My original intention for this week’s column was to continue on with examining some of the 2016 performances of third basemen. However, given recent events, I am now presented with an opportunity to examine a versatile (and, as such, a third base-eligible) player that has easily emerged as one of my favorite players to watch, in all of baseball. This has been a growing trend for me, and many others with North Side loyalties, over the past couple of years. The rest of the country, however, spent the National League Division Series matchup between the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants learning just what Javier Baez brings to the table.

We’re not going to talk about the glove here. For one, it really speaks for itself. Javy Baez might have the best set of hands I’ve ever seen a baseball player possess. His instincts are off the charts, along with a strong arm. Toss in the athleticism and the versatility, and it’s really no wonder that Joe Maddon is comfortable deploying him at the five different positions at which he appeared this year. He maintains fantasy eligibility at second, shortstop, and, of course, third base.

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My goal over the next few weeks will be to reexamine some of the seasons of third basemen throughout Major League Baseball. We’ll start with the bottom tiers, in the form of a couple of groups, working our way up to individual performances that are actually worth discussing.

Since WAR isn’t necessarily a fantasy element, we’ll use something at least a little bit more relevant to our purpose here and organize our 3Bs by their Off rating. And since the objective is to observe the results and performances of the position overall, we have to start somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ just happens to be at the bottom of our 24 qualifying third sackers.

The good news is that no third baseman finished on the negative side of the WAR game. However, there were some that provided negative offensive value to their club, based off of that Off rating alone. The following represent that group, with the exception of Yunel Escobar, who represents the only “league average” player among these seven, if we’re using Off to determine that.

There certainly isn’t a whole lot within this group that will surprise anyone. The strikeout and walk rates fluctuate a bit, depending on the hitter, but the on-base and power numbers are relatively consistent across the board. The wRC+ column gives you a pretty good idea of where this hitters stand, in terms of being considered “league average”, if Off didn’t already do that for you.

With numbers like this, most of this group isn’t terribly interesting to delve deep into, especially because this was largely expected from the majority of the names on this list. But a pair worth exploring just a little bit deeper, and two that we profiled earlier this season, are Maikel Franco and Travis Shaw.

Franco is interesting because he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was expected to take the next step forward as an offensive player and a potential building block for the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, he ended up providing negative offensive value overall. There’s some power there, to be sure, as he hit 25 homers and notched the second highest ISO among this group of 3B. In that column earlier in the year, I noted Franco’s increase in swing percentage from his tendencies in 2015, particularly against offspeed and breaking pitches. Turns out, that was a trend that continued throughout the year, as he experienced a near 10 percent increase against offspeed and one of about eight percent against breaking.

This is where things get interesting. Turns out, those trends aren’t necessarily indicative of his overall struggles. Even with that in mind, he still only swung at less than two percent more pitches outside of the strike zone, and experienced a swinging strike rate of 11.8%, only a 0.7% increase. His contact rate was also up about a percentage point. And even those figures can be somewhat deceiving, as his 52.0% overall swing rate was a five percent increase (and the 21st highest rate among all qualifying Major League position players). His penchant for swinging at the first pitch crept up near 40%. That’s absurd. And while he was still able to make decent contact (30.7% Hard%) at a reasonable rate (77.1%), he’s going to have to find an appropriate balance between a legitimate approach and the aggressiveness that he’s become known for. That’ll be the challenge with the new hitting coach in Philly.

Shaw is disappointing just because of the start off to which he got in 2016. He hit .314 in April and a still quality .275 in May. Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall that a slump was on the way and, boy, did it come. His next four months saw averages of .214, .246, .167, and .203, respectively. His OBP over those final four months was just .270, while the power dipped from a solid .213 ISO in the first two months (including a .239 mark in May), to just .160 for the rest of the year. In three of those months, he posted a wRC+ at 50 or below.

Given that his BABIP in April came in at .410, followed by a .347 mark in May, there wasn’t any doubt that a slump was coming. Especially since his hard hit rate dipped in the second half by about seven percent, following from about 35 percent to a mark more around 28, finishing just into the bottom half of the third base group in that regard. While luck certainly played into it in both regards (within the hot start and the frigid finish), there’s reason to believe that Shaw can be a serviceable player in Boston. He’s a versatile player with some pop. If he can solidify the approach, as his strikeout rate did rise above 25% in 2016, there will be a place for him.

The place for the remainder of this group, however, remains to be seen. Escobar, Suarez, and Garcia all maintain relative insignificance because they’re merely stopgaps on bad teams. Headley is past his prime and showed some pop towards in July, but was decidedly average for the remainder of the year. Cuthbert was merely a fill-in for Mike Moustakas and will attempt to become more versatile this winter in order to maintain some semblance of value. In any case, Franco and Shaw remain the only intriguing options for this group moving forward.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the middle-of-the-road types before subsequently moving onto those third basemen worthy of individual attention. And visuals.

