What Would You Pay Eric Thames Now?
Over the last few years, we’ve been called TroutGraphs more than a few times, because we write about Mike Trout a lot. Well, TroutGraphs might officially be taking a year off, because 2017 appears to be the year of ThamesGraphs. Yes, after we put his name in the headline of three posts and a podcast last week, I’m writing about him again today. Sorry, rest of baseball. We’ll get back to you all eventually.
Yesterday, Thames did Thames things, launching two more home runs and drawing two more walks, reaching base four of the five times he came to the plate. His season line is now at .373/.481/.910, and he’s now one home run away from having as many long balls this year as the Red Sox. At +1.8 WAR, Thames has already produced the entire season’s worth of value for which we projected him before the season started, and the consensus was that our projections were wildly optimistic. Apparently they weren’t optimistic enough.
But the fact remains that, as amazing as Thames has been, we’re still talking about a 19-game sample right now, and not-great-players go on great offensive runs for a month at a time with some regularity. Using our Splits Leaderboards, I found 268 different player months since 2002 during which a player posted at least a 200 wRC+ in at least 80 plate appearances, or about three players per month, every year. Sure, there’s a lot of Barry Bonds and David Ortiz months in there, but there’s also Randy Winn (246 wRC+ in September of 2005), J.T. Snow (241 in August 2004), David Freese (229 in July 2012), Delmon Young (224, July 2010), and Ty Wigginton (209, August 2008).
Winn is a perfect example of how dramatic a change a player can appear to have undergone in one month, relative to what he was previously, and how that doesn’t always stick. In the first five months of 2015, Winn hit .273/.333/.409, launching a total of nine home runs in 550 plate appearances. In September, he hit .439/.469/.862, with 11 home runs in 133 plate appearances. In 2006, following his monster September, he ran an 84 wRC+, the worst mark of his career as a regular to that point, and he hit 11 home runs the entire season.
Of course, power from Thames isn’t a big surprise. He hit for power before he went to the KBO, hit for power in the KBO, and is now hitting for power in MLB. This isn’t a Winn-like fluke. Eric Thames can crush baseballs. But part of the reason that the Brewers were able to sign him for just $15 million over three years is that teams didn’t have confidence in his track record. We don’t have a long list of guys coming over from the KBO and continuing to hit well here, and the last time Thames faced MLB pitching, he ran an 82 wRC+. Teams pay for something as close to certainty as they can get, and even brief stints of greatness in the big leagues aren’t always rewarded with big paychecks.
Take Rich Hill, for instance. His September performance in 2015 was the pitching equivalent to what Thames has done these last three weeks. In four starts down the stretch, Hill put up a 37/56/61 ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- line, with Kershaw-esque walk and strikeout rates. For 29 innings, he looked like the best pitcher alive, but a few months before that, he’d been pitching in independent ball. So when he hit the open market with a spotty track record and one great month of MLB dominance, he signed for all of $6 million on a one-year contract with the A’s.
There were obviously health concerns with Hill, as well, but if teams really bought into his rejuvenation after one amazing month, he would have gotten more than $6 million. You don’t have to throw many innings at that level to be worth bench-player money. Twenty-nine great innings simply weren’t enough to convince teams that he was something other than what they thought he was previously, when he was available to sign with any team as a minor-league free agent.
So, that brings me to the question that is sitting in the headline of this post: how much has Eric Thames changed his market value since he took $5 million per year from the Brewers? If his April of 2017 had occurred in September of 2016, so it was the last month of performance teams saw before they had to bid on his services over the winter, what kind of contract would he have gotten instead?
Obviously, this is an unknowable hypothetical, but the market just valued Thames in roughly the same way it valued Brandon Moss (2/$12.0M) and Steve Pearce (2/$12.5M), and a little less than it valued Luis Valbuena (2/$15.0M). Thames was priced near the level of a corner platoon bat expected to produce about +1 WAR. Now, our rest-of-season projections have him as roughly a +3 WAR player over a full season, making him comparable to someone like Chris Davis when he hit free agency two years ago. Davis got $161 million over seven years.
Obviously, Thames would get more now than he got over the winter. How much more, though? I don’t think he’d get Davis’s deal, not after just one good month that involved hitting a bunch of home runs against the Reds. And the market just rejected basically every slugging first baseman to hit free agency over the winter, so it’s not clear that teams are willing to pay premiums for this skillset like they used to.
