Two years and one month ago, I wrote that David Ortiz was probably done as an effective player of the game we call baseball. If you recall, he got off to an impossibly slow start in 2009, hitting a measly .208/.318/.300 with 0 HR and a slightly elevated strikeout rate through the first month and a half of the season.
Of course, at that time, I also wrote in the first person plural, and assumed that, barring a non-steroidal resurgence, Papi would be out of baseball after 2010 (which, haha!*). So, y’know … grain of salt, and all that.
*Is David Ortiz’s positive PED test the least-covered of all time? I ask partly to spark a debate, but mostly because I was out of the country when the news broke, and so didn’t hear any of the reaction. All I know about it is that I’ve not heard people mentioning Papi’s PEDs the way they have other stars.
And so now! Here we are in 2011, and after Ortiz struggled to a league-average wRC+ in 2009 (.238/.332/.462), he rebounded mightily in the successive 2010 campaign (.270/.370/.529, 134 wRC+) and has been crushing the ball this season to the tune of a .321/.393/.617 line with a 175 wRC+* and seven-freaking-teen home runs.
*If you didn’t know, wRC+ is essentially a weighted (‘w’)scale for a batter’s runs created on offense (‘RC’) relative to the league average (‘+’). It’s also park and league adjusted, meaning that 100 is always the average in a given season. So, Ortiz’s 100 wRC+ in 2009 was perfectly league average; his 134 wRC+ in 2010 means he created 34% more runs than the average hitter in MLB.
That performance has, as of this writing, made Ortiz the best hitter in the Red Sox lineup this year. Which is no small shakes considering that they (a) have the second-best wRC+ in the league (Yankees), (b) employ Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford and, um (c) are currently paying him $12.5MM in the final year of his contract.
And therein lies the rub for Boston fans, who are watching a franchise icon throw the clock back to his glory days and mash the ball like it ain’t no thang: will their front office see fit to throw big dollars at an aging (he’ll be 36 in November) DH? My initial instinct says no, because while the Red Sox have plenty of payroll room, they are not only judicious about how they spend those moneys, but (at least in years previous) seem to want to avoid being cast in a pinstriped spotlight for the amount of money they spend on players. See, casual fans will still point to the Yankees as the MLB team that just heaps money upon players so that they’ll come assimilate themselves into the greater title-winning robot that is The New York Yankees while the Red Sox toil away in blue-collar blight, grinding out wins one game and dirty jersey at a time.
But I’d be remiss if I were to just end this article there on some fairly baseless speculation. Let’s fully address the question at hand: Will the Boston Red Sox re-sign David Ortiz after the 2011 season?
To address that, I’ll go back to that 5/16/2009 well, and address Ortiz’s current most comparable players. Here was the list back then:
1. Lance Berkman
2. Richie Sexson
3. Paul Konerko
4. Derrek Lee
5. Mo Vaughn
6. Hal Trosky
7. Danny Tartabull
8. Carlos Lee
9. Ryan Klesko
10. Cecil Fielder
Now, there are a couple of disaster cases in that list*. Mo Vaughn? Carlos Lee? Ryan Klesko? Cecil Fielder? Red Sox fans might suffer Ortiz devolving into one of them considering the role he’s played for their franchise in the last decade, but the front office certainly would not. The funny thing, though, is that those four guys being Ortiz’s worst-case scenario is encouraging in a weird sort of way.
*Trosky and Tartabull declined dramatically upon their age-33/34 seasons, but Trosky was in WWII and Tartabull was a full-time fielder, so I don’t hold that against them.
What I mean by that is that the other guys on the list — Berkman, Sexson, Konerko, D. Lee — are fairly recent cases of comparison, and none of them have aged as poorly as their big-bodied, fast-aging counterparts before them. Berkman is having a renaissance year in St. Louis, Sexson was productive in the last couple seasons, Konerko has turned back the clock, and Derrek Lee was tremendous in his half-season as a Brave last year. Hell, even Jason Giambi has been a productive enough bench guy for the Colorado Rockies despite his grey goatee (which he should really shave, but hey).
And so it’s possible that with modern medicine and such, aging sluggers are able to postpone what has been, in the past, a precipitous decline. I mean, Paul Konerko underwent some wrist surgery earlier this year and was available to pinch hit the next night. Obviously, we can’t throw out the aging curve, but perhaps it’s time to reconsider the shelf life of hard-hitting 1B/DH types. After all, Ortiz’s comps now include Albert Belle, Kent Hrbek, David Justice, Tim Salmon, Ralph Kiner and Hank Greenberg (and Berkman, Konerko, Vaughn and D. Lee), which says to me that in the 2+ seasons that have transpired since I wrote him off, he’s actually improved. Now, I’m not mathematically inclined enough to tell you that the aging curve should be redefined, but it certainly seems to be the case that hitters these days are more able to stave off the effects of aging than their historical comps*.
*Even Derek Jeter, who’s more maligned now than probably ever before, is holding up better than most shortstops throughout history.
Further, not only is it possible that more knowledgeable training staffs can prolong the careers of hitters, but the free agent market is paying high per-win salaries (~$5MM/WAR is basically the going rate nowadays, if I recall correctly) and the run-scoring environment is far more depressed than it has been in the last decade. I’m not going to delve into reasons why the latter is true, but I will show you this:
David Ortiz, 2005: .300/.397/.604, 157 wRC+
David Ortiz, 2011: .321/.393/.617, 175 wRC+
20 points of batting average, four points of OBP and 13 points of SLG are all that separates Ortiz’s performance from his ’05-era heyday, and yet he’s been 18 percentage points better in terms of runs contributed relative to average in 2011. Big bats are in short supply, and Ortiz has shown thusfar that he’s able to provide that which many other teams throughout MLB are lacking: some legit pop.
So basically, I would argue that the Red Sox would do well to retain him. They don’t need the DH slot for aging sluggers who can no longer field (their main corner guys — Youkilis, Gonzalez and Crawford are outstanding defenders, and J.D. Drew won’t command enough on the open market to force the Sox to overpay for him should they want to retain his services), so keeping Ortiz in that role makes a ton of sense from both a marketing and a baseball perspective.
If indeed that’s how the front office in Boston is thinking, then the question becomes how much should they pay him, and not should they pay him. Well, he’s already accrued 2.5 WAR, which is basically the same as his 2.7 from the entirety of last season, and he’s not been overly lucky on balls in play (.306 BABIP this year; .301 career average).
The downside, if we’re looking for one, is that he’s not walking as often as he used to (10.4% BB rate this year; 13% career) and has been benefiting from a perhaps-unsustainably low strikeout rate (11.7%; 22%) this year. So the worst case for Boston is that Papi’s swing gets too long for his age, he starts striking out a ton, and can’t find the power that has made him the intimidating hitter that he’s become since donning a Red Sox jersey.
All that considered, I suggest a two-year, $30MM extension for Big Papi. That will accomplish three things: keep Ortiz financially happy, require only 6 WAR over two seasons to justify the cost, and make me eat a Man Vs. Food-sized plate of crow. I don’t like the idea of giving big money to players even two or three years younger than Ortiz, but for an organization like the Red Sox, who can stomach a bit of overcompensation to a high-risk, high-visability player like Ortiz, the commitment is minimal in both years and money. It could even be a bargain if he continues to hit the way he has in the past two seasons! Even if we’re conservative about Ortiz’s performance going forward, it seems unlikely that he’d be worse than a league-average bat next year and an overpaid platoon guy in the next season. Bats are valuable these days, folks, and the Red Sox would do well to keep one of theirs around for another couple years.
