is pretty annoying. If you’re truly so sold on a guy based on his pedigree and his Korea numbers, how about talking him up during ST instead of waiting for an other-worldly start?
As for said start, it’s pretty damn legit. His xOPS (per batted ball velo and angles) is 1.320. Source: xstats.org.
A couple of years ago, Eric Thames was literally the poster boy for skepticism of KBO hitters. People had doubts about Jung Ho Kang’s power translating to the MLB because even ERIC THAMES hit 40 HRs in the KBO.