It hasn’t been a great year for our beloved San Francisco Giants.
The Giants are currently 68-72, and it feels worse than that. They’re listless, directionless, aimless, hopeless. They are limping to the finish line in another forgettable season. They’ve had things go right this year, but more things have gone wrong, and the fans are tired of it. Not only are they tired of it, but they’re losing patience, losing motivation to watch this team, and losing faith that it’s going to get better any time soon.
There’s no hope for this team. They’re building a castle on the shoreline, and every season half their progress gets washed out to sea. They need some kind of stable building block for the future, someone they can rely on, someone with a proven track record who actually wants to stick around. But who could fit this bill?
Say it with me…
THAT’S CHAPPIE!
(the crowd goes wild)
The Giants and Matt Chapman agreed to a six year, $151 million contract extension yesterday, the second biggest contract in Giants history, and a sign that the team wasn’t going to abandon one of its few offensive free agent successes. They found someone who was good and wanted to stick around, and they gave him enough money to stick around. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Also: hey, one Scott Boras client got his long term deal! He just had to wait a few months to get the details ironed out.
Without watching Chapman every day, it’s hard to appreciate just how good he is on defense. For the first month or two, it seemed like he was making a lot of errors, and yet he was still one of the best third basemen in the league. He was also in an awful slump, and yet he’s rebounded to have a solid year at the plate. He’s simply an excellent baseball player, and if he wanted to stay in San Francisco, it was good that the team paid him to do that.
(waits)
(waits)
(waits)
But…
For all the things Chapman does well, he’s not a great hitter. He’s certainly a good hitter — he’s never had a wRC+ worse than 101 — but he’s not an offensive superstar. That’s fine this year, and it’ll be fine next year and likely the year after that. In today’s game, though, age curves are steeper. Players are declining faster. So far this year, there are 11 players who are at least 35 years old with 100 PAs and positive offensive value, and “positive offensive value” is not a high bar. If you want to restrict it to qualified hitters — guys with enough PAs that they’ve been everyday guys this year — there are 6. That’s one for every 5 teams.
It’s not likely that Chapman will be one of those guys in his age 35 season, much less age 36 and age 37. Other than Mark Canha, every one of those guys — Carlos Santana, JD Martinez, Andrew McCutchen, Justin Turner, and Paul Goldschmidt — had a much higher peak than Chapman, so they had more room to decline than him. Even Canha had a 146 wRC+ season with Oakland in 2019, which is better than any individual offensive year Chapman has had. For the last half of this contract, Chapman is simply not going to hit and we should prepare ourselves for that.
And again, if you didn’t click on the “age curves are steeper” link above, you should. Everything is declining faster than it did even a decade ago. My guess is that this is due to the number of guys throwing in the high 90s or 100s, but I can’t say for sure. Still: strikeouts go way up, walks go way down, contact goes way down, ISO goes way down, BABIP goes way down, defense goes way down. If you’re going to pay for those years, then you’d better have either a lot of really good years before that or this had better be the one player that puts you over the top in the good years you get.
Is either of those going to be the case with Matt Chapman? It’s hard to see it. It’s possible that this Giants team takes a leap next year with Kyle Harrison, Hayden Birdsong, Heliot Ramos, and Tyler Fitzgerald continuing to develop, and a Bryce Eldridge call-up, and maybe the team getting its shit together and figuring out how to develop Marco Luciano into the best version of himself instead of doing a bad job of turning him into Buster Posey, but it’s also possible that half of those players end up being terrible for reasons we only recognize in retrospect.
So there are a lot of ways that this is a bad idea. I was on the anti-Chapman train over the offseason, and while some aspects of that have aged badly (he, uh, turned out to be significantly better than JD Davis), the general concern about how his offense would age was correct, I still think. Even with a good offensive season this year, and a strikeout rate that noticeably declined, his future at the plate is not promising. The most likely outcome for this signing is multiple years in which fans openly grumble about the contract.
But they still had to do it.
Players around the league notice how front offices operate. They know the difference between the cheap franchises and the good ones. They know that you go to play in Tampa to develop yourself for your next paycheck, you go to the Dodgers if you want to win, and you go to the Angels if they offer the most money. For pitchers, the Giants have been closer to the Tampa side of things, and for hitters they’ve been closer to the Angels. But seeing Chapman want to build something in San Francisco makes it a little easier to buy in to the idea of Anthony Santander, for example, also going to San Francisco to build something. That’s league-wide credibility, and if the deal ends up being bad down the line, well, that’s really not that high of a price to pay.
And, of course, the fans need it. Attendance has been up for the Giants this year, but if you’ve been watching the Diamondbacks series, the stadium has been empty. Announced crowds have been around 23,000 for the first couple games of this series, which is staggeringly low. There is a lot of discontent among people who want a “good product” that’s “entertaining” and “doesn’t remind me of the inevitability of death’s cold embrace” for some reason.
Chapman, then, is a reminder to them that yes, this team is going to try. They’re not going to be the A’s, forever half-assing it because they’ve figured out a way to be The Producers of baseball. This is a popular player you like? He is going to stay, and next year we will have more popular players you like. Right now, the team needs to just chuck olive branches at fans one after another, and Chapman is a good first step.
So as a pure baseball move, it probably won’t go great (Prove me wrong, Chappie!). But as a message that this is actually a baseball team and not just a front for a real estate conglomerate that’s going to perpetually make tons of money off its Mission Rock development, it’s a good first steps. We’ll need to see more steps over the offseason, but hey, at least they’re trying.
Before the sentence: "But they still had to do it." I had formulated a response in mind. But, with the second half of the article, that response seems redundant, so I don't need to ... aww... I'll say it anyways, so I can avoid work for a few minutes.
Despite the previous article saying Kevin Gausman was a "possibly helpful", I really feel like he is the real one who got away. Letting him walk started the owners-to-players narrative: "It's great that you played so well and helped us (set a franchise record for wins and) make us even more truckloads of money, but if you are unwilling to sign an extension without even more surplus value on it than what we think we can get in the market, then we're done here." I suspect that this hypothetical narrative cost them a lot, perhaps even FA players that would have helped win one of those coveted Third Wild Card trophies. The Chapman extension though may start to unravel the narrative, and really, something like it is long overdue.
Maestro - excellent pros/cons on the Chapman signing. My initial take was, too many years, and that's generally true for 30-ish position players. But when I see Chapman play 3B I'm reminded of Brooks Robinson, who played well into his late 30's [ https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/robinbr01.shtml ] He's really that good, and a comparable hitter, except for all the K's. I mean, did you see his most recent dinger to left-center that almost broke the fence the other day? It was a 17% missile launch that left the field in about 2 seconds!
The other thing that jumps out is Chappie's fitness. He's gotta be 95%-tile among MLB players in physical fitness, quickness, reflexes, and obvious stamina. He even sounds much younger than his peers in interviews. I think he'll be an outlier in his durability in the field. And los G's need to commit to adding EXCELLENT players, instead of plugging holes with rejects and projects.