White Sox Add Adam Eaton to Long-Term Plan

When the White Sox signed Adam Eaton to a five-year, $23.5 extension over the weekend, the move in and of itself, wasn’t huge news. It wasn’t huge money, and Eaton isn’t a huge player, literally or figuratively. But the move wasn’t just about Eaton, necessarily, rather it was part of a bigger plan.

Take it from Eaton himself:

“I think I’m going to play more than that contract is worth, but again, we want to win here and there’s money to go elsewhere,” Eaton said. “The next three, four, five years, if I can be a savings to bring some guys in, that’s key for us.”

This quote pretty much nails it all. Eaton talks about the value of cost certainty, he talks about being part of a bigger plan, and he talks about what extensions for pre-arb players like this allow teams to do. With the Eaton extension, the White Sox have added a fourth member to a pretty clear “core four” who are now locked up through at least 2018, when the oldest of the bunch (Eaton) will be 32 years old. Both Sale and Quintana have club options for ’19 and ’20, and if all options are exercised by the end of the contracts, here’s what the White Sox are on the books for:

• Chris Sale: $53.15M through 2020 (two club options)
• Jose Abreu: $51M through 2019, though he can opt into arbitration when eligible
• Jose Quintana: $40.15M through 2020 (two club options)
• Adam Eaton: $42M through 2021 (two club options)

That’s 24 combined years of control for $186.3M, where one of the players is a top-5 pitcher on the planet and one of those players is a top-5 hitter on the planet, and all four guys are playing through their prime years. That’s a pretty enviable position for the White Sox.

Eaton, surely, is a step down from the other three guys, but what he represents is certainty. He’s a center fielder, and he’s a true leadoff hitter. These are two areas deemed key by teams going through a rebuild, and two areas about which the White Sox no longer need to worry.

Perhaps the jury is still out with regards to Eaton’s ability in center field. His defense, over nearly 1,500 innings in center, has been met with an unusually large discrepancy by our defensive metrics. Defensive Runs Saved has him pegged at +9 runs. Ultimate Zone Rating differs and counters at -10 runs. When you guys were polled, 95% of you agreed that Eaton was at least a plus defender in center, with a third of you calling him a +5 to +10 run defender. Scouting reports of Eaton coming up seemed to like his defense in center, and BaseballAmerica gave him the “Best Outfield Arm” label for the Diamondbacks’ system in 2013. Seems like UZR might be the odd man out here.

As far as Eaton being a certainty at the leadoff spot, the White Sox appear to have found their guy. Over 918 career plate appearances, Eaton currently holds a .350 on-base percentage, and that number was .362 last season. Eaton gets on base. Over those same 918 plate appearances, Eaton also has a 6.8 Speed Score, which puts him between premier stolen base threats like Ben Revere and Alcides Escobar. Eaton gets on base, and he’s fast — the two most sought-after skills of a leadoff man. The stolen base totals (15 last year) haven’t quite been what was probably expected of Eaton, but he’s shown the ability in the past (46 steals in 2012) and it’s apparently something he’s been working on in the offseason.

Let’s go back to the plate for a moment, because there’s a couple more interesting points about what Eaton is, and what he could be. One might look at Eaton’s .359 batting average on balls in play from last season — or his career .333 mark — and assume regression. But consider Eaton’s profile. He’s speedy, we know that. He comes close to hitting line drives at a league-average rate. He almost never pops out, and that’s because he hits a ton of ground balls. These are the type of things that make a high BABIP sustainable. Perhaps the .359 from last year was a bit fluky, but in the minors, he held a .363 BABIP over his first full season. The following year, he held a .428 BABIP over 613 plate appearances. Eaton’s got the right profile to make balls in play work. The projections peg Eaton for a .323 BABIP this season, but given what we know, it certainly wouldn’t be crazy to take the over on that.

Eaton can make balls in play work, but the question with players like Eaton early in their careers is more often about power. You hear about whether guys will “grow into” their power. With Eaton, that seems unlikely. He stands at just 5-foot-8 and 185 pounds, so there doesn’t seem like much room to fill out there. Then, consider the extremity of Eaton’s batted ball profile. Last year, nearly 60% of his balls in play were grounders. For his career, it’s been the same. It’s hard to hit grounders over the fence, and the grounders are a product of Eaton’s swing. That swing’s been working, and so it isn’t likely to dramatically change. Resident FanGraphs mechanics expert Dan Farnsworth recently wrote the following about Christian Yelich, though it could just as easily apply to Eaton:

“…it’s easy to dream on him figuring out his power stroke to become a legitimate five-tool athlete. The only problem with that dream is his propensity to kill the infield grass with all the ground balls he hits. He has a swing that is consistently on a downward plane to the pitch, making it unlikely he adds a lot of power to his game unless something changes dramatically. Either he figures out how to create some loft with his swing, or he gains so much strength as he matures that he’s able to drive a few more balls out with sheer muscle. Don’t count on any big swing changes; as the adage says, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

With Yelich standing at 6-foot-3, the possibility of gaining strength looms. With Eaton, not so much. Eaton’s also three years Yelich’s senior, and when you look at guys who have hit ground balls as often as Eaton through their age-25 seasons, it feels pretty unlikely that Eaton will ever develop into anything more than 10-dinger-a-year guy.

But the White Sox didn’t extend Eaton to hit dingers. They extended him to get on base, which he can do, run, which he can do, and play center field, which all signs point to him being able to do. Eaton’s skillset isn’t necessarily one that would have netted high costs through arbitration, but the White Sox don’t have to worry about that now because they’ve got Eaton under relatively cheap control through at least 2019, adding to a stable of team-friendly extensions the club has inked over the previous couple seasons. We already saw how the Sale, Abreu and Quintana extensions allowed the White Sox to build around their three stars this offseason. Eaton isn’t a star, but he’s a good player, and now the White Sox have one less position to worry about filling in the future.