Third Base in Review: The Bottom of the Barrel

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.

	AVG	OBP	OPS	ISO	K%	BB%	wRC+	Off
Yunel Escobar	.304	.355	.745	.087	11.8	7.1	108	0.0
Chase Headley	.251	.329	.712	.133	22.3	9.6	92	-1.7
Eugenio Suarez	.248	.317	.728	.163	24.7	8.1	93	-6.4
Maikel Franco	.255	.306	.733	.172	16.8	6.3	92	-7.1
Cheslor Cuthbert	.274	.318	.731	.139	18.8	6.3	94	-7.6
Adonis Garcia	.273	.311	.717	.133	16.5	4.3	90	-8.8
Travis Shaw	.242	.306	.726	.179	25.1	8.1	87	-9.3

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.