Why The Braves Needed to Sign Sean Rodriguez
$11.5 million is what the Braves will give Sean Rodriguez over the next two years, and that seems fine even if he reverts to a utility infielder that faces mostly lefties. But there’s a few things Rodriguez did right last year, and if he does those things right again, he’ll be worth much more than the money he’s due. A team like the Braves needed to make a signing like this.
Going into last year, Rodriguez had a .143 isolated slugging percentage in over two thousand plate appearances. He walked 6.5% of the time. He’d been 28% worse against righties than league average that far. He was at his best defensively in the corner outfield and at second base.
That last part was true again in 2016, but he did play first and third and even short some, too. The rest was totally different. He had an ISO a hundred points higher. He walked more than he ever did before, and the right-hander was 20% better than league average against righties. He hit the ball harder than ever had before, and he hit fewer pop-ups than he had before.
Probably, he won’t do all of those things again.
It’s fun to find the change he made, though. Because he added launch angles all in the right places. He raised his launch angle while hitting fewer pop-ups, in other words. Take a look:
| Year | 2015 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|
| Average Angle | 8.5 | 12.9 |
| % Above Ideal Power | 11% | 10% |
| % Below Ideal Line Drive | 52% | 43% |
Below Ideal Line Drive = Below 10 degrees
That’s a good trick.
He also improved his selection against righties. He started swinging at pitches over the plate instead of in on his hands at least. Check out his selection on the four-seam in against right-handers before last year (left) and then last year (right).
Maybe he’s done it by being more athletic in his stance. Here’s a stiffer 2015 stance.
He’s more crouched and anticipatory in 2016.
Maybe that’s how Rodriguez homed in on his ideal launch angles. Maybe he changed his stance a bit and was more aggressive with his leg kick. Maybe he saw the ball really well against righties, and maybe it won’t happen again, or maybe there was real change here.
It doesn’t matter! The Braves should do this either way. It makes sense for most of Rodriguez’s potential outcomes.
If he’s ‘just’ a decent right-handed hitting utility man, he’s got some potential partners. Left-handed hitting second baseman Jace Peterson is probably close to league average against righties, so he could work well in tandem with Rodriguez. If hot prospect Ozzie Albies comes up, Rodriguez helps in the outfield with Nick Markakis, who’s best days against lefties are behind him.
And then there’s the benefit if he retains any of his gains. Billy Beane once explained why the Athletics have always bought veterans on short contracts to me last winter meetings, as we talked about why h Athletics don’t do total teardowns. Anyway, he said that the Athletics had to sign Rich Hill and guys like him.
I’m “taking a chance on some upside,” Beane said to me then. “In Rich Hill’s case, you’re banking on a guy that was dominant for a while. If you’re wrong, you know why you’re wrong, it’s because we bet on a small sample size.”
The Braves will pay for a useful right-handed utility man with power when they sign Sean Rodriguez to this contract. If they get a more regular player, they have him for two years at a good price. If they didn’t get any thing more, they know what sort of analysis they can blame it on, at least, and the price wasn’t high.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Would you take a chance on him in a 30 man dynasty points league, if so what round would you take him in? thanks
I like your writing in general and appreciate your posting one on Black Friday.
However, you did not include the $ and yrs of the contract and your Launch Angle chart was totally confusing. Nor did you address the “Needed” in your title.
2/11.5MM is in the first sentence.
Thank you, Hareeb, and I apologize to everyone for my stupid mistake.
In the meantime I found a better article on this posted on Thanksgiving in SBN.
Found a typo in the launch angle table and fixed it! As for need I thought the platooning with Markakis or Peterson and Beane paragraphs spoke to that, but maybe SBN was more straightforward in their post or gave you more details on the signing bonus..
Thanks. Eno.
No need to be nice to that cunt.
plus he is valuable if the gatorade cooler gets out of line.
He’ll be SeanRod by the end of 2017
Who knows if he can repeat it, but his very impressive hard hit rate shows that his production this past season was legitimate.
He strikes me as a poor man’s Ben Zobrist. I would have signed him myself, because if he did have a flaw in his swing and fixed it, then he’s going to be worth much more than they’re going to be paying him over the next two years. It’s a risk, but I do like the odds.
