On Bo Bichette and the Austin Riley contract (no, really!)
It hasn't been Bo's year so far, but make no mistake, he's still an incredibly valuable player. Plus news and notes on Zimmer, Pearson, Atkins, Kirk, Stroman, and more!
On August 1st, the Atlanta Braves locked up 25-year-old third baseman Austin Riley with a 10-year, $212 million contract that will kick in next season. Just five days earlier, FanGraphs had ranked Riley at number 22 on their annual Trade Value list. Coming in one spot ahead of him was a 24-year-old shortstop with the exact same number of years of team control left and higher projected WAR over the next three seasons, who FG's Ben Clemens said he figures "will settle in as a 20%-above-average hitter," and who then proceeded to produce a 117 wRC+ in August, taking his mark up to exactly 120 since May 1st — the date when he finally seemed to get over his abysmal early-season slump.
Since this is a Blue Jays site, and his name is in the title, and his picture greeted you at the top of this post, I should hope that by now you've figured out that the shortstop in question is none other than Bo Bichette.
Clemens acknowledged in his piece that some might think he had these two "power-first infielders with a pile of team control remaining" in the wrong order.
"Right now, Bichette’s arrow is pointing down and Riley’s is pointing up. If they continue on their current trajectories, or replicate this year’s expected statistics ad nauseam, Riley is better. Consider this a statement in favor of regression towards the mean. Or, you know, just a wildly misinformed attempt to place trade value on every player in baseball," he admitted. "Your choice."
Objectivity is a funny thing, isn't it? Divorced from — though not blind to — the day-to-day frustrations of watching the 2022 version of Bichette, Clemens has put him in a class that I suspect a lot of Jays fans believe he's already tumbled out of. The sense I get from Twitter — particularly among the most profoundly Leaf-Brained denizens thereof — is that a lot of people think the Jays would be better off without Bichette at all, and would laugh at the idea of handing him anything even approaching a $200 million deal.
I'm not about to advocate for the team to do that, but I also don’t think it’s as crazy a thing to think about as some might...
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Clemens’ words about their respective arrows may undersell the difference between the seasons that Riley and Bichette are having. Even with a healthy positional adjustment, Bo’s 2.5 fWAR this season pales in comparison to Riley’s 4.8 mark, so he’s not wrong that whether or not you agree with him about how to order these players hinges on whether or not you believe their numbers will regress to the mean over time. In the extremely short term he’s been right: as noted, Bo has produced a 117 wRC+ in August, which is completely in line with his career mark and what he’s expected to do going forward, while Riley came back to earth somewhat, following a 266 wRC+ July with a 97 wRC+ August.
A month’s worth of data doesn’t mean much, but the way hit the nail on the head underlines that this isn’t a list made up by just some guy. FanGraphs takes their work seriously and they don’t let just anyone do these pieces for them. The whole thing is undergirded by statistics (particularly ZiPS projections) and scouting reports and sources throughout the game, and — among others who have graduated from making these lists into front offices — the guy who started out doing them is now a consultant for the Mariners after a stint with the Padres. A thing like this is as good a reflection of what the industry might think as you’re going to find in the public sphere.
What that means is that there may be other teams out there who would place this kind of value on Bo. So if you don’t want to read this piece as making a case for giving him a pile of money, you can at least read it as a case for foisting him onto some other misguided sucker. Also your choice!
Regardless of which group you’re in, the reality that can’t be avoided here is that there are some red flags on Bo that have grown… uh… redder as the season has gone along. Thing is, Clemens was clearly aware of this at the time of his piece.
“He’s not one of those mythical hitters with no holes in his swing and he’s prone to a bit of swing-and-miss, so you might think that pitchers could solve him,” Clemens writes. “I think it’s fair to worry that his expansive approach carries some risk of a strikeout-induced decline, and he doesn’t grade out particularly well defensively. But those are small issues.”
Oh. Wait. SIKE! He actually wrote those sentences about Riley. And while that doesn’t mean that similar concerns on Bichette are any less apparent, I think it suggests to us something important about what a $200 million player in the year 2022 looks like.
The average annual value on Riley’s new contract ranks just 41st in baseball, and with the luxury tax threshold having jumped from $210 million last year, to $230 million this year, with it headed toward $244 million by the end of the new CBA in 2026, that ranking is bound to fall — and could fall fairly precipitously.