But does a 19-game run of greatness double what you’d have paid him a few months ago? Triple it? How quickly does a performance like this change what we thought? And is it a more dramatic change in this case because our confidence in the original Thames’s forecasts was lower than if he’d been playing in MLB the last few years?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. This isn’t a post where I argue for a particular point of view. I’m curious to know what you guys think, so I’m going to steal one of Jeff’s shticks and end with a poll. Because our baselines are all different, and I’m more interested in measuring the magnitude of the change than simply the amount he’d make, we’ll start with a poll about how significantly your offer would differ from what it would have been over the winter. And then we’ll see how much you’d pay in AAV, assuming he still was seeking just the three guaranteed years that he got from the Brewers.
What is three great weeks worth? I’m looking forward to finding out what you guys think.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Would anyone give him the Encarnacion deal? I think I would.
I was thinking something along those lines but more in the 3/52 or 4/60 range so a little less than the Encarnacion deal.
If you multiply the Thames dollar value by 4, you’ve basically got the EE deal. Same length: 3 years plus a club option year.
The comparison is good in other ways too, because they’re both power hitters at first base. EE has a better track record stateside but he’s also 4 years older and has less positional versatility. Even if Thames returns to earth soon he still might provide better value over the life of the contract.
Agree, the age difference means something.
I imagine any big(ish) market team with mediocre production from 1B would offer something in the EE range to get in the conversation. Boston, Philly, Tex, Houston & Seattle off the top of my head seem like good fits.
I’d give him 4/190 with a team option
That gives him $45M in surplus value, which looks like it doesn’t get him into the top 50 in Dave’s trade value list.
Somehow, I think you’d be able to find an irrationally exuberant GM that would trade one of Dave’s top 50 for him.
Are we sure ‘Ric Thames is human? He has to be either a robot and/or an alien. I for one am just glad he’s here and glad I have my popcorn.
So if he’s a robot, does that mean that the Cardinals hacked his OS last weekend?
The Brewers needed to download a firmware update but had a bad internet connection at the hotel and ballpark.
He’s ‘Ric Thames, bitch!!!
Aren’t these two questions essentially the same thing ?
I think the first one is trying to get at whether you would perhaps be more likely to give thames a contract longer than 3 years now. You could be willing to pay him more while holding the same aav, for example.
I must be interpreting these differently from others. The way I see the result so far — 87% would pay him more than $11 million AAV. 52% would not pay him more than 100% of $5 million.
Yeah, people really aren’t voting consistently. Simply skewing toward the middle answers even if they are contradictory.
I thought it was that if you think back to the winter, you would have paid him 5 million but now you would pay him 7.5 million and the % increase is what you would put down.
When I first saw this article I imagined 4 for $50 and lo and behold that would be right in the middle of the most popular poll choices. 3 for $45 would be fair for 3 years. There is an adjustment period coming and Thames can’t play every game against the reds so it will be interesting how quickly he adjusts when there is a bigger book on him
This was my exact price range, too. Somewhere in the $45 to $48 million range over 3 years. That’s paying for ~ 2 WAR per year which I feel is a safe bet here.
I’d like to offer Cistulli’s unborn child.
His vision of the future is so exact, that if Carson was to have children, he would strangle them here and now.
Considering we’re all believers in SSS and have seen players get off to hot starts before and then cooled off. I’d prefer to wait a bit longer before answering the question. No hurries.
The hypothetical situation we are put in is if Thames came up in September 2016 and just had the month he just had here in April. Under those circumstances how much would you, if you were a general manager of a mlb team, would you have offered Thames in the 2016-2017 offseason. So waiting a bit longer isn’t really an option in this scenario
Ok, I choose not to offer him a contract, let him go to another team.
So you wouldn’t offer him even 3 years and 3 million total over the life of the contract?? If you would offer him that deal, then would you offer him 3 years and 4 million? If so, then at what point would you stop the bidding. Choosing not to offer him any contract is pretty dumb haha
Not offering him a contract could be extremely smart with more context added. If you are sitting on a Freeman, Goldschmidt, or Rizzo type, it would be insane to offer him a contract. With a guy like that already filling the position he would be playing, the chances of you improving on your situation would be minimal, and you could use whatever investment you would place into him in other areas of need.