IMO, this article is too front-office friendly with no empirical reason.
Rodriguez’s projections don’t have any upside variance that is statistically significant – so he is just as likely to put up 2.0 as any other player projected for 0.2 or 0.4: that is, very unlikely.
Adding a counter-empirical ‘narrative’ about how maybe his swing became more athletic doesn’t change the variance of his projection.
Rodriguez has a long track record of mediocrity, turns 32 in a few months, and has a K-rate north of 25%. He is extremely likely to be below average at the plate, in the field, and on the base-paths. He’s never had more than 2.1 WAR, despite nearly 2,500 PAs. His career-hihg .344 BABIP is a typical unsustainable BABIP peak, even with trimmed popups, his speed is declining. His 25% HR/FB rate is an obvious outlier, he has typically been around 7-9%, with an 11% career average due to a couple of unsustainable peaks. Last season obviously include one of these peaks.
He’s projected to contribute 0.4 to 0.8 WAR over the next two years, his age 32 and 33 seasons. The Braves do not need that contribution. He’s unlikely to be worth much in trade, as he has never had much trade value and now his once-decent secondary skills are poor. 12m ought to buy 1.5 WAR, not 0.4-0.8, so this is poor value for money.
The Braves would be worlds better off doing what smarter clubs do, using that roster spot and PA allocation on AAAA types with some upside, like Milwaukee has done. A player like Tommy La Stella would offer more upside, at less cost- and there are plenty of younger and decent candidates to be the next ‘Villar’ or Valbuena’.
Atlanta obviously has Swanson and Albies, but also IFs like Rio Ruiz, Dustin Peterson, Jace Peterson, plus spare OFs like Mel Rojas. All offer more upside and fit, but will now have less chance because of a more expensive mediocrity. Rodriguez is simply a boring attempt by a poor front office to add a low upside veteran in what will surely be a failed attempt to compete.
A decent article ruined by anti-empirical cheerleading imo. It seems this site has become far more rosy about MLB front offices since partnering with ESPN, Fox et al. The Braves definitely did not need to sign Sean Rodriguez- infact, they needed to avoid such poor transactions.
The notion that all near-replacement level players possess the same variance is bizarre and clearly not true. It would be fair to say that Rodriguez has quite a bit of variance in his profile and therefore it is possible that the Braves might be paying for a player who ends up being replacement level, since he resided there in 2014 & 2015, but Rodriguez also has three seasons around 2 WAR to his credit. I’ll get to the validity of his most recent one shortly, but the point is that your dismissal of Rodriguez’s upside is rather glaringly contradicted by his historical performance.
Comparing single season WAR with his career total of plate appearances is yet again bizarre. Either you innocently made a ridiculous mistake by not comparing like with like (season vs. season, career vs. career), or you’re being intentionally deceptive in order to forward an agenda you do not believe to be adequately supported by the evidence. An accurate accounting would be to say that Rodriguez has never produced more than 0.555 WAR per 100 plate appearances in an individual season (his total last season), and has averaged 0.312 WAR per 100 plate appearances over the course of his career.
And finally we get to the part where you become johnforthegiants Jr. It is appropriate to note Rodriguez’s career highs in BABIP and huge jump in HR/FB%, but you made a colossal mistake by stopping at that point and exclaiming “Fluke!” without any further inquiry. Not only did Rodriguez experience a steep drop in pop-ups, but he also produced a career high line drive rate, a career low soft contact rate, and a career high hard hit rate. All three of those have a strongly positive effect on BABIP in addition to the positive effect from reduced infield flies. While Mr. Sarris didn’t note this in his column, he did mention the dramatic improvement in Rodriguez’s launch angle, so it’s not as if you would have reason to be completely ignorant of real changes in the batter’s profile. At this point you should also note that Rodriguez’s average exit velocity increased by 3.7mph, the fifth largest jump in the major leagues last season, and he tied for the best average exit velocity among all batters against fastballs.