I’m a big fan of Jake Lamb. This is likely well known throughout the land at this point. And in the first half of the season, boy, did Lamb justify every bit of praise that was showered upon him. He was making contact at a high rate, using his ability to generate hard contact to further develop his power, and reaching base at an obscene rate. Lamb’s first half performance was a rare bright spot for an Arizona Diamondbacks club that has suffered greatly throughout the season, save for a few individual offensive performances. As the club has slipped deeper into its misery, though, Jake Lamb’s performance has tailed off considerably, appearing to leave more questions than answers at the plate as we approach the end of 2016.

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I’ve spent a lot of time this season profiling some of the league’s young stars at the hot corner. Kris Bryant and Jake Lamb have each represented points of emphasis, while the likes of Manny Machado, Justin Turner, and others have all had their moment in the sun in this here column at one point or another throughout the 2016 season. But there’s one that I have failed to give his due, which is a shame because he’s doing exactly what he’s done for the better part of his (potentially) Hall of Fame career. There may not be a finer example of consistency than that of Texas Rangers third sacker Adrian Beltre.

One of the league’s longest tenured veterans, despite not being among the game’s oldest when the season began, I’ve come admire Beltre above many others over the past few seasons, and it really is for a variety of reasons. His stoic presence with which he graces the field each day is not unlike my own, whether in the classroom or manning the infield on my own slow-pitch softball team (of course, that’s really where the similarities between the two of us really begin and end). I’m also a sucker for great defense, especially on the left side of the infield. Perhaps above all, though, there is something to be said for consistency, and there may not be a more upstanding example of a steady presence in recent years than that of Adrian Beltre.

I should preface this by noting that of course there are going to be declines and discrepancies in certain aspects due to factors such as age, health, BABIP, etc. The variation is going to exist, no matter how often the word consistent is going to be tossed around. Nonetheless, that consistency comes in a number of different regards. And given that the natural reaction is to neglect those down years in Seattle, we’ll start with 2010 as the basis for labeling him as such a constant presence at the plate.

Since re-establishing himself with Boston in 2010, Beltre has been the model performer at the third base position:

If we were to take each specific category and slap it on a line graph, I’d venture to say that it’d be a pretty steady distribution as the disparity between figures exists, but isn’t terribly significant. His power has declined a bit as he’s aged, but he’s still extremely productive, as indicated by virtually everything else above. Obviously there are going to be some outliers over the course of seven seasons, something which is true of every player because baseball. That strikeout rate is especially impressive, though, just because of how little disparity actually exists over that time.

Raw numbers have a little bit more “give”, as far as their ability to fluctuate a little bit more and still allow us to declare a player consistent. Which is what makes the contact rate and contact type aspects of Beltre’s game so intriguing:

We’ve seen players whose ability to not only make contact, but solid contact, fluctuates significantly from year to year. Obviously there are players out there who make hard contact at a significantly higher rate than Beltre as the percentages stand right now, but look at the Hard% since 2011. That’s very little variation. Which is kind of the theme here with Adrian Beltre: very little variation.

Beltre has never been keen on taking a free pass. His walk rate this season has him set in the bottom half of qualifying third basemen. Last year, he ranked 12th at the position (6.6%) and in 2013 (7.2%) he ranked 14th (2014 serves as the outlier here as he walked at a clip over 9 percent). But that hasn’t been a detractor from his success, as he’s maintained the high contact rates and low swinging strike rates as illustrated above. That’s not to say he’s a free swinger, as his Swing% on pitches outside the strike zone is just 33.o% for his career. The approach is there, even if he hasn’t exactly demonstrated a penchant for walking.

The production and contact at the plate are certainly one result of that consistent approach. And as far as his pitch selection is concerned, that’s yet another element of his game where he’s been entirely steady. That’s yet another aspect of his game which has not deviated from what we’ve come to expect:

The lone exception there is the offspeed in 2014 and 2015, but everything else has remained pretty steady. Beltre has posted a mean swing percentage of 53.02 against the hard stuff, with a median of 52.58. Against breaking pitches, he’s gone for a 44.23 average and a 43.22 median, with a 43.91 average against offspeed and a median of 43.75. Each category lends itself to a pretty even distribution and really helps to drive home the point of Beltre’s consistency as it relates to a number of different aspects.