If you were the Cubs right now, would you trade Matt Szczur for Eric Thames? If your answer is yes you should offer him a contract and if your answer is no then there’s no convincing you Mrs. Szczur.
1) Yes, I would trade Szczur for Thames.
2) If I’m the Cubs, what do I do with Thames? Do you flip Schwarber to make room for Thames? Do you play both in the same OF? Do you decide that Rizzo no longer has a future with the team? Do you keep them all and let Thames ride the pine after giving him said contract?
I’d pay him league minimum to be a pitch hitter if I’m any of those teams with a stud 1B already.
Dave makes a good comparison to Rich Hill… not being an injury prone pitcher, feel free to add a couple million… so maybe $8m year. You can make a case for 10m a year, but just remember, a couple months ago 29 teams chose not to… I’m assuming some of them wanted more information before considering a deal. 3 years, 30 million isn’t out of hand at all, but he’s a 30 year old who’s failed previously… so basically you’re either sold on the guy and you take the risk, or you pass and let someone else… I chose to pass. Is that really ridiculous?
Thames is also several years younger than Hill, so I’d add a bit more for that reason as well.
Go for it. There isn’t a right or wrong answer to this.
Using SSS as a blanket justification is stupid. Late breakouts seem to happen ever year: remember when Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson were quad-A players at best? You have to look at the underlying data.
So you’re the guy that’s going to spend $60m based on 19 games? Go ahead.
You guys are crazy. Three years and $21m take it or leave it.
Agreed. Everyone is crazy except you.
It is insane to offer much more than that. He has 7 of his 10 HR against the Reds, as well as a .541 OBP, among other inflated numbers against them. Basically the only thing he hasn’t done as well against the Reds as he has done against everyone else is doubles. Even only 2 of his 18 Ks has been against the Reds, while everyone else has struck him out at a 28% clip.
If anything he gets a slightly better contract because he has had a very high quality month against the Rockies, Cubs and Cardinals (and one game against the Blue Jays) and an OUTSTANDING month against the Reds.
Exactly!
What is it you think specifically about the Reds that makes the results against them meaningless? Are other players having comparable results against the Reds?
There is nothing about the Reds that make them meaningless. They are just currently making up a disproportionate amount of the schedule than they will be at the end of the year. Three weeks ago if someone was to ask what the three worst rotations in baseball were, the Reds would have been in the conversation.
The results against the Reds last year largely allowed the Cubs to run away with the division. They matter very much. But when I am going to look at a player’s skill level, I am going to want to see more than 19 games and his results against the best that he faces as well. We simply are not to that point in the season
Against non-Reds, Thames is hitting .333/.439/.646. That 1.084 OPS would rank 8th among qualifiers.
.333/.439/.646 line is exactly what I said it is, very high quality. Similar lines have been put up by many types of players over 3 week spans.
Correction: Over three week spans with the best five games excluded.
I wonder if September, and to a lesser extent, April stats aren’t as predictive as other months
September is definitely less predictive. Roster expansion drags down the level of competition.
Why would April be less predictive? As a hitter you are likely to be facing, on average, better pitching before injuries take a toll, in the worst weather for hitting. On an individual level its probably not a difference maker, but I think its as meaningful as any non-September month
If April pitching is tougher than later in the year (debatable as an assumption since most pitchers are throwing 1 mph slower than their season average, but let’s go with your assumption anyway), then April is not representative of a full season, which makes it less predictive than other months. For it to be truly predictive the conditions need to be similar or the same.
That said, I do agree with your overall point; April is probably no less predictive than any other month (aside from September).
Cyborg Eric Thames is the hot new toy your major league team just HAS to have! Samsung’s latest gadget will improve your team’s power and plate discipline, all while looking great in uniform! Only comes in an extra-large size for now, but you’ll be the envy of all your division rivals as you SMASH home runs with your brand new Cyborg Eric Thames! The hot new Christmas gift that everyone has to have!