This is the mistake you made. You noted indicators that can be fluky and stopped there without further investigation, but looking more closely would have revealed to you that Sean Rodriguez’s batting profile in 2016 was substantially different from his profile from 2015 or 2014 or anything outside of his very brief stint in 2009. Sometimes BABIP can be inflated by getting lucky on balls falling between defenders and sometimes HR/FB% can be inflated by getting lucky on balls just making it over the wall. Neither are the case here, and if you had spent a little bit of time perusing the entirety of his player page than you would have noticed that. Instead you chose to fire off a snarky, condescending dismissal of this piece that really did not work out well for you.
The projections don’t take into account the factors I mentioned above.
As noted above, Sean Rodriguez’s best single season performance accounted for 0.555 WAR per 100 plate appearances and his career mark is 0.312 WAR per 100 plate appearances. Tommy La Stella’s best single season mark thus far was .355 WAR per 100 plate appearances and his career mark is .116 WAR per 100 plate appearances. Tommy La Stella would have been less expensive, sure, but all available evidence indicates that he has substantially less upside than Sean Rodriguez, not more.
Swanson and Albies? Yes. The others? No. Even assuming Swanson and Albies both produce considerable value over the next two seasons at shortstop and second base respectively, it’s doubtful that both play ~300 games during that time, while Atlanta still has a large question mark at third base. Rodriguez’s defensive versatility therefore makes him a valuable addition, as he can plug into several different spots depending upon the team’s most pressing need.
I would argue that the article itself was fine, although it could have benefited from some of the points I made above. I would say that it’s the decent comments section that was ruined by a pseudo-empirical criticism imo. It seems that your comments have become far more negative since partnering with johnforthegiants. This article definitely did not need a comment like yours, it needed to avoid such a poor attempt at a rebuttal.
My snark aside, I am not suggesting that Sean Rodriguez will be a 0.555 WAR per 100 plate appearances player over the next two seasons. He might be, but it is entirely reasonable to believe that his LD%, IFFB%, HR/FB%, Soft%, and Hard% may regress to some extent from their 2016 improvement. It would be very surprising, however, if all of them reverted completely to his 2014/2015 levels, and that’s where the projections lag well behind a human’s ability to more thoroughly examine an individual player’s changing profile. Like I said, it was correct of you to note the increase in BABIP and HR/FB%. Your mistake was stopping at that point and assuming it was luck rather than taking the thirty seconds necessary to notice that Sean Rodriguez changed as a hitter last season, he wasn’t just lucky. Whether or not he can sustain that change is something I cannot say, but his production last season was legitimate and there is reason to believe that he can reproduce some if not all of it over the next two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQEIRAnNY4o
hmm maybe. Fangraphs is the gold standard, the ESPN comment was weak on my part.
But playing time projections are not meaningless. And the differences in variance for players with similar projections exist, but generally are not statistically significant. availability and selection. There’s a good bit of narrative with this contract that pays a 32 year old something around %200-300 of his projected market value. Availability and selection (a proxy of playing above replacement) are skills that Rodriguez has not demonstrated enough for bullish WAR projections, he’s been a lefty platoon guy for much of his career.
A break through guy like Villar is so much more valuable because of the team control and surplus value, and the braves have some interesting internal candidates plus the Rule-5 and waiver priority to pick up more.
Projections do account for a decent amount of what you say they do not.
IMO it is not sound to cherry pick some changes in Rodriguez’s profile- some of which are not very large – and assuming that they are predictive, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. In 2010, Rodriguez posted an IFFB rate roughly as low (8%) as he did last year (7%)- only to then return and maintain his career rate (13%)- assuming that last year’s change represents a new baseline that can help sustain his .344 BABIP (.292 career, but notably .324 in 2010) is merely optimism. Justin Smoak and Tim Beckham had somewhat similar streaks last year- hitting well north of .300 on fly balls over a similar small sample- only to regress to their norms this year. To your point though, some guys make permanent improvements- and wow does Franklin ‘Bluth’ Guitierrez look interesting from browsing similar jumps (and to be fair Smoak/Beckham can’t match Rodriguez’s hard hit jump). In general, however, small sample size surges in power related to large humps in flyball batting average are unsustainable, especially for largely ground ball hitters.
