Hunter Renfroe Signs

the Sox are making moves

Perhaps as a warning to me about starting this site, the Red Sox have signed outfielder Hunter Renfroe. He gets a one year, $3.1 million contract, though he has two years of team control beyond this season if the Red Sox want to keep him. Which is to say, if he’s good, he stays, and if he’s bad, he goes. This is as team-friendly as it gets, so for all you player-haters out there, you’re gonna love this deal.

Renfroe himself is a former first round pick of the Padres in 2013 and was drafted by the Red Sox in the 31st round way the heck back in 2010 but didn’t sign.

As for Renfroe the baseball player, here is a list of things Renfroe does well:

1. Look like Mike Trout.

   Matthew Kory @mattymatty2000

   Is Mike Trout playing for the Rays?

   

   If they sign a dude who looks like Mookie Betts, they’ll have the Red Hoax outfield. I went with ‘hoax’ because of the X but I’ll accept, Fraud Sox, Con Sox, Fake Sox or whatever you can come up with which will almost certainly be better than any of these because I am generally bad at this. Renfroe looks a lot like Mike Trout and that’s kinda weird is the point here. This could come in handy if the World Series is tied going into the 24th inning and the commissioner invokes the costume party challenge tiebreaker.

2. Hit left-handed pitching. Renfroe had a 137 wRC+ and an .912 OPS in his career against lefties. That’s really good! How about against righties, you say? No no, this is a list of things he *can* do.

3. Play defense. He’s a good defensive corner outfielder. He played right field exclusively with the Rays last season, but he’s played left as recently as 2019 with the Padres. The defensive numbers are all over the board (below average last year, well above average in 2019) but the consensus seems to be that he’s an above average defender in the corners, and who doesn’t love a good consensus?

4. That’s it.

For $3.1 million, that’s not a bad list. He fits in pretty well on Boston’s roster considering their two starting corner outfielders, Andrew Benintendi and Alex Verdugo, are both left-handed. Verdugo doesn’t need to be platooned (Benny is another story for another time) but if either get a day off, it would stand to reason it would be against a left-handed pitcher, in which case, boom, there you go. So even with two entrenched regulars in the outfield corners, Renfroe will get a decent chunk of playing time.

Now the fine print on what has been a Happy Fun Ball post. What Renfroe hasn’t been able to do over his career, and the reason he was non-tendered and available in the first place, is: he can’t hit righties. This is *the* central problem with the player and the reason Renfroe got cut instead of signed to an extension. He has an 87 wRC+ (100 is league average, so 13 percent below league average) and a .717 OPS against right-handers in his career, and that dipped in 2020 to a 54 wRC+ and .561 OPS.

2020 was a super strange season for a whole bunch of reasons not only how short it was, so I’m very hesitant to put much weight behind any of the season’s numbers, especially if they are different than what a player has done over the course of his career. For Renfroe though, while his numbers are more extreme they are not wholly different. He has struggled against right-handed pitching his entire career with the exception of 2018. Every other season he’s been somewhere between bad and wretched against same-sided pitching. Could that change? I mean, sure, but it’s not likely, it’s not something you’d sign him to do, and it’s not why he’s now with Boston.

The Red Sox still need a center fielder, though if they bring back Jackie Bradley, Jr., Renfroe’s skillset makes even more sense. Consider that sentence a vote to bring back Jackie, please and thank you.

If he’s deployed correctly by old/new manager Alex Cora, Renfroe offers above average production from the outfield corners, just not on the regular. There’s value in that, even if he looks like he should offer more.