So is this what happens when you get rid of your successful, respected GM, and try to Jerry Jones your way through the offseason?
Signing a 35-year-old first baseman/DH to a three-year deal, even off a year when some signs of age crept into his performance and his batted-ball stats, is some 1980s George Steinbrenner malarkey. It’s also rather contrary to the way James Click, and other execs from the Tampa Bay Rays front-office tree, try to build their rosters. First base and DH are spots you can easily fill in the lower end of the free-agent market, or use to accommodate players you already have who might be blocked elsewhere. If you’re not signing an elite player — put a pin in that for a moment — you go for a less expensive one and spend that money elsewhere.
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It is quite likely, however, that the Astros, whether Jim Crane or his factotums or Reggie Jackson or whoever is making these decisions, believe they got an elite player in José Abreu. The Cuban infielder won the AL MVP in 2020 (despite being nowhere near the league’s best player) and appeared to bounce back in 2022 after a down year in between, boosting his batting average 43 points to .304, cutting his strikeout rate to a career-low 16.2 percent and generating about 4 WAR, his best full-season showing in either of the major WAR metrics since 2017. You can wave your hands a little bit and argue that the Astros got a top-tier first baseman — he was fifth in the majors among first basemen in fWAR and rWAR last year.
I’m not arguing that Abreu was less than elite last year, because that’s beside the point. The Astros aren’t buying Abreu’s 2022 performance. They’re buying his 2023-2025 performances, and those are extremely likely to be worse, starting in year one and declining sharply from there. For one thing, he’ll play at 36 this year, and his production outside of 2022 hasn’t been elite for some time; from 2018-21, he had just a .340 OBP, .336 if you take out the intentional walks. He did show consistently strong power output, averaging 33.7 homers per 162 games in that stretch, making him above-average but putting him in the 2-3 WAR range.
In 2022, his production changed, and it’s something we’ve seen before. He lost some bat speed and started to struggle on four-seamers for the first time in his MLB career. His contact quality went down on four-seamers, and the harder the pitch, the more likely he was to whiff. He actually hit the fewest homers of any season since he first signed with the White Sox a decade ago, just 15, fewer than he hit in the 60-game 2020 season. He put the ball on the ground more and went the other way a lot more, which, in an older player, is often a sign that he can no longer get around on pitches he used to pull or hit back up the middle.
Fortunately for Abreu, he made up for some of the lost power with a big boost to his plate discipline, notably on pitches well outside the zone. He chased those pitches at the lowest rate of his career and was close to league average (45th percentile, per Baseball Savant) for the first time as a big leaguer. That led to more walks, with a career-high 60 unintentionals, and a career-high OBP of .378. It turns out that you can lose half your homers — he went from 30 in 2021 to 15 last year — and still be more valuable by getting on base at a much higher clip.
Free-agent 1B José Abreu has agreed to a deal with the Astros, a source confirmed to @Ken_Rosenthal.
A three-time All-Star, Abreu won the American League MVP in 2020.https://t.co/QeA1vWBvgS
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) November 28, 2022
When a young hitter does this, it’s almost always a positive, as we assume that the newfound plate discipline will lead to better swing choices and any power lost will return. When an older hitter does this, it may be that he’s compensating for a loss of bat speed: I can’t hit the ball as hard as I used to, and I can’t turn on pitches I used to eat for lunch, so I have to lay off more pitches and hope I either draw a walk or the pitcher makes a mistake.
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Abreu can still hit mistakes, at least for now, and I don’t think he’s going to stop drawing walks tomorrow. But he’s very, very unlikely to post a .350 BABIP again with the slippage in his batted-ball data, not with a career BABIP of .327 either, and all the projections I’ve seen have him dropping to under 3 WAR in year one of the deal. I’d give him an over/under of around 5 WAR for the three years, but with a significant chance that he follows Yuli Gurriel’s path, where he’s fine one year and completely toast the next — Gurriel went from a 132 wRC+ in his age-37 season to an 85 wRC+ in his age-38 season, making him a 3 WAR player one year and then below replacement level in the second. He did that for the Astros, by the way. You’d think they’d remember.
There aren’t many other first-base options in free agency this winter, however, which may have driven Houston’s urgency here. Josh Bell was the best of the candidates, and after this contract and the two-year deal Anthony Rizzo signed with the Yankees for a $20 million AAV, Bell should at least be looking for comparable money and three years since he’s younger than either of the other players.
The White Sox, meanwhile, have an opening at first base for the first time since 2013, but they do have some internal options they could try, starting with moving Andrew Vaughn back to the dirt and hoping he shows more of the exceptional plate discipline that was his calling card in college. Vaughn has played out of position for most of his MLB time in the last two years, and, unsurprisingly, he’s done it very badly, rating as the worst defender in baseball last year by Outs Above Average, with -17 OAA just in his time in left and right field. I don’t know if moving him to his natural position of first base will help him hit better, but he’ll cost the team a lot less with his glove if they do so.
They also have Gavin Sheets, who has more raw power than Vaughn but is probably a platoon bat and isn’t a very good defender at first. A rebuilding team would be fine giving these guys the time at first and DH while also using the latter spot to rest guys like Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert and try to keep them healthy. I’m not sure if the White Sox view themselves that way, and they may end up going after Bell or someone in a trade who offers more predictable production.
(Photo: Erik Williams / USA Today)
