The run on credible infielders arrived this week, and the White Sox watched it from the sidelines. The following players found new homes over the last few days:
- Marcus Semien, Blue Jays (one year, $18M)
- Tommy La Stella, Giants (three years, ~$19M)
- Andrelton Simmons, Twins (one year, $10.5M)
- Jurickson Profar, Padres (three years, $21M)
- César Hernández, Cleveland (one year, $5M)
OK, Hernandez is returning to his old home, where he posted a .355 OBP as part of the Cleveland Nine's top-heavy lineup, led the league in doubles and won the Gold Glove. He'll have a new double play partner after the Francisco Lindor trade, probably in the form of a former Met infielder who came over to Cleveland for Lindor (Amed Rosario or Andrés Giménez).
Hernandez's combination of slightly above-average offense and the league's best defense at second base put him on pace for a 5 WAR season. That would've been a career high, besting a couple of 3 WAR seasons he contributed to the Phillies several years ago. Perhaps he had a hot 60 games, and the other 100 offered regression to knock him down, but he makes the Tribe a bit tougher, as the White Sox saw last year (.364/.462/.545 against).
Hernández seems a bit underappeciated, but at least he has a home. Kolten Wong is still out there. He's won Gold Gloves at second base the last two seasons, giving the St. Louis Cardinals a .356 OBP over the last four seasons. But after a down year, the Cardinals declined the $12.5 million option they held for Wong's 2021 season, and Hernández's contract confirms they probably had his market value correct.
(Whereas Brad Hand, whose $10 million option was declined by Cleveland after he went unclaimed, ended up signing with the Nationals for $10.5 million. That was weird.)
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Both players have my attention, but not because the White Sox necessary need one of them. If all goes according to plan, the White Sox are a terrible place for a utility infielder to sign, because plate appearances would be few and far between all the way around the horn. It'd be nice if the Sox had a better insurance plan against injury than the oft-injured Leury García, but it's not a crisis.
It's more because I've been watching Nick Madrigal garner honors from MLB Pipeline and Baseball America as baseball's best second base prospect, while Keith Law left Madrigal off his top-100 list entirely for the second straight year, and trying to figure out how to bride that divide. Assuming Madrigal tones down the rookie-year adrenaline and slows down the game both in the field and on the basepaths, his combination of defense and baserunning should put him in the company of Hernandez and Wong.
The question is how much he can differentiate himself with the hit tool. That's not new to the discussion of Madrigal, but the high supply of players with the other skills provides some context for whether it would be difficult to replace him.
In the Offseason Plan Project, I'd seen Madrigal traded away as a headliner in nearly a dozen plans, with one of the aforementioned free agents from the middle infield pool selected in his place. The trades made sense in terms of individual value. I just wondered, if such a replacement option was there for the White Sox, why wouldn't another team just sign a Hernandez, Wong or La Stella instead of dealing a quality player for Madrigal?
"Because Madrigal's hitting talent is insane," that's the counterargument. And indeed, Madrigal hit .340 over his first 29 MLB games, with a 6.4 percent strikeout rate that only La Stella (5.4 percent) beat over a comparable amount of plate appearances. What's crazier is that strikeout rate seems likely to fall with another season's worth of reps. Most rookies would be laughed at if they called 3,000 hits "very reachable" after just 29 games. When Madrigal says it, it's amusingly audacious or audaciously amusing, but it's well within his playing and personality profiles to put himself on that limb.
On the other side, his walk rate (3.4 percent) and ISO (.029) stood out for the wrong reason. The former was the seventh-lowest in the AL, the latter was the worst, and the latter explains why the former might be harder to raise than it seems. Neither mattered that much in terms of Madrigal contributing with his contact, but that lack of power means he needs every bit of that batting average to stand out. Despite a 60-point head start on batting average, he ended up in the same neighborhood as a few other guys we're discussing here.
| Player | BA/OBP/SLG | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|
| Madrigal | .340/.376/.369 | 112 |
| Hernández | .283/.355/.408 | 110 |
| La Stella | .281/.370/.449 | 129 |
| Wong* | .285/.361/.423 | 108 |
(OK, I worked the numbers a bit by including Wong's 2019, rather than his down 2020 -- .265/.350/.326, 92 wRC+ -- because he's been alternating above-average seasons with mildly disappointing ones the last four years. Maybe he's due for a rebound in 2021.)
All of these players can help a team. It's just more a matter of whether Madrigal will need to hit .340 to maintain such company, or whether he'll develop the secondary skills around the hit tool to bolster it. Keep the walk rate and ISO as is, and the production dips pretty hard. WhereIsRobin pointed out in his Shop Talk post that it's hard to have average production without an average ISO, and here's what his production would look like with the same patience and power accompanying batting averages that are still above the league's bar.
| AVG | OBP | SLG |
|---|---|---|
| .340 | .376 | .369 |
| .330 | .365 | .358 |
| .320 | .356 | .349 |
| .310 | .347 | .339 |
| .300 | .337 | .329 |
| .290 | .328 | .319 |
I wouldn't expect Madrigal's power to continue to flatline. With increased reps should come a sense of which pitches he can drive, and the increased threat of damage would naturally result in a few more walks. The issue is that he's well behind his peers in terms of exit velocity...
- Hernandez, 89.1 mph
- La Stella, 88 mph
- Wong, 85.8 mph
- MADRIGAL, 84 mph
... so even mild gains might not offset a 30- or 40-point drop in batting average. Then again, Madrigal's profile is so extreme that more .340s could be in store. He's playing his game in an era that's not designed for him, but like Jimi Hendrix stringing a right-handed guitar upside down so he could play it lefty, sometimes the results can break the system in a mindblowing way.
The projections are all trying to wrestle him into a more conventional slash line, where he can hit at a clip that starts with a "2" and still approach league average offensively. Most players become some semblance of normal, but it's hard to separate Madrigal's small sample from his small frame, small power and small strikeout rate. It gives him a small margin for error, which is why guys like Law have never been enamored with him. If it breaks right, he could break the algorithms for years. The hope is that he can clear a .300 average with room to spare while adding a little more of everything, if only to distinguish a fourth-overall pick from the kind of talent that is readily available for reasonable prices.
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Two tangential items:
No. 1: The Oakland A's made an attempt at retaining Semien on a contract structure similar to the one the White Sox arranged for Liam Hendriks, but it came off as far more insulting:
When Semien reached agreement on a one-year, $18 million contract on Tuesday, it was not with the A’s, but the Toronto Blue Jays. The A’s declined to make him a formal offer, instead floating a concept that had little chance of enticing Semien, sources said — a one-year, $12.5 million deal with $10 million deferred in 10 one-year installments of $1 million each.
No. 2: Adam Wainwright is returning to the Cardinals at the going rate for a credible starter on a one-year deal ($8 million).
No. 3: Joc Pederson is signing with the Cubs, according to Ken Rosenthal. If you want to monitor the way an alternative to Adam Eaton might've performed in Chicago, you'll just have to look on the other side of town. (Update: Especially since Pederson is guaranteed less.)
(Photo by William Purnell/Icon Sportswire)
