The Tampa Bay Rays are shopping their ace this offseason. Would he make a good Christmas gift, or is he being overpriced by the Rays?
It seems like Tampa Bay Rays ace Chris Archer has been on the trade block nearly as soon as the ink dried on his extension signed with the team to buy out a number of his arbitration seasons. This offseason, however, the Rays seem to be actively listening on Archer, and there could be momentum to move him.
The trade proposals and rumored cost for Archer bandied about online seem to indicate teams assume that Archer is a cost-controlled ace, one of the top 10-15 pitchers in all of the game. While he has shown well with certain metrics that would indicate such things, he has some very interesting comparisons to two pitchers that most people wouldn’t be offering near the same value in trade to the Tampa Bay Rays to acquire him.
The issue at hand
The reason that many of these discussions come to play is because Archer has consistently posted FIP and xFIP numbers better than his ERA numbers. For his career, Archer has a 3.63 ERA, 3.46 FIP, and a 3.43 xFIP. He’s posted 16.2 fWAR over the last four seasons, which places him 12th over the last four seasons among qualified pitchers.
However, things change if you look at bWAR, which is more of a reflection of what did happen on the field while fWAR takes some allowance for an “expected” home run rate and “expected” defense and gives some correction to what is viewed as “unlucky” home run rates. Per bWAR, Archer has 9.8 bWAR, and he’s ranked 37th over that same 4-year period.
That difference would be a significant difference in what would be viewed as a reasonable return in a trade for Archer. Is he the pitcher that is seen as one of the 10-15 best in the game, or is he more one of the 30-40 best pitchers in the game? That will make a big difference in his trade value.
First, let’s look at some concerns with just Archer alone.
Worries with Archer’s trends
Many who trumpet Archer’s value point to his underlying numbers as being a reason that he should be valued more strongly. However, there are certainly numbers as well that point in a direction that lead to some certain worry.
First, we will look at his batted ball profile. Archer moved from a sinker/four-seam combo in 2013-2014 to the point where he almost exclusively utilizes his four-seam fastball now. From that point, he’s gone from allowing 31.1% fly balls in 2014 to 36% in 2017, and his HR/FB rate has typically stayed in the 10-15% range.
It’s also been a trend for Archer that he has seen his medium-strength contact percentage go from 56.9% in 2013 go down every season to 47.4% in 2017. His weak contact was 15.1% in 2013, and it was down to 13.2% in 2017. Conversely his hard hit rate has gone from 28% in his first significant season in the rotation in 2013 to 39.4% in 2017, which is a definite red flag.
Archer is 29, and he won’t turn 30 until September of next season. For many, if velocity has maintained to 30, it will then start to taper off. For instance, while Justin Verlander had his peak value in 2009 at age 26, but he generally stayed between 95-96.1 average MPH until his age 30 season, when he dropped (until a spike in 2017).
As far as pitch usage goes, the typical trend sees that the more a pitcher utilizes his breaking pitch, the higher the risk of injury for that pitcher (not a perfect 1:1 correlation, but certainly a trend). Per Pitch Info data, Archer has seen his slider usage go from 28% as a rookie to 43.8% in 2017.
Per Brooks Baseball, Archer has seen his slider usage go from ~40% in 2015 and 2016 to 44% in 2017 via their tracking methods, which is definitely a notable rise.
In viewing Archer’s info at Brooks Baseball, it’s easy to see why he’s throwing his slider nearly as much as his four-seam fastball at this point, as he does get nearly a 40% swing and miss rate on the slider. He does see a nearly-11% HR/FB rate on his slider. Only his change is put out a worse rate.
What exactly does that mean? The short and long of it is that with the increasing usage of his slider, his HR/FB rate will likely continue to be high, meaning that his value will most likely be measured by those metrics that measure his actual results rather than what his results “should” have been with a “normal” home run rate, making bWAR a better measure with Archer. In other words, Archer is more a solid #2 than a true ace.
In the initial discussion, comparables to Archer were mentioned. Let’s take a look at them…
Javier Vazquez
Vazquez was a fellow 5th round selection (Archer was a 5th round pick in 2006 by the Indians before being traded to the Cubs and then to the Tampa Bay Rays) by the Montreal Expos out of Puerto Rico. He worked his way up the minor league system quickly, and after he put up a 1.86 ERA over 25 starts and 154 2/3 innings between high-A and AA at 20 years old with a 0.99 WHIP and a 40/147 BB/K ratio. He was ranked as the #83 prospect in baseball by Baseball America after the 1997 season.
He spent the entire 1998 season in the Expos rotation, struggling to a 6.06 ERA, and he had a rough 1999 as well with the Expos, finishing with a 5.00 ERA over 154 2/3 innings before settling into the rotation in 2000, putting up excellent numbers for a number of years.
Vazquez was one of the first pitchers who received notoriety for having better numbers if you would give him a normalized defense and home run rate compared to what he actually put up.
