What do I know?: Trevor Story
Trevor Story is perhaps the hardest person for me during this little series. He’s had a good career, 21.6 fWAR over 5 seasons, thus far and should be in line for a pretty good, big contract. For a long period of time, he was my biggest hope for the Detroit Tigers this offseason.
He’s an above average hitter, he owns a positive OAA to show he’s above average defender. So I gathered my data as I had with the previous players. 32 players I could compare him to, with some big names as well:
Some legends there. A lot of names I’m familiar with too. Some players who are still playing today. But like with Correa, trying to find a comp in that spiderweb will be pretty hard. So I once again went with the relplot to graph it. Since Story hasn’t missed a lot of games, I needed to figure out where his weakness is.
It just so happens his weakness would be something that I cannot gather easily for 30+ players; his home/road splits. Before I get too much into it, I do want to say that I think the Coors field makes hitters better is garbage. Larry Walker and Andre Galaraga were fantastic when in Montreal, Todd Helton was nearly as good in the road as he was at home. Nolan Arenado as well — and he had a decent first season in St. Louis.
Story has had 1,592 PA at Coors Field and 1,544 away from it. Almost as close to a 50/50 split as you’d think. However, his wOBA is .081 points lower and his wRC+ is slightly below average (98). His batting average at home (.303) nearly matches his OBP away (.310), his K% is nearly 6% higher on the road.
But again — I would need to look at each of these players individually to see who else has similar splits. That won’t be easy.
So for this exercise, I went ahead and took a look at each of their wRC+ by age and set up the color chart to equal WAR. This should at least give me something to start taking a peek at.
So using this graph two players stand out to me a similar comps: Jake Beckley and Justin Upton. One player we for sure know, a second who played in the 1800s. There really seems to be a lot of matches from that era. Let’s narrow the next graph down to those three:
I mean.. Justin Upton and Jake Beckley are pretty close to identical, no? That’s pretty insane, really. But I digress.
I’d like to talk about Upton here. One thing I know about Upton is that he is incredibly streaky. But does he also have larger home/road splits. After all, he did start his career playing home ball games in Chase Field.
- Equal number of home/away PA: check
- Much higher wOBA at home?: .060, check
- Below average wRC+ away? 100, so close
- Home BA almost equal away OBP?: not quite
What we have is a close counterpart. One that should work here.
Onto trying to figure out a good contract.
Here’s the normal average for all players:
And again to the close comps:
Given how identical Upton and Beckley were initially, I couldn’t really pick one as a closest comp, especially since there are no splits data available for Beckley. They both were really close from a trending standpoint. So instead, I am able to get just the average of the two. It’s slightly surprising to see Upton’s career after age 30… not good.
This is where the hard part came in for me. Here are the contracts we have: 8/$129.6M and 8/$146.4M..
8 years seems like it could be about right. $138M is the middle point there, giving him a $17.3M AAV.
I tried to come into this with little to no expectations and wanting to only try to find proper comps for each player and get an idea of possible future value. That’s what it’s all about. However, I was not thinking I would see a value so low for Story. Yet.. here we are.
8/$138M.
