The Rangers went big this Thanksgiving weekend, signing shortstop/second baseman Marcus Semien to a surprising seven-year deal, and then followed that up with a four-year deal for right-hander Jon Gray. In both cases, Texas added players who will make the club better in the next few years but committed more years than even this aggressive market seemed likely to give them, which might just be a sign that teams think the CBA negotiations won’t drag on too long and they’re fine handing out full-size contracts even before the old deal expires.
Advertisement
Semien was the No. 3 free agent available this winter and led all free agents by 2021 value, with 6.6 fWAR/7.3 rWAR; the main reason he didn’t rank above Carlos Correa and Corey Seager was his age — he’s four years older than Correa and three and a half years older than Seager. They’re in their prime years right now, with several more ahead of them, while Semien is probably at or near the end of his prime years and more likely to see some decline in his performance over the next three to four years than the other two shortstops are.
That’s not to say Semien is a bad signing — far from it, as he’s an immediate improvement of several wins whether they play him at shortstop or second base. The boost would be bigger at shortstop, where Isiah Kiner-Falefa has become a superlative defender but can’t hit; he had a .297 OBP before fattening up on some weaker pitching in September, and his contact quality is among the worst of any major-league regular. He’s an outstanding bench player, but Semien could be a three- or four-win improvement at shortstop and would probably be almost as much of an increase in value at second base, where he’d push Andy Ibañez, who had a credible half-season debut at age 28, to the bench. It’s also possible the Rangers do both, signing someone else to play shortstop and putting Semien at second base, given how little they had committed coming into the 2021-22 offseason.
A seven-year deal for Semien, however, is a bet against Father Time. Semien will play at 31 in 2022, and thus the last three years of the deal cover his age 35-37 seasons, and there’s just no rational reason to believe he’ll still be an All-Star or even a solidly above-average regular by that point, especially given how much of his value resides in his elite defense. It’s an incredible deal for Semien, who hit free agency last winter off his worst season as a regular and might have missed his chance for one big payday by hitting the market this winter, at this age, with a huge supply of star-caliber middle infielders available. Giving seven years to a player in his 30s is a bet that he won’t see typical age-related declines, and in this case, perhaps a bet that the big jump in his strikeout rate from 2019 to 2021 and drop in his OBP isn’t a harbinger of an early decline in his offense as well.
Gray never seemed to reach his potential with Colorado, although he was consistently better than his ERAs implied, generating 11 WAR (Baseball-Reference, based on runs allowed) or 15.7 WAR (FanGraphs, based on FIP/peripheral statistics) over 800-plus innings for the Rockies. He just never found that fourth gear, despite a plus-plus slider and a four-seamer that at least played as plus away from Denver, and it wasn’t just the ballpark or pitching at altitude. He provided a lot of bulk innings and still looks like there could be another level of performance in there, with at least three average pitches and the out pitch in the slider. Maybe it’s a change of scenery thing, maybe it’s a matter of working with a new coaching staff, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Gray end up among the AL leaders in strikeouts in 2022.
Advertisement
For the Rangers, he gives them their best starter on paper right now and provides some floor as well, both in terms of innings (he’s mostly been healthy as a big-league starter) and production (he should be at least league-average). When you add these deals and the signing of Kole Calhoun, who was a replacement-level player last year but more of a below-average regular over the three years before that, the Rangers have probably made themselves eight wins better in one weekend, which could be a conservative estimate, and that’s before considering whether any young players already in Texas — Leody Taveras and Spencer Howard come to mind — improve on disappointing 2021 seasons. That may seem counterintuitive for a team that won just 60 games last year; there’s no prize for winning 70 games, at least not in baseball. We can’t bemoan teams failing to field competitive teams on the one hand and then criticize teams that spend, and do so on good players, in an attempt to get better, even if those moves aren’t likely to put the team in the playoffs (yet). The Rangers will be better in 2022, and that’s good news for their fans and for MLB as a whole.
The Rockies declined to extend Gray a qualifying offer, and while that looked like a mistake at the time, it is clearly a mistake now with this signing. The Rockies just gave up a free draft pick for no reason other than, I assume, the owner’s parsimony. This doesn’t seem like new GM Bill Schmidt’s philosophy, as he was the team’s longtime scouting director and knows the value of more draft picks; it’s the continuation of the same line of thinking that had the Rockies give up the 11th pick in the 2017 draft to sign free-agent Ian Desmond to a disastrous five-year contract. (Shane Baz and Trevor Rogers, both high school pitchers at the time, were the 12th and 13th picks, while Jake Burger went 11th to the White Sox.) It would have been a tiny gamble that Gray might accept the qualifying offer, which would have put the Rockies on the hook for about $8 million until they could try to trade him in late June, for the huge payoff if he declined it and afforded them an extra draft pick and the associated bonus pool money. If Schmidt’s hands are tied on something as trivial as this, it doesn’t speak well for owner Dick Monfort giving Schmidt the autonomy he needs to make bigger changes to the roster. This was a bad baseball decision and a bad business one. Gray should be grateful, as I’m sure it boosted his market value to have no draft pick attached to him, but Rockies fans should be livid.
(Photo of Marcus Semien: Kim Klement / USA Today)
