The Oakland Athletics have entered full rebuild mode after trading away Sean Doolittle, Ryan Madson, Sonny Gray and Yonder Alonso in recent weeks, with each move opening up opportunities for the next wave of players to start making their impressions on the A’s front office.
The face of the Oakland Athletics rebuild is quickly becoming third baseman Matt Chapman, who debuted in June and after four games in the bigs, ended up in the hospital with a knee infection while his rookie teammates were busy putting on a power display in Chicago.
Since returning to Oakland on July 3, Chapman has been dazzling the fans with his glove work at the hot corner and has come up with some big hits along the way. It’s safe to say that by the end of the game, Chapman’s jersey isn’t going to be clean.
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After batting .221 with seven homers and 17 RBI through 113 at-bats, the stat line doesn’t necessarily scream future All Star. His .278 BABIP eludes to an increase in batting average likely coming around the bend, but many think that Chapman will be quite the player if he can manage a .250 average with 20-25 homers a season. Once his BABIP sits around league average, that should account for the gap between his current mark and .250, while he’s already on pace for 31 homers in a 500 at-bat season.
But a .250 home run hitter with some power isn’t terribly special. What makes Chapman special is his glove.
In under 300 innings, Chapman has a DRS (Defensive Runs Saved) of 11 according to FanGraphs, and that’s good enough to tie for 15th in the bigs this season among all Major Leaguers. Keeping in mind he has only played in a quarter of the games this season, that’s extremely impressive.
While DRS isn’t the be-all end-all, it’s worth noting that the agreed upon best defenders in baseball are typically the ones that do well by this metric. Centerfielder Kevin Kiermaier had the best season in recorded history (since 2002) by this stat back in 2015 with the Tampa Bay Rays when he put up a DRS of 42 in 1,174 2/3 innings. With the pace that he’s currently on, Chapman would be looking at a DRS of 49 over that same number of innings, and just a little bit more over 150 games in a season.
This rise up the leaderboards is the defensive equivalent of Gary Sanchez’s home run crusade last season when he hit 20 bombs in 201 at-bats. He may not have led baseball in homers at the end of the season, but he showed the rest of baseball that he was going to be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. Chapman is doing the same thing with the glove in 2017.
If the Oakland Athletics are really looking to turn a corner in their rebuild, while selling to their fan base that recent trades aren’t just more of the same, Chapman could be one player to take a look at locking up through his arbitration years.