Paul DeJong is coming off of a season in which he posted career lows in Hard Hit % and Exit Velocity, the latter of which was in the bottom 2 percent of the league. Both of those Statcast metrics have been trending downward for some time and, heading into his age 30 season, there is little reason to have faith in a raw power resurgence. This downturn might seem to be a career death knell for a player whose value from 2017-21 mostly came from the 25-ish homers the Cardinals could expect from him.
But in spite of that declining power and a .207 batting average, he managed 27 extra-base hits across 400 plate apperarances in 2023. That total would have been good for seventh among White Sox players (admittedly a low bar). DeJong continues to be a professional hitter because he still has one thing going for him at the plate: He makes decent-to-solid contact, measuring up to league average on expected weighted on-base average on contact (xwOBACON).
Now, to argue that xwOBACON says Paul DeJong's bat is actually good would be to fall into the stereotype of how analytics are used:
But DeJong's strength of getting the most out of the contact he makes — if he can tap into it — is still real, and what sets him apart from the Nicky Lopezes and Elvis Andruses of the world and gives him upside as, say, a seventh hitter in a lineup versus a ninth.
Enter new hitting coach Marcus Thames, who brings the White Sox at the very least a clearer message on his approach to hitting. As he told Bruce Levine and David Haugh over the weekend:
"I think sometimes when you go up, 'I'm just going to swing to swing', I think that's when you get into trouble. You start making a lot of weak outs going outside of your zone. I've always thought that every hitter is totally different. [...] I want our guys to know who they are, what their strengths are, and continue to help educate them."
This echoes what he told Sam Blum last November after being hired as the Angels' hitting coach.
"I feel like if we try to cover the whole plate — it shouldn’t be that way. We should be able to realize what we do well and go off of that. Be aggressive in the zone."
Despite the 2023 Angels making contact on even fewer pitches in the zone than their 2022 lineup, Thames's Halos improved their team wOBA by .020 points, jumping from sixth-worst in the league in that metric to middle-of-the-pack.
If Thames' philosophy can help DeJong find and attack his zone, the White Sox get some marginal value here — with his expected defense, an 85 wRC+ across 400 PAs is good for roughly 1.5 WAR.
While DeJong has never been a disciplined hitter, he looked completely lost last season, finishing tied for fifth-worst in the league for swing-and-take run value. Not only did DeJong chase more pitches than ever in 2023, his swing selection didn't line up with his hottest zones:
For comparison, here is his 2021 season, when he batted .197 but still posted an 84 wRC+:
DeJong presents the coaching staff a different challenge from, say, Eloy Jimenez, about whom Thames remarked to Levine and Haugh, "It seems like his bat-to-ball skills are so elite, and sometimes it just seems like he's trying to put anything in play".
Not enough players on the 2023 White Sox showed the ability to make any sort of good contact regularly, so it shouldn't take an offensive renaissance from DeJong to improve the team in that regard. The path forward for him seems realistically in line with what Thames has preached in Anaheim and, now, Chicago.
Last offseason my take on the White Sox agreeing to terms with Mike Clevinger in November was that, if the coaching staff indeed had a plan for the player, jumping the market could be justified. While even calling this year's FA crop of middle infielders a "market" may be generous, by committing to DeJong so early the front office is still forgoing the February value that they got picking Elvis Andrus up out of the crowd of leftovers.
If the organization is confident that coaching can fix his approach at the plate, it's not hard to understand the timing of this signing. I acknowledge that most of the discourse around DeJong has been how uninspiring even the best-case scenario will be, but at least there is a clear vision for how he can manifest that best-case scenario.