Singling out that Rodriguez is tied for 1st in exit velocity on fly balls is a bit odd- he was T91-98th in exit velocity with the likes of Teoscar Hernandez, Xavier Scruggs, and Yadiel Rivera. It’s not like he is a fly ball hitter (1.07 GB/FB career, 1.11 last year), and if anything has become less so recently (39% career, 31 and 35% last two seasons). His LD% was just barely a career high (1.2% higher than 2013), and doesn’t match up with any promising batted ball metrics other than hard-contact: zone-contact down, o-contact down, f-strike% normal: though the hard contact and fewer swings at O-zone are encouraging. Rodriguez simply hammered a small sample of fly balls last year (.391 and 18 HRs on fly balls)- but he’s done similarly before only to regress, slugging 12 HRs on flyballs in 2014, but only hitting 4 with similar PAs in 2015.
Over the course of many seasons, sometimes a lefty-masher that typically struggles against righties will put together a nice 250 PA showing against righties: unlikely anything more than that occurred here.
A major benefit of projections is the insight that future performance will likely be between the best and worst of prior performance. It’s generally unfounded to reject projections due to the assumption that some extreme level of performance from a small sample size trumps all the moderating evidence. Rodriguez’s HR/FB rate and BABIP are likely due for regression, in which case his negative secondary skills and 30% K-rate, make him a poor bet going forward.
Although it’s fun to be accused of being both too front office and too player friendly – especially ironic to me because the Beane comment comes from a piece in which I tore apart Beane’s comments about A’s team finances – I’ll bite on one topic: Serpico has shown league average or better upside. He hasn’t done it in two straight years. If he did, he’d have trade value. You’re making the easy argument against him, just as there were easy arguments to make against Rich Hill. In conclusion, Tommy LaStella has bricks for hands, and the rest of the guys are still under Atlanta team control and a bad Rodriguez won’t block them. So they bought a cheap lotto ticket, which is something I do think smaller market teams should do.
Your writing is great, my critique is only with an eye on the really high standard you guys have set.
Even so, I do think the site is trending towards ‘nearly every front office is smart’ style cheerleading, which imo is false. It’ll be interesting to see how many ’30 year old FAs paid more than 8m per projected WAR, going to bad teams making a weak attempt to compete’ get good reviews by fangraphs this offseason: my guess is most of them. It simply seems that the site is strongly trending towards less scrutiny towards FA overspends.
It’s simply nowhere close to true that ‘bad Rodriguez’ won’t block better options- he almost certainly will. The Braves showed just this past season that they will let Jeff Francoeur and similar punchlines take up limited roster spots- while Mel Rojas hasn’t gotten a chance and might be lost in the Rule 5 draft. Atlanta intentionally signed Nick Markakis for 4 years and $44m, and then gave him 700 PAs; they value 3 years of Matt Kemp around $32M; they’ve overvalued and so far refused to cash in any assets (it’s not even clear that they will play Smith over bums like Markakis): Atlanta simply does dumb things regularly (but did well to rip off Stewart).
Atlanta appears to be currently loading up on mediocre vets to make a weak attempt at competing because of the stadium opening. If they want a UT vet with a recent power surge, Matt Tuiasosopopo doesn’t project much worse than Rodriguez (as it is hard to projected ‘much worse’), and while I’m not saying Tuisasosopop should get the shot (imo they should give opportunity to younger guys like Rojas, Ruiz and Dustin Petersen), the value Rodriguez offers over similar scrap-heapers is unlikely to be worth 12m to a team on the low end of the win-value curve.
Rodriguez is not a lottery ticket- that’s exactly my point. He doesn’t have upside variance moreso than younger/cheaper talent like Rojas, Ruiz, Petersen; waiver-guys like Adam Walker (just went to Milwaukee); or Rule-5 guys like John Andreoli, Johny Field, Nick Delmonico and Sherman Johnson. If any of them can be 2.0 WAR players, Atlanta is looking at $70m surplus value and years of benefit- even when they get to the good part of the win-value curve. If Rodriguez is a 2 WAR player, the Braves only get $6m surplus. None of these players project well, but Rodriguez doesn’t project substantially better than any of these others. Signing Rodriguez makes the Braves less able and likely to get real lotto tickets, and takes away from limited funds that could be spent in more efficient markets (draft, int’l FA, Toussant-deals) than the ’30 year old FA’ pool.
