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December 2, 2014 Transaction AnalysisThe Predictable Nelson Cruz Signing, the Predictable Nelson Cruz
Reportedly signed OF-R Nelson Cruz to a four-year deal with $57 million. [12/1] What makes Nelson Cruz to the Mariners so obvious is that he’s an archetype, and an archetype that the Mariners have seemed to be chasing so hard for years, up to and including (reportedly) Nelson Cruz last year. He’s the nicest product in a store filled with Mike Morses and Corey Harts, and he’s the downmarket, entry-level version of Justin Upton or Matt Kemp. He’s right-handed, he’s big, he’s strong, he hits dingers, he does nothing else, but those dingers, sure do love those dingers. He’s the compromise between treating yourself to something nice and having enough money for heat this winter.
What makes an archetype so useful for us: We don’t have to just throw our hands up and blindly guess what Cruz might do. Baseball has been churning out Nelson Cruzes for decades. Some guy in his early/mid-30s produces a rough version of the 2014 Nelson Cruz every year—there was even a different one in 2014, one besides Nelson Cruz's:
And as you tour through the Nelson Cruzes of yesteryears using Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, it’s like reading Life magazines from a half-century ago: The occasional flash of recognition and damning significance
or future greatness
among columns and columns of names that mean absolutely nothing to us now
but all of them seemed special in their own time. Just like Nelson Cruz convinced a General Manager that he, Cruz, is special right now.
*Albert Pujols, 2014
Common isn’t necessarily an antonym for special; actually, I guess it is, but it’s not necessarily an antonym for valuable. The Cruz archetype could be both common and valuable—the right-handed slugger who produces big dinger totals in his early 30s and… then does what? That’s the question, so let’s look at the 16 players whom Cruz most resembles: All of them of a modernish (post-1970) era; all of them corner players; all of them right-handed, and all of them All-Stars at some point; all of them with at least 60 home runs, 4 to 12 WAR, and an OBP no better than 70 percent as high as their slugging percentage in the combined age 31-33 seasons. The filters seem to more or less work, as Cruz is roughly the median name no matter which category you sort by:
(Table via the Play Index.) On to the actuarial stuff: Let’s just say that every year Nelson Cruz is an above-average hitter, Seattle will be happy they have him. That’s probably generous—as a DH or bad-glove corner outfielder, “average” holds a higher requirement—but let’s give them that. A healthy, above-average Cruz will be enough to justify a one- or two-win free agent expenditure. Of the group of 16:
There are unquestionable successes—Ellis Burks, Moises Alou and Andres Galarraga were still stars at age 37. But we have 16 players, over the course of four years, producing 64 total seasons, and just about half of those seasons were what we’d consider successful, from our hypothetical Mariners perspective. Nelson Cruz will likely be a pretty good hitter this year—our first, unofficial PECOTA run has him the 48th-best hitter in baseball this year, wedged between Jason Heyward and Shin-Soo Choo on one side and Billy Butler and Brandon Moss on the other—and he will likely not get 300 plate appearances in the fourth year of the deal. The Nelson Cruz archetype is not special.
All that said, this isn’t a shocking move so much as the “meh” we preemptively load up for Mariners/must have/dingers transactions. As I wrote last month, Cruz did everything he needed to do to attract the sort of offers he was looking for a year ago: He stayed healthy, he hit well on the road, he convinced opposing pitchers he’s a threat, he put an All-Star season between himself and his PEDs, and he time-traveled a year into the future, where quality DHs are a little bit rarer and the value of a draft pick is a little bit lower. Meanwhile, the Mariners did everything they needed to do to make an offer like this look almost sensible: Their designated hitters’ OPS was the fourth lowest in American League history; Seattle’s DH’s have been last in the league four of the past five seasons. That should be the easiest position to fix, but it’s obviously not always, and the Mariners spent more than $10 million on the position last year. Cruz had more total bases on the road than Seattle’s designated hitters had all season. "The Nelson Cruz inevitability" was how Jeff Sullivan titled a piece he wrote last offseason about the Mariners and Cruz. "An astoundingly long-shot" is how a Mariners beat writer described the chances of a Cruz/Mariners meet-cute this winter. But nothing has really changed for the Mariners except that the payoff for signing Cruz is perceived to be a bit higher, and the downside of not signing Cruz is in everybody's recent memory. By third-order record, the Mariners were the fifth-best team in the AL last year. By wins-and-losses standings, they missed the postseason by a game. One of the clearest causes for that was at DH. One of the clearest causes for everything the Mariners have gone through in the past five years has been at DH. It's neither surprising nor all that objectionable that the Mariners would overpay in years and dollars fix it. Nelson Cruz isn't special, but after all that Seattle has been through, he'll at least look the part.
Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @SamMillerBB
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One of the best TAs ever. Great job, Sam!