In 2013 a $21.2 million player represented 12% of a team's pre-luxury tax budget. By 2026, which is only year four of Riley's deal, that number will have dropped to 8.7%.
In other words, we need to recalibrate our conception of a $20 million per year player a little bit. In 2011 there were only ten players at or above that level, whereas this year the number is 49 and growing.
Unlike the past, players at that salary level going forward are going to have some very real flaws.
Granted, at the moment flaws are a whole lot harder to see on Riley than they are on Bichette. The Atlanta third baseman is carrying a 148 wRC+ on the season, delivering a breakout on top of last year’s big breakout. His career wRC+ of 125 is muddled his first two rocky seasons in the big leagues, and probably isn’t indicative of his true talent right now. Bichette, on the other hand, has a similar career wRC+ (119), but has come about it in a very different way.
Yet it was not long ago at all that Bichette’s star shone much brighter.
Before the season began, ZiPS projected Bichette to be worth 5.4 WAR in 2023 and 5.7 WAR in 2024 — projections that had him ranked 6th and 4th out of over 1,500 position players calculated. Those numbers had been adjusted down by the time Clemens' piece was released in late July, with "just" 3.9 WAR projected for 2023 and 4.0 for 2024. (Riley, curiously, had only risen from 3.5 to 3.6 for 2023).
That movement in Bichette’s projections wouldn’t have entirely been down to the season that he’s having at the plate, though I suspect that will have obviously been the largest factor. More than 1/3 of his career plate appearances have come here in 2022, and in those he’s produced a wRC+ of just 107 — a number that’s actually fairly decent, even if it’s certainly not in line with what’s expected from a player of his talent.
If there’s a disconnect between that number and what fans feel as though they’ve seen from him at the plate this year, there’s a fairly simply reason for that. We may not talk as much about the dead ball as we did before mid-May, when home runs suddenly started flying out of ballparks a little bit more, but the offensive environment this year is still quite clearly depressed. (But aren’t we all? HEYO!)
Non-pitchers in 2021 produced a wRC+ of 100 as a group by slashing .247/.321/.418 and a wOBA of .319. In producing a 100 wRC+ this year, non-pitchers have slashed just .243/.312/.395 with a wOBA of .310.
If the Bichette of 2022 had put up the same numbers last year they would have been significantly worse, which is why I'm sure they feel so much worse right now. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. produced a 107 wRC+ last year by slashing .276/.319/.466. Bichette's at 107 this year with a slash line of .262/.304/.423.
The dip in Bichette’s numbers coupled with the downturn in the offensive environment has made it feel at times like he’s cratering, but relative to the rest of the league it really is only just a bit of a down year.
The question, as it pertains to his future value, then becomes, what’s different and what can we reasonably expect to bounce back going forward?
My answer is that there’s still a huge amount to like here, even if you maybe have to squint a little more to see it than you have at other times in Bo’s career.
For one thing, his defence keeps improving. There are always going to be high profile misplays from time to time, but anecdotally those have gotten fewer and farther between from year to year. More tangibly, Statcast calculates his Outs Above Average this season so far to -2, which is actually a decent improvement on the -5 mark he put up in 2021 — and on the aggregate -2 mark he produced over just 75 games across 2019 and 2020 as well. He’s a slightly below average defender and may not be able to push himself much above average, but the ability to play shortstop every day even at that level, is incredibly valuable. Particularly if you can hit.
On the other hand, an area of concern is what has happened with his speed and his base running. In 2021, Bo stole 25 bases and was caught only once, and that pre-season ZiPS projection for 2023 saw him as adding more production through his base running than almost anyone in the league. Unfortunately, this year his sprint speed has dipped from 28.0 ft/s (74th percentile) to 27.4 ft/s (53rd percentile), and he's been caught stealing seven times in 15 tries. His base running runs (BsR), which is a component of fWAR, have taken a massive swing from a season ago, dropping from +6.9 to -1.4.
Nothing about that is good, especially once you start thinking about what it might mean about his future defensively. But it's also not necessarily static.
Marcus Semien, for example, bounced between average and above by BsR early in his career, and was just 3.3 runs above average across 2018 and 2019 combined. He saw his sprint speed bottom out at 28.1 ft/s in 2021, but this year has it up to 28.9 ft/s, and over the last two seasons has been worth 10.6 runs on the bases.
If there is some type of nagging injury going on Bo would definitely be the type to play through it. He did require X-rays after fouling a ball off his leg in mid-June, but I think it would be awfully generous to think something like that could still be affecting him at this stage.