Hotter than an exploding Galaxy Note 7
I am disappointed I’m capped out at 40 million a year
i assume Brewers will trade him? What could they get for him at deadline
The Brewers live and die by their attendance. Thames is a box-office draw, and he’s cheap. And his track record isn’t long enough that teams wouldn’t be willing to part with the prospect value needed to get him. Unless you think someone like the Astros is willing to trade 3-4 of their top prospects for him or offer a true blue-chip talent I think he stays.
Pomeranz is a recent project and was flipped for A Espinoza, a top 20 prospect that was judged to be a bit of an overpay. If Thames keeps it up, maybe a top 30. (He won’t stay this hot, I’m expecting regression)
If Thames keeps this up it would require a Herschel Walker-level deal (he won’t keep it up). But that’s not the point. The point is that even if he regresses to being a very good player he will have 3.5 years of team control on a cheap contract. The Brewers are simply going to value him more than teams are willing to pay.
“The Brewers live and die by their attendance. Thames is a box-office draw…”
Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe multiple studies have concluded that winning teams, not individual players, are box-office draws.
Maybe, and if so the Brewers would probably be the team to know it and plan accordingly. I’d be interested to see those studies, not because I don’t believe you but because I’m interested in that kind of thing. Of course, that probably wouldn’t change the calculus too much of holding/trading him since he would, in theory, help them win more.
The one thing that keeps me from offering more is that Thames valued himself at 2 years $12.M (including the buyout). He didn’t have to sign a multiyear deal, so I wonder what his thinking might be.
How do you figure? You think he had higher offers he turned down? Seems to me people probably didn’t want to offer him a 1-year deal because if he is a success, they’ll have nothing to show for it. It was a gamble on future value for teams, less about this year.
They would have a year, plus the possibility of a QO. Instead Thames got a guarantee of $18.5M over 3 years if he decided FA didn’t make sense for him in year 3. I don’t know what his other offers were. But a lot of players are given one year offers.
Okay, for real now: What I want to know is how much of this is him having the Reds’ number. Seven of his home runs have come against the Reds. That’s weird, because the Reds pitching actually hasn’t been that bad so far. Aside from the obvious small-sample-size problems what could explain that? Bad scouting reports? The Reds stadium? Is it something that Thames is doing differently? Or is he eventually going to hit home runs more evenly around the league as the sample size increases? I don’t know the answers to these questions.
He just really hates the color red.
He only hit 1 HR in 3 games off the Cardinals. That’s roughly league average vs. the Cards so far this season.
Best fans in baseball, however!
That is incorrect. 1 HR every 3 games is 54 HRs in a 162 game season. No player in baseball hit even 48 HRs last season.
So he’ll only hit 50 HR if he played just the cardinals!
The answer is that he has played the Reds a lot.
This is true, and that certainly explains some of it. But he’s only played a quarter of his games against the Reds, and has hit 7/10 homers against him. That’s still out of proportion.
The Reds’ stadium is always a partial answer to any power surge that occurs in Cincinnati.
Assuming he had come over from Korea at the tail end of last year and he put these numbers up in September 2016 (or was somehow a free agent on May 1st of this year, if you want to account for roster expansion), I’d offer 3/$30. Still no guarantee that he can adjust, his crazy ISO and HR/FB are coming down. I like the BB/K ratio, but the lack of defense and baserunning (though he’s been ok at first base) really cap his ceiling.
Could he be a better version of Chris Carter? Absolutely. Wouldn’t risk more than 3/30 though.
The reason I’m a believer is the dramatic shift in his O-Swing% compared to his previous MLB stints. In 2011-12, he was sitting in the mid-to-high 30’s. In 2017, he currently sits at an even 20%. TO me, that seems like he’s learned to recognize pitches and has developed the patience to punish them, rather than simply having run into a bunch of balls over a couple weeks.
As Daren Willman hast pointed out on Twitter a bunch of times, Thames is being played really, really shallow. I mean, Ronald Torreyes has been played deeper than Thames in CF and RF (though much, much more shallow in LF). I’m uncomfortable giving Thames any more than say 3/40 until I see his results with outfielders playing deeper. (Side note: the new Statcast update is awesome).
They can’t play in the stands.
I agree. The Reds should really start positioning their outfielders in the stands. Shame on them for not having picked up on this.
He’s hit 9 singles and 6 doubles, to go with his 10HR.