IMO, the ‘tanking’ taboo has put fangraphs under some well-publicized pressure, from Buster Olney and other Disney sport agenda-driven talking heads, to be more favourable towards teams ‘trying to win by spending in FA’ and to be more critical towards the idea of deferring success and complete ‘tear downs’ (even though Houston and Chicago did exactly that). Your Disney sports Billy Beane article is a perfect example of this turn imo. IMO, this fangraphs turn towards ‘how I learned to love overpriced 30 year old mediocre FAs’ seems to have increased greatly since partnering with Disney and Fox sports.
See for example, last year’s ‘Why Billy Butler to the A’s makes perfect sense’ article
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/why-billy-butler-to-the-as-makes-perfect-sense/
..which was also echoed by your article, ‘Why the Billy Butler Deal Might not be Completely Crazy’
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/why-the-billy-butler-deal-may-not-be-totally-crazy/
The Butler deal was always completely crazy, but the two fangraphs articles spinning it’s imaginary sanity has become the norm (although, to be fair, Dave critiqued the Butler deal as crazy). From the strained optimism of the Butler articles, I’m not sure you guys actually disagree, but might be feeling a little pressure from the standards encouraged by the WWL.
You’re going to double down on this ESPN thing, huh? It’s super weird. I’ve never heard anything close to what you’re talking about from my editors, and in fact my editor now is a former Baseball Prospectus writer. I didn’t even remember Buster talking about payrolls. That part just strikes me as crazy conspiracy talk.
As for the being friendlier to teams that spend their budget and try to improve incrementally when they aren’t projected for high wins totals, that’s maybe true. I’ll take the criticism, and certainly I was wrong about Butler, but it comes from a public discussion I had with Dave. I said the Marlins were good to tank and he pointed out that the error bars on win projection are really large — a standard deviation is five wins — so if you build to wins in the mid eighties, you can have a year on the meaty end of that error bar and go to the postseason now with the wild cards. Those pieces are public record, and I stand by my piece on Beane as being fair, but pointing out where he was wrong in terms of his financial reasoning for not spending more. That’s just giving the owners profits.
The Braves still have room on the forty-man, the rule five is not the way forward, and the guys that you’re talking about blocking people behind them are full-time guys on bigger deals. I didn’t love getting Markakis or Kemp, but yes they block people. An $11m backup player, if he sucks, and the team sucks, can be waived easier than a Kemp or Markakis.
It’s not crazy conspiracy talk- that’s hyperbole.
Sometimes working with ESPN and Fox can reduce the standards of formerly independent blogs- hardly aliens from the great beyond.
As you say yourself-
‘As for the being friendlier to teams that spend their budget and try to improve incrementally when they aren’t projected for high wins totals, that’s maybe true.’
These ‘every front office is smart, who cares if the projections say this FA buy is an overpay, narrative narrative narrative’ approach is the main focus of most all fangraphs FA articles lately. If this isn’t requested by ESPN or others, ok, but surely it is more in line with their approach. Maybe this new direction (which is pretty much the exact opposite of what fangraphs did for many years) is related to ‘broader appeal’ issues that also loosely relate to drifting towards ESPN/FOX style. Plus bigfoot.
But, the rest of your points are fair and thanks for the well thought out response. You guys are the gold standard, I guess I just don’t want to see Disney and Fox mess with something we all love. Your work is excellent so I’m embarrassed a bit to draw a response, but thankful. I only disagree about your take on the Rule 5- I do think Rodriguez means no Rojas probably, and also none of the OFs from a pretty solid OF Rule 5 group. All the rest agreed and appreciated.
I’m reacting to the idea that espn had some sort of direct influence on our editorial, which was cray enough to make me laugh.
But anyway, you’re asking me to comment on many different authors writing many different pieces in some sort of narrative that I haven’t seen as defending upon us in some sort of blanket way.
If you’re talking about me in particular, well, I can say this last thing: The two-year deal, not much money, with some upside? That’s fucking catnip to me. And has been, ever since I started writing on this site six years ago.