John Jaso will man first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates with a large cloud of uncertainty above him. Perhaps a change of scenery will clear the skies.
One of the major moves of the off-season for the Pittsburgh Pirates was the decision to part ways with former first round draft pick Pedro Alvarez. With the bat, Alvarez had the ability to leave fans in awe with a monstrous home run in one at-bat and then frustrate them in the next with a strikeout on three pitches. In the field, any play involving him was a nerve wracking few seconds.
The strikeouts would have been a little easier to swallow if he had a higher average and played sound defense, but that was not the case. After experiencing throwing issues at third base, the team decided to move him to first base towards the end of 2014 with the idea of him being the everyday first baseman in 2015. The 2015 campaign, however, was not any better for Alvarez, as he continued to hit poorly and also led the league in errors by a first baseman. His 23 errors were almost double what the next first baseman had (Jose Abreu committed 11). Clearly his days as a defensive player were coming to an end.
While there were free agents like Chris Davis who would cost well over $100 million dollars or trade options like Mitch Moreland who would demand a good prospect package in return, the Pirates turned their attention to a cheaper, under the radar option at first base after letting Alvarez go. The team opted to sign John Jaso, who spent almost all of his career as a catcher and has logged a grand total of two games and four innings at first base, and is now the team’s left-handed platoon option for 2016. Last month Steve Kubitz did a great comparison of Jaso and Alvarez with some of the more advanced stats to show where Jaso’s value lies. Not only is Jaso the better overall hitter, he is signed to a very friendly contract and is moving to a ballpark that may help his power numbers. Because of this, he could very well turn out to be one of the better signings this off-season.
As mentioned, Jaso has not played much first base and has also dealt with a number of injuries during his career, including multiple concussions and most recently a wrist contusion last season that caused him to miss significant playing time. Add in the fact that Jaso’s season high in home runs is ten and his career total is 37 (just one more than what Alvarez hit in 2013), it appears that the Pirates are replacing a bad first baseman with a lot of power with a player who has hardly any power and has very limited experience at the position. But before we talk money, let’s look at the career slash lines of both players.
In 1,588 career at-bats, Jaso has a slash line of .263/.361/.406, good for a .767 OPS. In 2,500 career at-bats, Alvarez has slashed .236/.309/.441, an OPS of .750. Alvarez’s OPS is high because of his power, while Jaso’s OPS gets a huge bump with his ability to get on base. Last year his OBP was .380, well above the league average. Alvarez’s was .318, which isn’t very good.
The release of Alvarez and the subsequent signing of Jaso shows a shift in the way the Pirates are approaching the construction of their roster for 2016, at least at first base. The team is banking on Jaso’s ability to get on base to outweigh his lack of power. And this may be a smart move. A baseball game is won by scoring the most runs and it doesn’t matter how you get them. Jaso gives the Pirates a player who has a much better chance of moving baserunners than Alvarez.
There is another way to look at the Jaso deal and that is to compare the cost of the two players. His contract is for $8 million over the next two years, evenly divided at $4 million per year. Alvarez was paid $5.8 million last season and would have seen a raise if he and the team went to arbitration. In 2015 he had a 0.1 WAR and Jaso finished with 0.9 WAR. Comparing Jaso’s salary of $3.2 million, the Tampa Bay Rays got better value on the dollar than the Pirates did with Alvarez.
I also think that Jaso will benefit from the move to PNC Park. Jaso’s home ballparks for his career have been Tropicana Field, Safeco Field, and O.co Coliseum. Below are the dimensions of those four ballparks and PNC Park.
[table id=75 /]All dimensions can be found on the individual page of each ballpark on wikipedia.org.
All of these ballparks are fairly spacious. Certainly playing in such large ballparks for half of his game limits the already limited power threat of a hitter like Jaso. As a left-handed hitter, though, he is naturally going to hit the ball to right field. The right field wall in PNC Park is closer than that of any of his former home ballparks. Because of this, balls that either were outs, doubles, or triples before may now turn into home runs. Below are his spray charts for the 2015 season and the past four seasons, both from Jaso’s player page on fangraphs.com.
For his career, Jaso has done a good job of hitting the ball to all fields. His 2015 campaign was cut short to due to injury, but he still showed the ability to hit the ball all over the place. PNC Park is built to be taken advantage of by left-handed hitters, and Jaso should see a bump in his power numbers due to the distance from home to right field being shorter than that in his past home ballparks.
It will be interesting to see how the first base situation plays out this season. The Pirates obviously saw enough in Jaso that they believe that he can adequately play first base and give Josh Bell a chance to get more at-bats in Indianapolis.
He may not hit the mammoth home runs like El Toro did, but he won’t make fans cringe every time a ball is thrown to first base.
As long as he keeps getting on base and plays solid defense, from a value on the dollar perspective, Jaso’s signing could prove to be one of the best of the off-season.
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