Curious how you think his current production has anything to do with how deep outfielders are playing him when he is hitting it over the fence?
Take away half of his non-HR hits (let’s give him 5 1B) and his production line is 0.269/0.395/0.761.
That’s still, essentially, Bryce Harper having a good month!
I suppose it is possible that some of the doubles were hit over the heads of the outfielders. But moving them back might put the defense out of position for some of the times he was out. I don’t think taking away half his doubles is going to change his line all that much.
When you watch Thames you can see how he’s legit. The bat speed, the patience and selectiveness, and the power. He’s got it all and based on his interview quotes he seems to have a very good head on his shoulders.
The question that I have been pondering is what would Chris Davis’s value be in the present market? He seems to be a extreme outlier and was lucky to be just ahead of the collapse of the one-dimensional slugger market.
I think he would struggle to get more than Trumbo’s 3/$37.5m.
His value wasn’t that high in the market back then, either.
It is just that Orioles decided to outbid themselves.
It would help to benchmark him against Cespedes and Encarnacion, right? I think he definitely would have gotten more than Encarnacion because of age, even though Encarnacion has been better over the last few years. He was a year younger than Cespedes and he’s got similar offensive output, but he plays first base (and can pass in an outfield corner, too) and doesn’t seem quite as consistent on a year-to-year basis as Cespedes is.
I would guess he would probably wind up with a 5 year, 100M deal–same AAV as Encarnacion but for longer, lower than Cespedes.
I’d go 3/36, and you could talk me into 3/40.
So, basically, you’d go 3/40.
Also experiencing higher market value: people who work in Milwaukee’s analytics department that can plausibly claim credit in their next job interview.
How good would Thames look in Rockies uniform? Seems like a perfect fit.
Thames to Denver for Marquez, Wall, and Cardullo on July 22
They would get a heck of a lot more than that
They don’t line up well because the Rockies’ system isn’t loved by the analytics (e.g., KATOH).
Do we have any examples of a ~30yo Quad-A lifer who got called up when rosters expanded in September, proceeded to destroy MLB pitching for a month, and then got to negotiate a contract?
That’s what Thames is, essentially.
I disagree. While the KBO is probably not much better than AAA, and might be worse, he still did something really incredible over there. No AAAA player could do what he did in AAA for as long as he did without getting called up multiple times. The precedent would be a guy who was the Barry Bonds of the PCL for three years without a call up. That is a hard precedent to find.
I did a search since 1970 of rookies age 30 or older with 300+ PA and sorted by wRC+. The best I could come up with was Clint Robinson in 2015.
So I kept lowering the age until I got to age 28+ rookies.
2009 Garrett Jones hit .293/.372/.567 with 21 home runs in 358 PA for a 142 wRC+. That’s pretty close.
He hit pretty well in AAA in 2008 and 2009 but nothing super crazy. As it turns out, 2009 was a total fluke and Jones never even put up a 125 wRC+ again, ending with 106 for his career.
As an average-ish baserunner with bad fielding at first base, Jones is a pretty close corollary, I think.
Would Rich Hill have gotten a bigger deal if he were throwing high 90s gas in September 2015 instead of his 90 mph fastball? If Thames were a defense first/high BABIP guy with 1.8 WAR, it’d be a different story.
That said, there has to be a very good chance that there are weaknesses to his batting profile and things will get a lot harder once there is a new book on Thames. I’d have a hard time offering more than 3/$40 million, and thus would probably miss out on him.
ooh, I hope it’s called “the man who couldn’t not hit dingers”
Unrelated question I’ve been meaning to ask: What do you do to block-quote text?
there are some html tags that are just accepted here like a, b, blockquote, em, and I feel like I have tried others. you basically do it as you would any html. So just surround quoted text with (lt)blockquote(gt)(text here)(lt)/blockquote(gt), replacing (lt) with the less-than symbol and (gt) with greater-than.
I’ll try escaping the characters and see what happens
<blockquote>text here</blockquote>
(ok so xml escapes work)
Any, type what you see above except when you type it, it will magically be a quote.
Just ask the Cardinals for their book on him.
Can you really pay Eric Thames, or is that akin to buying indulgences?