Even with his difficult first two seasons, Vazquez had 12.2 bWAR over his first 5 seasons in the rotation compared to Archer’s 12.0. As both Vazquez and Archer benefitted from FIP numbers, figuring in fWAR puts Vazquez at 18.2 over his first five seasons while Archer is at 17.5.
Another way that the two are similar pitchers is in their offerings. Archer works with a fastball that Pitch Info rated at 95.8 MPH on average that he threw 47.5% of the time in 2017. He utilized a slider at 89.1 MPH 43.8% of the time and a change up at 86.1 MPH 8.6% of the time.
Vazquez’s pitch mix looks very similar. He didn’t have the same premium velocity, but he had an average four-seam fastball velocity via Pitch Info of 93.8 in 2007 (the first year of available data). He used his four-seamer 35.6% of the time at that time, along with using a 92.8 MPH two-seamer 17.5% of the time. Vazquez’s best pitches were his breaking pitches, and he utilized his slider and curve ~35% of the time that Pitch Info tracked his pitch mix.
While Archer has a 3.63/3.46/3.43 ERA/FIP/xFIP career line, it matches well with Vazquez’s 4.22/3.91/3.74 ERA/FIP/xFIP career line, leading some credence to those who say that while Archer could have an uber-elite season or two like Vazquez was able to put up in 2009 with the Braves, he’s most likely going to be more of a innings guy with solid results than a pure ace.
Ervin Santana
Santana was originally signed by the Angels out of the Dominican Republic in 2000 at 17 years old. He worked his way up the Angels system, quickly establishing himself as one of the premium young arms in the game.
In 2002, Santana went 14-8 and struck out 146 over 147 innings in the Midwest League at 19 years old, earning him the #59 overall prospect ranking from Baseball America. He followed that up in 2003 by excelling in high-A and AA, posting a 2.80 ERA over 154 1/3 innings with 153 strikeouts, bumping up to the #29 overall prospect in the game.
Santana missed much of 2004 due to injury, but when he returned in 2005, he was excellent in AAA, nearly immediately earning his way to the big league rotation. He debuted with the Angels in 2005 at 22 years old, going 12-8 over 23 starts and 133 2/3 innings, with a 4.65 ERA, 1.39 WHIP, and a 47/99 BB/K ratio.
Santana struggled again with his control in 2006, though he did win 16 games, giving him the leeway to really struggle in 2007 before he was sent back down to the minor leagues with a 5.76 ERA in 150 innings.
Santana came out in 2008 and flashed the excellence his unpredictable young arm contained, going 16-7 over 32 starts, pitching 219 innings, with a 3.49 ERA, 1.12 WHIP, and a 47/214 BB/K ratio, earning his first All-Star game.
That first big season really showed the elite aspects of “Big Erv” when his slider was at its best and he could locate it well. Santana struggled with this inconsistency for four more seasons with the Angels.
He seemed to have something click, however, when he reached Kansas City in 2013, and he’s been an excellent inning-eater in a rotation ever since, and that is the player that compares well to Archer.
Taking bWAR into play, Santana certainly has more negative value seasons in his background than does Archer, but his peak seasons early in his career were better than anything Archer has produced. If you compare their first five seasons, Santana posted 8.2 bWAR compared to Archer’s 12.0. However, the last five seasons, Santana has posted a 14 bWAR.
So, he compares well to Vazquez and Santana…what should the true value be for Archer then in a deal?
So what should his value be?
While Archer’s performance may not be an elite ace pitcher as perceived, it’s important to realize that even when comparing him to someone like Santana, Santana has provided just over $100 million in value the last five seasons, even considered the 29th most valuable pitcher in baseball the last 5 seasons by Fangraphs.
Going forward, if Archer is providing an average of $20 million in value per season, he is currently signed for just over $34 million for the next four years, breaking down to just over $8.5 million per season of salary. At that rate, he’d provide $80 million of production while being paid $34 million, giving his team a production value of $46 million from the next four seasons.
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Based on the research that Fangraphs put into valuing prospects and released last offseason, that would mean along the lines of a 50 future value (FV) hitter and two 45 FV pitchers or two 55 FV pitchers.
To give an example of what that would mean in prospects, I took the recent prospect list for the Milwaukee Brewers, one of the deeper farm systems in the game. The first scenario would be a package of Isan Diaz, Freddy Peralta, and Marcos Diplan.
The second scenario would be a package of Corbin Burnes and Luis Ortiz. Of course, that is significantly less than most would expect to see in a package for Archer going back to the Tampa Bay Rays.
Based on 2017 grades for the Yankees list (some players already traded), that would be a package of Jorge Mateo, Chance Adams, and Jordan Montgomery in the first scenario, and James Kaprielian and Justus Sheffield in the second scenario.
Obviously that first scenario a year later looks like a fairly good value for Archer, though the second one is not exactly stellar.
So now that we’ve explored all that, what do you think Archer should bring back in trade? Are the Tampa Bay Rays asking too much, or is Archer’s contract worth enough to make his value high, even with the concerns expressed here?