It’s almost difficult for us to appreciate production this consistent. At some point, it becomes the norm and, thus, less impressive to us. Rational or not, that just seems to be the way we, as fans or media types, tend to react to overwhelmingly stable production. Such is the case with Adrian Beltre. So while we’re obviously going to pay plenty of attention to the guys making all the noise, Kris Bryant, Josh Donaldson, etc., it’s important to take a step back once in a while and admire as reliable of production as we have seen this decade at the hot corner over these last seven or so years.

Okay, obviously the headline there is something that has become easily perceivable anytime anyone has watched Manny Machado pick up a bat in the last calendar year or so. One of the more prominent players at the third base position in a number of ways (again, I’m dealing in obvious statements here), one of the elements that folks were watching for early in his career was for that power to develop. Primarily a gap hitter early in his career, with 51 doubles during the 2013 season, it was only a matter of time before balls started leaving the yard. Here we are into Machado’s second completely healthy season in the last three years and that early expectation of more power has absolutely come to fruition.

In his first full season, back in 2013, Machado posted an ISO of just .148. The “just” qualifier is present only because of where he finds himself now. But he found the seats only 14 times across 700+ plate appearances. The 2014 campaign wasn’t completely a wash, but he was limited to appearances in 82 games because of injury. His ISO over that significantly smaller span came in slightly higher, at .153. But last year saw him break out in the power game.

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With the Chicago Cubs set to wrap up the National League Central in the coming days/weeks, it’s looking more and more difficult for anyone to make a case that will topple that of Kris Bryant for the National League Most Valuable Player Award. That hasn’t stopped some from trying, and there are cases to be made for a small handful of players outside of the Chicago third sacker. One of those potential finalists could be one of Bryant’s third base counterparts, in Colorado Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado.

Our job here isn’t necessarily to decide that debate. While it does look like Bryant is currently the frontrunner, there are numerous factors to be considered in regard to the MVP beyond the offensive numbers which we will illustrate here. There’s defense to be considered as well as versatility, WAR, etc. That’s almost another debate entirely. Here, we’re only worried about the offense. So let’s delve into some of the numbers for a pair of extraordinary National League players.

Heading into Tuesday’s slate of games, here’s how the two stacked up in a general sense:

The general perspective would certainly seem to favor Bryant in most regards. He reaches base at a far higher rate, while notching an OPS that comes in almost 50 points higher than Arenado. In regard to ISO, the two are tied in home runs, while Bryant leads in doubles. It’s Arenado’s four triples that give him an edge there. But even the higher K rate for Bryant doesn’t make this a win for Arenado, considering everywhere else on the board that Sparkle Eyes has an edge. At the same time, we’re comparing two elite players here. The numbers are going to look great anyway you slice it. While we could certainly make a judgment about which is more valuable based off of this information alone, let’s dig just a bit deeper. Spoiler alert: we’re going to the splits.

Home/road splits tend to always be Arenado’s undoing. Playing at Coors Field is both a blessing and a curse in that regard. While nobody is questioning his offensive potency overall, it’s hard to ignore the disparity in production between his home and road splits:

At Coors, Arenado is predictably off the charts. His ISO is, to use a technical term, stupid when he’s playing in the confines of his home ballpark. But there isn’t a statistic here that doesn’t experience significant decline when he steps out of Denver. In most respects, the road numbers are still impressive, but not so much that they don’t still take away from the total body of work. Hooray for double negatives.

Conversely, Bryant has posted more impressive numbers on the road than at the Friendly Confines:

The favorable road split is something I touched on earlier this season, and it’s a trend that hasn’t exactly dissipated as the season has worn on. Even with that more impressive road split in mind, it’s hard not to look at that home line and still be overwhelmingly impressed. While there’s a clear decline, he still maintains a higher level in almost every single respect above Arenado, strikeout rate notwithstanding. So to this point, the general overview and the splits both seem to favor Bryant.

To some degree, consistency should be taken into account, illustrated below with Arenado’s wRC+ throughout the season, followed by Bryant’s:

And Bryant…

Obviously, with the scope of each graph, there’s going to be the appearance of a great deal of fluctuation. And it’s hard to put too much stock into the day-to-day happenings of the wRC+ world. At the same time, this does provide a nice visual when considering each player’s total offensive value in a more intricate sense. Just as the splits did, this would also appear to favor Kris Bryant, as the actual variation in his wRC+ is not nearly as significant. Perhaps more importantly, Bryant has managed to exclusively stay at or above that 100 mark since the very beginning of the season, something Arenado has not accomplished.

If we were going to take this debate out of the fantasy arena and put it on the MVP plane, then we’re bringing in other factors. Defensively, the edge would probably go to Arenado. But you also have to take defensive versatility into account, as Bryant moves around the diamond and is still an above average defender wherever he is. Sparkles in the eyes? Game: Bryant. It’s a really fascinating debate, and one that will likely continue as the regular season winds down. But for our purpose here of examining that offensive value, and thus assessing their fantasy relevance in a very general sense, the edge has to go to the Chicago Cubs superstar.