I see Jose Bautista as a pretty interesting corollary here. Joey Bats hit 10 HRs with a 139 wRC+ in September of 2009, and got a chance to prove it wasn’t a fluke the next year (similar to Hill in 2015) on a $2.4 mil arb deal. He dominated in 2010, but due to age and the lack of lengthy history at that elite level, he signed for an eventual bargain at 5/$65 mil plus an option year. If Thames were on a 1 year deal here, and provided a line like Bautista in 2010, I could see him getting at least the $65 deal Bautista got, but over a 4 year term – he would be 1 year older than Joey Bats was when he signed his deal.
This makes sense, except that everything is more expensive now. Maybe that’s canceled out by not being able to play third base and being a year older.
D Murphy is the closest thing there is
I agree that Joey Bats is good comp. But Joey made a discernible change to his approach and swing while Thames seems more to have refined and perfected his.
He is very valuable at that price but he is also 30 and of limited defensive value. The market does not exactly love 30yo sluggers who can’t provide a lot of defensive value.
Of course if he continues to hit like babe ruth defense does not matter but if we assume he is a true talent 130 wRC+ guy with 35 bombs that’s great but probably still “only” a 2.5 win player that is 30 years old.
Small Sample Size in the majors, but you can see his swing mechanics, bat speed, plate discipline and power in video from his years in Korea. He does not seem to be the same type of “flash in the pan” risk that would normally be associated with a few weeks of out-of-nowhere hitting.
I was amazed the Brewers could sign him for utility infielder money. I would have no reservations offering Thames a 5 year, $75 million contract at this point.
The big difference between Hill or Randy Winn is that those WERE out of nowhere small samples. Winn was always Winn, had one great month out of nowhere, and went back to being Winn. Rich Hill was trash, then had one great month and confused the market. With Thames, he had three years of amazing production in a league that is less than well-known, and then had very good to great projections. So in his situation, the SSS great month makes sense in context while the other example really didn’t. I don’t think 4/$60M would be unreasonable.
I’m amazed at how fast he earned his contract already. Outside rookie contracts, how close is that to a record?
The most extraordinary thing is that there are people arguing both that (a) we have too small a sample to draw significant inferences and (b) there is something significant about the fact Thames has hit 7 of 10 homers against pitchers wearing Reds uniforms.
The EE deal seems rich. There is a lot of uncertainty here! A lot of upside! Probably more like 3/45 with team options for the next couple years.
Say he keeps up like a 150 wRC+ through the first half: what kind of prospect(s) could the rest of his contract return?
All the moneys.
I think the real question is what are the Cardinals doing differently to actually get him out on a regular basis?
One note of skepticism: Thames so far has a very normal distribution of ground balls, fly balls and line drives, but very abnormal results on each.
I’ll compare him to the AL average (my proxy for non-pitchers); all stats from Baseball-Reference:
Ground balls:
— AL avg. 44% of batted balls, .235 BA, .256 SLG
— Thames 43% of batted balls, .286 BA, .333 SLG
Fly balls:
— AL avg. 31%, .190 BA, .582 SLG
— Thames 33%, .563 BA, 2.250 SLG (9 HRs from 16 fly balls)
Line drives:
— AL avg. 25%, .606 BA, .886 SLG
— Thames 24%, .833 BA, 1.500 SLG
Thames is #1 in OPS on fly balls, #2 on line drives (among all with 10 of that trajectory), well over 2.000 in each. No one else ranks top-18 of both.
His fly ball results are just preposterous. The best fly ball OPS of the past 5 years was 1.861 by Chris Davis (his 53-HR year), .300 above the #2 mark. Thames is .952 above Davis. Absurd.
On line drives, Thames is close to the best OPS of the past 5 years, by Giancarlo Stanton.
So his results will regress, and his distribution is ordinary. It’s hard to have a great year with normal rates of both ground balls and line drives.
So you’re right, but a couple of counterpoints:
1) He hits the ball very, very hard
2) You can regress a long way from a wRC+ of 255 or whatever he is now and still be a very, very good player
Aaaaaand Thames gets his 8th vs. the Reds, before anyone else has 8 total. Baseball!
The Reds should be giving him the Bonds treatment at this point.
You really buried his current contract in this 1100 word article. Midway through the 5th paragraph, for crying out loud. And here I am trying to decide what % raise I want to give him.