Still, he’s 24 and not exactly built like a defensive lineman. I have to believe that the foot speed he can improve, even if the base running instincts were probably never as good as they looked in ‘21. He successfully stole bases at a 76% rate in the minor leagues, and his career rate in the majors is exactly the same. This year's struggles may simply be a bit of a correction to what’s really a rather small sample of data.
The notion that Bichette is simply too young for his physical tools to be degrading is one of many that was explored in a recent piece at Sportsnet from my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost, Nick Ashbourne. He points out that Bo this season has produced a wOBA of just .296 against fastballs, and .248 against fastballs at 95 and above, despite coming into the year with marks of .380 and .346 in those splits respectively. The uptick in strikeout rate from 19.9% last year to 24.6% this year is obviously another issue he’s having at the plate, but the fastball thing is pretty striking.
The spray charts below show us Bichette’s balls in play against all types of fastballs both in the first three years of his career (left) and this year (right). As Nick points out, this year they’re almost all going to the opposite field.
He writes:
The explanation of dwindling bat speed seems particularly improbable for Bichette. The violence of his swing is well-documented, and the power he’s displayed at a relatively small 6’0” 190 pounds is pretty strong evidence that there’s plenty of velocity in his bat — even if we don’t have any bat tracking data for the Blue Jays yet.
If the shortstop was simply getting blown away by heaters, we’d also see a massive uptick in his whiffs against those pitches, which isn’t the case. That’s been relatively flat, with his 2022 numbers coming in right where he was in his rookie season, when he had a .432 wOBA against heaters.
A possibly related thing we can see in the Statcast data is that Bo is doing a significantly better job of avoiding swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone this year, if you can believe that! His chase rate has gone from being in the first percentile in 2020, to the third percentile last year, all the way up to the 13th percentile this season. Unfortunately, it may not be helping.
“It’s clear that he has it in him to pull these pitches with authority more, but at times it seems like he could be letting the ball travel too much before he swings,” Nick writes. “His ability to wait on pitches serves him well against offspeed stuff, but there have been a number of instances this year where even low-velocity fastballs inside result in harmless opposite-field contact.”
I think this makes a whole lot of sense, which should mean that the issue is correctable. I also think that there’s a chance that the uptick in strikeouts Bichette has seen this season may also be affected by the same thing.
Bo’s swinging strike rate (12.1%) is worse than it was last year (11.6%), but slightly better than in 2019-20 (12.2%), his rate of called strikes against (11.5%) is much better than in 2019-20 (14.1%), and yet he has a higher strikeout rate than ever before. Some of that is definitely down to swing decisions, which he certainly seemed poorer than in years past, but he's also seen his pitches-per-plate-appearance tick back up this season. Generally that's thought of as a good thing, but for a guy who has so much swing-and-miss in his game, maybe spoiling pitches early in the count that he might have driven in previous years isn't so hot.
I miss the Bo who could just grip it and rip it on the first pitch.
To go back to the spray charts for a second, the other thing that I think is pretty glaring about 2022 is the fact that, even though most of the fastballs he’s put in play in the air are going to the opposite field, except for a few cheapie home runs in the corner, nothing he’s hit to right field has left the yard. The bulk of his career home runs against fastballs have gone out to that right-centre gap, and there have been literally zero of those this year.
That, I think, brings us back to Rob Manfred’s less-than-juicy balls. Bo's average exit velocity is the highest of his career, his launch angle is healthy (Vlad he is not), his barrel rate is as good as in his rookie year, his hard hit rate is elite (91st percentile), and yet the longest home run he's hit has gone just 427 feet compared to last year's topper at 468 feet. This year's maximum distance ranks 136th in MLB; last year's ranked 14th.
Now, I will grant that Manfred's balls are not uniquely de-juiced for Bo, but his particular type of home run — the “excuse me” kind that sometimes look like a fly ball caught in a strong wind — do seem like the kind of ones that would be especially impacted by a ball that doesn’t quite respond as well to being muscled out the other way.
Would I like to see the guy correct said fastball-pulling issues before I actually start talking about how he deserves a $200 million deal. Would I like to see what a jucier ball might do to help his slugging percentage on ones to the opposite field? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
But Bo’s shown he can pull the ball. Bo still hits the ball with authority. Bo can get by with a strikeout rate that’s hardly awful but is a little bit higher than you’d like to see.