And obviously none of this is meant to disparage Nolan Arenado. He’s a supremely talented offensive player and one of Major League Baseball’s elite. But when we’re talking offense and offensive value, there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that the edge, in almost every single respect, goes to Kris Bryant.

The Cleveland Indians have been among the best teams in baseball for the bulk of the year, which may or may not come as a surprise, depending on who you talk to. One of the more fascinating elements of their ballclub has been the recent emergence of Jose Ramirez. A team starved for offensive talent coming into the year has seen Ramirez serve as a catalyst in recent weeks, as they continue to separate themselves from the rest of the pack in the American League Central.

The total body of work paints a solid picture for the Indians’ third sacker, although not necessarily one that screams elite-level performance. He’s slashed .305/.359/.453/.812 for the year, with a 118 wRC+. He’s struck out less than 12% of the time and walks at a decent enough 7.3% clip. The power hasn’t necessarily been a large component of his game, with a .148 ISO that would rank him 20th among 24 qualifying third basemen. Speed is an element of his game that not many third basemen carry with them, as his 20 swipes rank second at the position. He’s certainly been an above average offensive player, in terms of his ability to reach and make things happen out on the basepaths, even if he doesn’t have the power stroke of some of his MLB counterparts.

It’s what he’s done in the past month, though, for a strong American League contender, that really makes him significant among a crowded 3B group.

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In the interest of transparency, my original goal here was to examine contact rates across the board for third basemen. But given the factors involved a much more intricate study and time overall, something I currently lack as a high school teacher, I elected to focus on one player in particular that really caught my eye out on the contact side of things.

Given my relatively obvious North Side loyalties, it’s often difficult for me to say positive things about the baseball club from St. Louis, Missouri. But what Matt Carpenter has accomplished to this point in the season has become absolutely impossible to ignore, in at least one very specific respect. While he doesn’t necessarily bring the loud home run power that some of his third base counterparts tend to demonstrate on a daily basis, he’s hitting the ball harder than all of them. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a hitter in Major League Baseball that makes hard contact at the rate that Carpenter has turned in this year.

That’s because only two of them exist.

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One of the drawbacks of adjusting to having a weekly column is that there are only so many opportunities for features in general, let alone ones that can avoid being outdated or immediately undermined. Given that we’re still in early August, though, allow me to indulge in some samples from July for this particular column. I tried to steer clear of the big names, largely because their stock tends to remain up throughout the year. And if it doesn’t, it finds a way to right itself in relatively short order. Circumstances for each presented here are different. Some guys have seen increased opportunity for playing time at different positions while others were moving around the field and getting at-bats, only to see their respective club’s lineup solidified and land them on the bench. Either way, here’s a sampling of folks who have their stock up heading into the middle of August and the home stretch of the regular season and a few who face questions moving forward.

Stock Up

Javier Baez – There is virtually nothing that Javy Baez cannot do on a baseball field. He’s hitting for power and average while providing elite defense at a variety of positions. That type of player in invaluable. He’s only logged five games thus far in August, with the Cubs having a couple of off-days mind you, but is coming off of a month of July where he hit .325 and reached base at a .364 clip. The strikeout rate is obviously still high, as it will probably always be, but his improved approach is evident but his ever-slightly-increasing walk rate (up to 4.5% for the month of July). He didn’t hit for quite as much power as he did in June (ISO came in at .157), but he made really solid contact throughout the month, with his 15.0% soft contact rate representing his lowest of the season for any month, and a might impressive 19.3% linedrive rate. He’s not technically a starter anywhere on the depth chart, but there’s a reason that Joe Maddon is finding him at-bats on a near daily basis.

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Maybe it’s because the Tampa Bay Rays are not a particularly good baseball team. Maybe it’s because there are other younger and perhaps more exciting infielders that have burst onto the Major League scene. For whatever reason, it seems that nobody really talks about Evan Longoria anymore. This is true at least from a national perspective. Which is perhaps unsurprising, given his market. At the same time, fantasy owners surely appreciate what Longoria has brought to the table this season. While he hadn’t exactly been a disappointment in recent years, the 2016 season has seen him re-emerge in at least one major facet of his game.

A player routinely selected outside of the top 100 players, Longoria currently finds himself inside of the top 15 in position player WAR (3.9 mark heading into Wednesday). He topped out at 4.2 last season, so he’s definitely on pace to eclipse either figure that he’s posted in each of the last two years. The trends across the board, in a number of different respects, are very interesting for Longoria over the course of the last three years. The good news there is that those trends are largely positive.

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