The Nats brought in Jeimer Candelario yesterday spending 5+ million on a player to play third base giving the Nats a desperately needed "Not Carter Kieboom" option. But who is Jeimer Candelario and is he any good? I've heard two knee jerk reactions.
1) NO! Just look at last year! He turned 28 (early - he's already 29) and he got worse across the board becoming a poor fielder and bad hitter.
2) YES! Just look at the last three years! He was a guy with decent average and solid doubles power and was a perfectly acceptable third baseman for a major league team.
This proves you can adjust the time frame accordingly to tell you almost anything. Even something crazy like "I like Kieboom's chances this year"
Jeimer is an American (USA! USA!) who moved to the Dominican so his father could set up a baseball academy. Smart Dad. He was internationally signed then by the Cubs and moved up their system at a fairly standard pace but at a decently young age. He even broke into the Top 100 prospects (at the very bottom. of one. one time). He did play in 2016 making him a World Champion in his first season. With few signs he'd be a good major leaguer for a long time the Cubs sent him over to Detroit in a package to get reliever Justin Wilson and back-up C Alex Avila.
With Detroit, he looked good in AAA he looked bad in the majors until 2020 where in the brief season something clicked and he began to hit. Of course the 2020 season was a weird one so you couldn't be sure about it. 2021 would tell the story and it told one of a found above average major leaguer. Then just as quickly as that story was told, 2022 told a story of a flash in the pan.
Defensively Jeimer is fine. He's very consistent with moderate range and a reliable glove. That's part of the reason the Nats could get him. There's no secret underlying great defender here, or even someone that ever WAS a great defender. As for the bat that's the question. As his fielding was always OK and the man can't run, his value came from the idea he could hit like you saw in 2020 and 2021 - high .200s average, 20HR ish doubles power, decent eye for the strike zone. What happened last year (and in all those earlier attempts?)
Well his K-rate got and stayed surprisingly high for a guy that was much more moderate in the minors even as an impetuous youth. At this point you have to say K wise there's definitely a AAAA thing going on here that limited his potential, meaning AAA pitchers can't strike him out but major league guys can*. Last year he just hit worse. Fewer hard hit balls, fewer line drives, fewer pulled balls, dropping HR/FB rate. I kind of find this troublesome and it speaks not to a guy struggling and trying to overcompensate. Usually those guys swing harder, get worse pull ground balls. Jeimer seems like a slow bat speed issue. Let's look at the fancy stats and yep - the EV is down, hard hit is down the drop is mostly against the fastball... He didn't hit it a lot worse just a fraction of a second later because his bat speed was a tiny bit slower. There probably WAS a bit of chase issues that ended up making things worse. His walk rate was well down and I don't believe he lost his eye that quickly especially given no real jump in K rate. I think he wasn't hitting the ball as well, got frustrated and tried to hit his way out of it. The fall off was on both sides of the plate
My gut says this is just a guy getting old. Anyone in their late 20s can tell you that's kind of when things start to feel different. You don't bounce right back as you might have at 24 and definitely did at 21. But I do think there could still be value here. If you can convince Jeimer he isn't going to be that .280 guy but instead a .230 guy he can stop trying to swing out of it and use his patience to gain enough extra value to be a positive offensive presence. It wouldn't be anything to write home about but an average bat and average glove at 3B would be an ASTRONOMICAL improvement over last year.
But the key is convincing him. If you can't... well he's not getting younger and he's likely to get worse if he keeps trying it.
*This is different than say Donovan KKKKKasey who can be struck out by everyone and was never going to make it in the majors.
8 comments:
I'd add that the entire Tigers roster hit terribly last year. I like this move fine and he could play some first base too. I think the difference between this and Franco, is that nobody thought Franco was going to start for them and then they made no moves, so he started a lot and looked bad. Candelario was recently pretty good and I'm not sure Franco was ever good.
I just hope we don't look back on this as the best move of the offseason!
Well, it seems like this is a guy who could use a good batting coach. If so, he came to the wrong team.
He could have gotten old (he just turned 29). Or his struggles could have been because he was playing hurt last year (left shoulder subluxation early in the season). According to an article in the Detroit Free Press the Tigers wanted to re-sign him after nontendering him. Which tells me that they weren't simply trying to jettison the player - they wanted him back, just not at the likely arbitration amount that he would have received (estimated $7.6M).
There's some upside potential here, and if he flops it's a one year, fairly cheap cost to absorb.
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I don't know... if both Pam AND Pedro vouch for him, then he must be pretty good.
Back on topic though, I suppose Harper got his wish for a better 3B failsafe than Vargas. And on the money side, I think the signing is great. $5M is a good gamble here. But the other limited resource is playing time, and I'm still confused about how that will work out.
Candelario's projection has high error bars. That's great for us because we can get value from upside surprises, and don't really care that much about eating downside surprises. But for him to have a track record that any team would trade for, he needs to start most games and basically have 300 PAs of good hitting by the deadline.
Kieboom's development has already been super weird and erratic, and I'm not sure another turn in AAA or riding the bench in the majors is going to anything for him. At next year's trade deadline, he'll be about to turn 26 and that's getting pretty damn old for a prospect.
Which means this only makes sense to me if Rizzo thinks the parlay of Candelario being good AND the prospect we trade for panning out is more likely than Kieboom panning out. I'm a little skeptical about it but I guess it's possible.
@Anon 8:13:
I agree; my first response to the Candelario signing was a resounding, "wow, the Nats are firmly convinced Kieboom is a total bust." Despite his poor 2022, this is a guy who was signed to at least be presumed to start; you pay your backup $5M if you have a Zimmerman or a Rendon starting ahead of him, not when you're a last-place team with a prospect. Plan A should have been "give Kieboom all the rope he needs" for a team that is Astros-rebuild bad right now. For them to reject that plan means that either the front office has no idea what it's doing, or their motivation isn't to do the best for the team's long-term success, or they really think they already have their answer on Kieboom and don't need to bother asking the question again.
Petition to trade Strasburg to the Phillies since they seem intent on having the stars of the 2018 Nats under long-term contracts.
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