The Detroit Tiger The search for a short stop seems to take all kinds of twists and turns. At first it was Carlos Correa. Then it was reported that there was an interest in Trevor Story and Marcus Semien. General Manager Al Avila has stated on several occasions that the trade will be difficult, but going that route is still an option. On Friday, it was Javier Baez’s turn.

Defensive Wizard is said to have turned down a $168 million extension in the spring of 2020, and it was traded by Chicago Cubs to me New York Mets this chapter. Overall, he’s had a very good season, although there are some indications that should raise concerns about an impending regression.

Profile personly

Javy Báez needs a little more formal introduction. The owner of one of the best and essential defensive reels of our time, El Mago, the magician, regularly does exciting and amazing things on the baseball field. The Puerto Rican-born player has spent the past eight alternate seasons frustrating and exhilarating the minds of Chicago Cubs fans.

Statistics support him defensively as well. Bayes is consistently above average defensively, and on a few occasions has accumulated some very good defensive numbers, both at second base and at the short stopping point. Great hands, great arm, amazing awareness, and body control allow him to perform plays others can’t, and he is an absolute artist with the mark around second base, no matter where he came from to get to the bag. It’s like having excellent Jose Iglesias with better range and much better arm strength.

In the rules, too, bayes are very aggressive. This sometimes leads to mistakes, but he generally steals 10-15 bags a year with a solid success rate, and he has a knack for amazing slides around signs and weird instinct plays that cause meltdowns by his opponents.

You can’t expect something like this to happen again, but the example below demonstrates Báez’s ability to achieve the truly inexplicable at times. On the other hand, Pirates offers one of the worst theater series you will ever see. On the other hand, these things happen when Javier Páez is on the court.

Well, Báez is clearly a talented and entertaining force in general both defensively and on the rules. Aggression leads to you making more mistakes than you’d like, so in both cases it ranks worse than, say, Trevor Storey. For more context, Carlos Correa usually scales similarly to Paez defensively, although he doesn’t offer anything extra on the core lanes. The place where these three players diverge a little bit is in the board.

Báez has a lot of strength, but a very wretched discipline, with a lot of swaying and failing. It destroys the left-hand throw, but is generally pedestrian against right-handers. Earlier in his career, his hands and overall ability to get a barrel on the ball made up for his free-swinging nature and he was on his way to stardom. However, the past two years have seen the strike rate rise to absolutely shocking levels of over 30 per cent. The strength numbers were enough to bring him well above his batting average in 2021, while his 2020 season was disastrous. Presumably, we can write that once, and expect it will post a generated tag (wRC+) 15 percent better than the league average next year.

Despite being of average stature with a height of six feet and a weight of 190 pounds, Bayes have exceptional bat speed and raw strength. His extreme exit speeds put him at a lower level than Aaron Judge’s and Giancarlo Stanton’s in the world. Of course, that’s partly because it has a massive leg kick and sells for power in the traction most of the time. As a result, he makes poor contact with the floor even when he is not breathing. His speed allows him to beat more than his share of ground players and turn individual flare into double, but he doesn’t walk and will never hit average enough to post good marks on base.

Even at his best, it’s an ‘all or nothing’ method, where Bayes ambush enough fastballs and hangers to do a lot of damage, but other than that it’s a target for shooters who have good things to break, speed and command to use. Unlike Story, Correa, or Marcus Semien, Báez is the guy you want to hit a little bit in the batting order, not in the heart of your squad. He has a knack for tournaments, and he seems to feed the audience – in both ways And less granular ways—and the big moments, but they often don’t work for weeks at a time.

Should tigers bite?

Javier Báez is a very good baseball player, despite the flaws in the board. It would have radically improved the Tigers’ defense, added another boost of speed to pressure bowlers, catchers, and defenders, and probably contributed more to home runs than we’ve seen from a Tigers hitter in half a decade. The question is whether it is worth the potential cost, and whether there is any chance that he can still improve versus the possibility that his skills will start to deteriorate in a few seasons.

Regarding the last question, the odds seem pretty bad. No doubt, Joe Madon’s coaching staff in Chicago tore their hair out in an effort to convince Bayes to see more pitches and be more selective on the board, but it didn’t take long. With his 29-year-old season approaching, his expectation that he would play anything other than baseball in Javy Báez style is almost certainly a mistake.

The problem is that there is almost no approach of any kind on the board. He relies entirely on his superb hand-eye coordination and bat speed to make mistakes on the pitches he can’t do without until he has something he can drive. The strength should hold up, but hand-eye coordination even at this odd level can deteriorate dramatically in a player’s thirties. If the Báez starts finding the barrel more often, producing it could pit it far beyond what we would have expected from Story’s dip stage and especially Correa.

maybe The drop may already be underway. Baez hasn’t chased the area much over the past two seasons. He misses fast balls over the board often. From 2017-2019, Báez crushed fastballs in the strike zone, producing 0.423 wOBA against those courts. In 2021, that number dropped to 391. Since these are the stadiums he made his bones by crushing, it’s a bit scary. On the other hand, Báez has completely knocked out broken balls in the area this year, scoring .492 wOBA against those courts.

So, at the moment, Baez can be described as a flawed player, but a very talented one, winning by three to four. That’s on par with Storey, who also has an arm problem which is cause for concern. Korea is on another level as a five to six player coming out of one of his best seasons.

Fangraves Estimated four-year contract, $80 million for Baez. That seems a bit light-hearted to get him to come to Detroit to get back to the New York Mets, who are still interested too, but we’ll deal with it. With Storey pegged at close to $24 million a year for five seasons, and Correa anticipating a roughly 10-year deal worth $300 million, Báez is sure to leave them with more flexibility on the payroll to add help this season. Maybe, just maybe, he can also give them everything they need in a short term position at a reasonable cost.

There is a fair amount of risk in the profile, but if the deal is reasonable enough, Báez is laying out a back-up plan that will allow the Tigers to add more assists this season while retaining roughly average league salaries and seriously boosting production from a position shortstop. This is still highly unlikely, but tigers seem to be casting a wide net and exploring all possibilities, as they should.