Bo can still very much be the player that we expect him to be and the industry still sees. It might not even take a whole lot to get him back there.
“Forget this year’s numbers,” Clemens writes. “I don’t think pitching coaches are instructing their charges to come after Bichette with in-zone heat.”
I don’t think so either. And I think a lot of Jays fans would do well to take the advice about forgetting this year’s numbers. Hard to do sometimes, I know. But while so many are out groaning at their TVs every time he does something wrong, wondering why he can’t just snap his fingers and become the guy they’ve always wanted him to, there are a whole lot of very smart people out there wishing they could get their hands on a player like this — or maybe even Bo himself.
Other notes…
• The Bradley Zimmer era didn’t end, it was only paused, as the Jays announced here on Monday that the oft maligned centre fielder has been claimed on waivers back from the Phillies. Players claimed on waivers have 72 hours to officially report, meaning the Jays won’t have to add Zimmer to the team before rosters expand on September 1st. Per Sportsnet’s Arden Zwelling, GM Ross Atkins says that Zimmer will get one of the two roster spots that will become available in September.
• Only one of those extra roster spots can go to a pitcher, which is why this is a move that makes at least a little bit of sense. The other reason is the fact that the minor league season this year runs all the way until the end of September, meaning that there are still too many valuable at-bats available to the club’s young players to have any of them come up and sit on the bench in the majors at this stage. Players on the 40-man roster or 60-day IL as of September 1st will be eligible to play in the postseason, so don’t necessarily write Zimmer’s name on your playoff roster sheets just yet.
• Why Zimmer? Well, obviously the Jays like him, for starters. And while his job is made somewhat redundant by the additions of Whit Merrifield to pinch run and Jackie Bradley Jr. to play defence, I’d say a couple things about this. One, there’s a reasonable chance that at some point the Jays will need a pinch runner in a game that Merrifield is already involved in. Two, I suspect that the Jays like JBJ’s contact-oriented bat more than they do Zimmer’s, so if there is a need for one of them to start, it will likely be Bradley, but if there’s a need for a defensive replacement it might not. Three, an outfield with Zimmer in centre and Bradley is a corner late in games is better than whatever defensive alignment the Jays could have come up with before this, right?
• Also noted in Arden’s tweet is the fact that Nate Pearson continues to make progress in his recovery from a lat strain. He’s schedule to throw live batting practice on Wednesday, and if that goes well, Atkins says that the next step will be getting him into a rehab assignment. Groan all you want, he could be a very useful guy out of the bullpen down the stretch and into October.
• Speaking of Atkins, he apparently had a media availability here on Monday and said… some… uh… things about the state of the team, I guess.
• *COUGH*
• Not only have the extra base hits dried up a bit for Alejandro Kirk over the last few weeks, hits in general have been tough to come by. They’ve come in bunches though, at least, as we can see from the chart below via Props.cash — player prop research made easy! — which shows all of his hits on a per-game basis over the last 30 he’s played. Looks like he’s just about due a three hit night!
• *COUGH* *COUGH*
• LET’S DO THIS!
• Marcus Stroman will be given a video tribute tonight as he makes his return to the Rogers Centre for the first time since blowing a gasket after being traded to the Mets at the deadline in 2019. Extremely funny to think about the conversations that would have went into deciding whether to do that or not! Also a guy who, say what you will about him, pitched his ass off for this team for a long time.
• Lastly, in case you missed it, and for some reason still want to think about that awful Angels series, Nick and I recorded an episode of Blue Jays Happy Hour on Sunday night. And we’ll be doing it again — hopefully with a happier outcome to talk about — on Tuesday morning at 11:30 AM ET!
Be sure to get the Callin app and follow us on there so you can tune in live!
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I think the problem with Bichette is that he is not living up to the (perhaps unfairly?) high expectations we all had for him?
That and the hair. I think his hair has reduced his sprint speed. It's a bit longer than it was last year creating more friction, not to mention added mass, when he runs.
Maybe Gibby can comment on Twitter about his thoughts.
I confess that i have soured somewhat on Bo this year, especially his D. I always get worried when Bo has too much time to make a throw. That almost always seems like the point at which he makes a dumb throwing error.
The odds are likely that this is just an off year for Bichette, and I might take advantage by trying to sign him to a cheaper long term deal. My worry is that Bo appears to have a higher sense of his worth than he has shown this year. And the questions still linger about his D.