Chris Bassitt Heads to Canada

On Monday, it was reported that the Blue Jays signed Chris Bassitt to a three-year, $36 million contract. After spending one season with the Mets after the majority of his career with the Athletics, let’s consult the park factors to find out how the park switch might affect his performance.

Wowzers, that’s not the park factor comparison chart Bassitt mixed keeper league owners want to see! It’s not often we see clean sweeps, but here we are. Let’s dive into each of the factors.

First, we’ll start with the non-home run hit type factors. It’s not just a sweep for Citi, these factors aren’t even close. Rogers inflates all hit types, and each additional base actually has a higher factor. That’s probably a slight positive given that singles are most frequent, as you wouldn’t want the singles factor there to be 108, as opposed to 102! This is in stark comparison to Citi, which sports pitcher friendly hit type factors, all suppressing each hit type.

I’m looking forward to how the park switch affects Bassitt’s BABIP. He has made a career out of BABIP suppression, but has always played in home parks that suppress singles. Over his career, he has posted a .277 BABIP at home and .285 mark away. That’s actually a small gap that I would have expected, and even that away BABIP is better than the league average. With a career .281 BABIP, a big reason why he has vastly outperformed his SIERA throughout his career is his ability to suppress hits on balls in play. It’s always difficult to determine how much luck, home park, and defense played a role, as opposed to the pitcher’s own skill. Clearly though, this park switch should increase his BABIP projection.

We see a similar story for home runs. Rogers is actually neutral here, which is better than the hitter friendly non-homer factors, but Citi was meaningfully pitcher friendly, as was Oakland when he played there. He has generally posted better than league average HR/FB rates in his career, and sits with a 9.9% career mark. His career averages tell the story of a pitcher who has really benefited from his home park — he owns just a 7% HR/FB rate at home, but a more league average 12.5% mark in away parks. He’s not moving to a home run haven, but even a neutral park should impact his HR/FB rate and increase his projection.

Moving along to strikeout and walk factors, we see a much closer difference here. Both parks inflated strikeouts and reduced walks, with Citi being slightly more pitcher friendly for both. Bassitt owns meaningful home/away strikeout rate and walk splits through his career, as he’s been much better at home. That’s pretty normal, and considering the parks don’t differ much in these factors, we shouldn’t expect much of an impact.

We shuffle over to batted ball type factors Rogers inflates line drives versus Citi suppressing them, but also slightly reducing pop-ups, while Citi increased them. Those are big gaps, both of which are unfavorable for pitchers at Rogers. Bassitt hasn’t had issues allowing line drives, but interestingly has allowed a higher rate at home. For his career, his pop-up rate has been about league average, but he has failed to generate a double digit mark in each of the last three seasons. He has also posted a far higher IFFB% at home than away in his career. As noted in previous park comparison articles, these factors merely drive the hit type factors, rather than add to them. So these better explain why Citi sports more pitcher friendly hit type factors than Rogers.

Finally, we end up at the summary factors, FIP and Basic (runs scored). As you could have guessed, both metrics favor Citi, which represent pitcher friendly marks. Rogers inflated FIP, but actually slightly suppressed run scoring, which is odd. Either way, Rogers is a worse environment for pitchers than Citi was.

So to summarize, Bassitt’s BABIP and HR/FB rate projections should increase with the park switch. Those adjustments should result in his ERA-SIERA gap closing, with his ERA rising, but his SIERA remaining stable. He definitely takes a hit in value here, which means there’s a good chance he’s overvalued in your league as there’s bound to be at least one owner who hasn’t made the proper park switch adjustments.