Red Sox top prospect Michael Chavis tests positive for PEDs

After a massive breakout season, news of Michael Chavis’ positive test for PEDs is incredibly disappointing, but perhaps not so surprising.

Top Boston Red Sox prospect, Michael Chavis, has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The twenty-two-year-old corner infielder was found to have Dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHMCT) in his system this past winter. DHMCT is an anabolic steroid that has been in use since the 1970’s. It was most famously part of the East German Olympic doping scandal. It is the same substance Chris Colabello got suspended for in 2016.

This news is a crushing blow for the young slugger who had just completed his best season and put himself back on the map as a prospect to watch. Call To The Pen had him ranked number 35 this spring, and he appeared in the top 100 for all of the major publications.

2017 was a monster year for the third baseman. He hit .318/.388/.641 with 17 home runs over 59 games for the Salem Red Sox. Chavis then followed that up with a slash line of .250/.310/.492 and 14 HR in AA Portland. It was a breakout campaign after two very disappointing seasons.

Michael Chavis’ history with the Red Sox.

Selected 26th overall in the 2014 draft, Chavis wasn’t a power hitter coming out of high school. He was lauded for his bat to ball skills, not his pop. His first partial season was only 39 games, and he finished the season with a 124 wRC+. All was as expected.

Then in 2015, he played 109 games for class-A Greenville hitting 16 home runs at 9% worse than league average. That was a home run in 13.8% of his fly balls. A nice step forward but compared to the 28.3% per flyball he managed Salem in 2017, he was still a very different hitter.

The following season he repeated at Greenville and was mostly a disappointment. Rather than improve dramatically in his second shot at the league, he managed just a 107 wRC+ with eight home runs over 74 games. He was promoted to Salem for seven games to finish the year but did nothing of note while there.

Now, injuries played a part, but to that point he had not redefined himself as a power hitter and his previously lauded hit tool was a long forgotten memory. Injuries or not, Chavis wasn’t on anyone’s radar as a potential top prospect.

Out of nowhere…

His breakout was a welcome sight for a farm system that had been horribly thinned out through trades and graduations. With 31 home runs across two levels, and the long ball still being featured after making the difficult jump to AA, the formerly forgotten prospect suddenly had a big league future in front of him.

If his AA numbers were to be a more accurate gauge of his talent than his dramatic run through High-A, he was still looking at being something similar to Lucas Duda at the plate. If he could stick at third base, that was a solid profile for an everyday regular. He was back on track.

And then came the news.

Chavis has issued a statement, denying any knowledge of where the substance came from or how it got into his body. You can read that statement here:

It’s not for us to decide whether his statement is true or not. And honestly, it doesn’t really matter if it is. There is now reason to doubt that the power spike we saw from him last season was genuine. Can steroids account for the jump in doubles and home runs? No, of course not. But we have no way to know how much of a boost he got if he did, in fact, have these drugs in his system all season.

What we do know is that his ISO (isolated slugging), which is calculated by subtracting batting average from slugging percentage as a measure of power, had never been higher than .185 before. For reference, a .185 would have ranked 75th in the majors last year, just ahead of Corey Seager.

His ISOs in 2017? .323 in Salem and .242 in Portland. Even if we take the lower of the two, that would have ranked 26th, tied with Kris Bryant. That’s elite power. The .323 would have tied Mike Trout for 4th and put him in the top tier of power hitters with Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Joey Gallo and Cody Bellinger.

Where does this leave us?

At this point, Michael Chavis has erased most of, if not all of the progress he made in 2017. Not because his performance is completely nullified, but because he has introduced enough doubt about the legitimacy of his power numbers that we must wait for him to serve his suspension and get back on the field before we can start making guesses about where his true talent level lies.

Next: Rodriguez returns after unique surgery

This is a bad day for fans of the Red Sox. It is a bad day for Michael Chavis. And it is a bad day for fans of the most beautiful sound in all of baseball: