Oh, hello there. I didn’t see you come in. Pull up a chair and a cup of coffee. Let’s talk about free agents.
The Dodgers, you see, possess some impending free agents on their roster. I’ve been thinking a lot about their fate lately. The Collective Bargaining Agreement between MLB and the MLB Players’ Association expires this winter. Without a new one, there will be no 2022 season and no clarity on the mechanism by which players get paid. We don’t know how that new CBA will affect the financial prospects of Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Corey Seager, Kenley Jansen and Chris Taylor. For now, all we know is these players don’t have a contract for next year.
That makes them special among the men currently inching the Dodgers closer to the finish line of the 2021 season. No matter what the CBA holds, those are five pretty valuable baseball players.
There are five days in the workweek, and this is as good a week as any before the season ends to assess the prospects of five soon-to-be free agents. Apologies to Jimmy Nelson, Shane Greene, Albert Pujols, Cole Hamels, Danny Duffy and Corey Knebel (the Dodgers’ other impending free agents), but this week isn’t for you. This week is about the guys whose jerseys fans tend to purchase in the team store.
Let’s start with Taylor. Come to think of it, I don’t see many (any?) CT3 jerseys floating around the stands at Dodger Stadium. On a team of stars, Taylor is more of a “glue guy.” He’s the Darrell Hammond to the rest of the “Saturday Night Live” cast. He’ll never steal a scene by himself, but he’s versatile and talented enough to play an essential role in any scene you could script.
On another team, a player who can play four positions capably, and give you 3-4 Wins Above Replacement in an average year, might be the most important impending free agent for the general manager to re-sign. On the Dodgers, it’s easy to lose sight of Taylor’s value. He bats toward the end of the lineup. His defense is more reliable than flashy. He requires little to no maintenance from the Dodgers’ coaching staff behind the scenes.
Speaking of which, there’s a good segue!
WHY TAYLOR STAYS A DODGER
It was Taylor’s work with current hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc that sent him down a path of transformation into a 3-4 WAR player back in the 2016-17 offseason. Van Scoyoc seems unlikely to go anywhere by all accounts. Why should Taylor?
For all of the stars they acquire and prospects they develop, the Dodgers have never had trouble finding playing time for Taylor. He missed a month in 2019 when he fractured his forearm. Otherwise, Taylor would have more than 500 plate appearances in every non-pandemic season he’s played in Los Angeles. It’s not as if he needs to leave town to find more at-bats. Taylor is a great fit on a Dodgers team that annually gets its players to buy into the idea of positional versatility, allowing him to fill in for AJ Pollock or Cody Bellinger or Corey Seager or Gavin Lux or Mookie Betts or Justin Turner.
Just as importantly, the Dodgers tend to win. There are a finite number of organizations Taylor could join with equal or greater promise of winning a World Series. Whether his goal is to win, or to play, or to join an organization that can fix his swing whenever it (… ahem …) needs fixing. Taylor can do all those things if he stays put in Los Angeles.
WHY TAYLOR DOESN’T STAY A DODGER
Money.
Any player who qualifies as “a good fit on the roster of Team A” is probably a good fit on most other teams as well. And with the Dodgers, the cost of a perpetually fruitful farm system is that there is often a high-caliber replacement for any free agent lying in the minors. Bellinger replaced Andre Ethier. Muncy replaced Adrian Gonzalez. Will Smith replaced Yasmani Grandal. Walker Buehler replaced Brandon McCarthy. This isn’t necessarily what you call “being cheap,” though optically it can have the same effect. It’s good roster-building.
When Chris Taylor sits down to assess his options this offseason, there is a non-zero chance that his best offer will come from a team that needs him more than the Dodgers. A team, perhaps, that isn’t as good at drafting and developing, or identifying future All-Stars from other organizations’ scrap heaps – like Muncy, or like Taylor himself once upon a time.
Last winter, we saw the Boston Red Sox sign utility players Kiké Hernandez (two years, $14 million) and Marwin Gonzalez (one year, $3 million). Taylor is a better hitter, and perhaps just as versatile defensively, as Hernandez and Gonzalez. He’ll play most of next season at age 31, a year older than Hernandez was when he became a free agent. In a similar free agent market, with a similar CBA – two admittedly dangerous assumptions – Taylor’s salary floor should be higher than that of Hernandez (who will finish this season with career highs in plate appearances and WAR). A strong finish to the regular season and playoffs might help Taylor stave off concerns around age-related decline.
Here’s a not-so-far-fetched hypothetical. The San Francisco Giants will enter the winter with some money to spend, and a star free agent of their own in Kris Bryant, whom they might consider more than a late-season rental. The problem with Bryant is that he is not an especially good fielder at any of the six positions he’s played this season. An American League team might be attracted to sign Bryant with the option of letting him DH more than not. (If the DH comes to the National League, Bryant’s market will only expand.) What if the Giants do not re-sign Bryant? Might they then turn to Taylor, a lighter hitter but superior fielder? In this hypothetical, do the Dodgers – a team with Mookie Betts and Trea Turner and Will Smith and Justin Turner among their stable of right-handed hitters – need Taylor as much as the Giants do?
Players with Taylor’s pedigree don’t come around often. Hernandez’s bat is too light to be a perfect comp. In the integration era, there have been only 67 player-seasons in which the guy played all three outfield positions, as well as second base, shortstop and third base, and batted more than 400 times. About half (33) the time, that player had an OPS under 100. Taylor is responsible for two of the remaining 34 seasons. He’s closer to peak Ben Zobrist than you think, if a little too old to be paid accordingly, and we all know who loves a good Ben Zobrist.
Dodgers’ pending free agents, Part I: Chris Taylor - OCRegister
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