Let's look at it analytically (I'm going to pro-rate this season for a full year
Health
Wong has never been a guy who starts 150+ games, over his career he has averaged about 125/games per year. looking at the last 3 non-covid years he is averaging 130. Trending steady
Hitting
Wong is exactly a 100 wRC+ hitter for his career. over the last 4 year (including Covid) he has a 109 wRC+ with a 109 and 117 with Milwaukee. He also has his largest ISO/HR total of his career the last 2 years (.175 and .188). K rate is up about 2% the last 2 years but given pitching trends that isn't alarming and is still well below 20%. Trending up.
Defense
This is the bad one. He had a 6 UZR/150 coming into this season and a -6.6 UZR/150 this year. If you prefer OAA he had a +14 (or +10 RAA) from 2016-2021 and a -10 (-8 RAA). He has been bad in bunches. He was terrible in April, June and September and okay to good in July/August. for a guy whose career was known for great defense this is troubling. Trending down
Total value
Fangraphs puts his value at 28.4 in 2019, 19.8 in 2021, and 18.3 (prorated) in 2022. This is based on a non-linear weighting of fWAR (WAR 0-1 is worth a lot less than WAR 4-5 even though it is both 1 total). BRef has him at 3.3 in 2021 and 2.6 (prorated) in 2022. Trending down.
Final analysis.
I think you pick it up simply bc it is low risk at 1 year 8 million and it will be difficult to get that much value for 8 million on a 1 year deal. The odds of him going full LC offensively is pretty low as he is currently having his greatest offensive season of his career (LC was trending down for a couple years). The defense is worrying especially with shift bans limiting optimization of 2B position. Additionally once you add SF/GM/BT to lineup that is a lot of similar profiles (low power, high BA types) which could make the offense a bit feckless. I also think giving Turang a time share at 2B/SS/3B would be good for him rather than just giving him 3B. Hedging the Urias bet is a good idea too. The biggest risk to me is he gets injured for the year which is a risk of any player his age.
Loading comments...