Hey, it's a free agent the Giants should avoid!

(elbowing wife and whispering) That's Chappie

If you listened to the most recent episode of Giants Chroncast — rate us 5 stars on Apple Music! — then you heard us discuss this year’s crop of free agents. While you’ll have to download it and boost our stats to hear whether we think the Giants should sign Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto (tough calls!), I am here today to talk to you about one of the top free agents on the market. I’m here to tell you why, despite many positives, I think the Giants should avoid him. I’m here to convince you that he’s actually not what the team is looking for at all.

(pulls up a chair, spins it around, sits in it backwards, facing you, like I’m cool, even though I’m absolutely not)

Let’s rap about Matt Chapman.

Chapman is, by most accounts, the second best position player on the market, behind Cody Bellinger (I am not counting Ohtani as a position player, because the only position he plays is pitcher, and that’s a whole different thing). Last year, Chapman was worth 3.5 fWAR and 4.4 bWAR, and he has been worth at least 3.5 wins by either measure in every full season he’s had in the majors (2020 excepted, for obvious reasons).

Chapman’s glove at third base is excellent — he won his fourth Gold Glove last year. He has good power, having hit 155 homers in 7 major league seasons, including 36 in the cavernous Coliseum with the A’s in 2019, so it’s likely he’d have enough power to still sock some dingers in San Francisco. With his Bay Area ties, and specifically ties to Bob Melvin, he might even be willing to sign with the San Francisco Giants baseball club, a notoriously unappealing destination for top free agent hitters. So what’s the drawback, huh? Why is some smartass with a newsletter saying to avoid him?

It’s the bat. I don’t trust the bat.

Obviously, Chapman is a gifted defensive player, and while that defense is likely to degrade somewhat over the course of his contract (which Jon Heyman expects to be around $150 million, for what it’s worth), he’s likely to be a plus player defensively for years to come. But he’s simply not the hitter that the Giants need, and it’s not likely he will be.

Over the last three years, Chapman has hit .226/.322/.420, which comes to an OPS+ of 108. That is, in other words, a little bit above average. He is entering his age 31 season, which means that a 6-year contract will have him on the Giants through his age 36 season. Those are…pretty much entirely decline years, and since he’s declining from slightly above average, what he’ll be declining to is definitively below average.

Last year, Chapman hit the ball hard when he hit it, but also swung through a lot of pitches and struck out an awful lot. His walk rate was good and his chase rate was excellent, but those whiffs meant that his strikeout rate was very high. He barreled the ball pretty often when he hit it, and his average exit velocity was good, but the large amount of swing-and-miss in his game meant that he didn’t do his damage often enough to really be an offensive difference maker. He started very strongly, but faded sharply as the season drew into its second half.

Here’s who that paragraph described: JD Davis, but somewhat better.

I don’t want to oversell that comparison. Chapman is better defensively, though Davis significantly closed the gap last year. Chapman is much faster, and he was better offensively last year. But $150 million on JD Davis With An Extra Six Points Of wRC+ isn’t a great selling point for a team desperate for offense.

Chapman has a strong reputation around the game, and it’s not undeserved, but it’s also not a good indicator of the type of player he’s going to be going forward. To me, Matt Chapman is a trap. He is not going to be the difference maker the team needs, and he’ll take a lot of payroll away from a hypothetical future player who could be that difference maker. Sure, the Giants won’t develop or sign that guy, but maybe he’ll come over in a trade? Something to think about!

I’m not concerned about the money, aside from having the knowledge that budgets exist and the Giants have one and Chapman won’t help with it. I’m concerned that he’s not much of an upgrade at the plate over what the Giants already have. I mean, I don’t even know that he’s an offensive upgrade over Davis at all.

Since 2019, Davis has posted wRC+ values of: 137, 118, 128, 119, 104
Since 2019, Chappie’s wRC+ values have been: 125, 118, 101, 118, 110

Now, Davis hasn’t had nearly as many plate appearances, partially because of injury and partially because of platooning, so Chapman certainly has an edge in actually playing baseball. But you can’t argue that Chapman has a stronger offensive track record, and if we want to upgrade the offense, then this isn’t the way to do it. Matt Chapman is not the answer for the Giants.

If a team needs a solid complementary piece, then that’s Chapman. If a team needs a centerpiece, then they need to look somewhere else. That’s where the Giants are right now. They can’t hope Matt Chapman will solve all their problems, because odds are that he won’t.