Sign Xander, You Dopes

This isn't difficult. You're making it difficult. Don't make it difficult.

Xander Bogaerts is set to reach free agency this coming off-season and the Red Sox are set to lose their de facto team captain and face of the franchise, not to mention starting shortstop if they don’t re-sign him. Based on everything available here on the outside, they’re not going to re-sign him.

On the face of it, you might say, why not? Or perhaps you might scream, “WHY NOT?” And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Xander has hit .318 this season (all stats through Tuesday’s games), good enough for second in the AL, just .001 behind the Twins’ Luis Arraez for the AL batting title lead (though .011 behind the MLB-leading Freddie Freeman). Even more in Xander’s favor is his on-base percentage of .385. It’s eighth in baseball, which is quite good, but it’s first for qualifying shortstops, and by a lot, almost 30 points ahead of second-place Carlos Correa.

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Then there’s Xander’s defense at shortstop. Fielding has never been his calling card, and in recent seasons there have been calls to move him off the position. This season however has been if not a revelation, then at least a big step forward. Publicly available metrics have 2022 as Xander’s best defensive season in his 10 year career. FanGraphs has Bogaerts ranked as a better defensive shortstop this season than Trea Turner, Javier Baez, and Corey Seager. Raise your hand if you predicted that.

Put it all together and Xander has 6.1 fWAR, seventh most in baseball among position players, tied with Francisco Lindor of the Mets. That’s not an Aaron Judge walk-year, but it’s not too far off.

So Xander obviously wants to stay in Boston and he’s obviously good. Why haven’t the Red Sox re-signed him? Despite all the glowing numbers above, there are reasons.

Bogaerts will be 30 on October 1. Generally, it’s not extraordinarily smart to give a 30-year-old middle infielder hundreds of millions of dollars. Corey Seager was 28 when he signed long term with Texas last off-season. Carlos Correa was 26 when he signed a three year huge money deal with Minnesota. Francisco Lindor was entering his age-27 season with the Mets when he signed for $300+ million. Sort the list of shortstops by fWAR and you have to get to 11th before you find one over the age of 30.

Then there’s defense. But, Matt, you just said Xander is having the best defensive season of his career? Yes, because he is. But shortstops don’t typically improve with age. It’s an incredibly demanding position that requires a skillset possessed by younger players. Also, while this season has been a good one for Xander on the field, that doesn’t mean you can completely dismiss what he’s done defensively in his career to date. There should be some level of skepticism about Xander’s defensive transformation going forward.

Then there’s the offensive numbers. While the batting average and on-base percentage are fantastic, the underlying metrics aren’t. Since Bogaerts became a star in 2018, his average exit velocity (i.e. how hard he hits the ball) has been on a downward trajectory, from the 79th percentile in 2018 (very good!) bit by bit down to 41st percentile in 2022 (not so great).

Then there’s this. Bogaerts is hitting .318, but Baseball Savant shows his Expected Batting Average at .265, a 53 point difference. Why? Bogaerts is batting .361 on ground balls this season. That’s 69 points above his career average and 136 points (!) above what he did last season. I wouldn’t necessarily chalk it entirely up to luck, but that sure seems to be a component of it. I’m sure there are smarter people than me who could better explain why (besides luck) Bogaerts is having so much success hitting the ball on the ground in 2022 versus 2021 and the rest of his career, but the upshot of it is I’m not sure it’s something he can do going forward. The reality is, while the batting average is shiny and screams “PAY ME” looking under the hood for a second makes you wonder a bit what you’d get for your money.

Add all that together and you get the reticence of the Red Sox front office to hand Xander Bogaerts a blank check. When you remember that there may be as many as three younger shortstops with better defensive track records on the free agent market in Carlos Correa, Dansby Swanson, and Trea Turner, and you can start to paint a picture.

So. That’s the argument against giving Xander big bucks. If he’d have signed on for the pittance (relatively) the Red Sox offered him this preseason, the front office would’ve been fine with that. Happy, even. But they clearly just don’t value him on the same level as some of these other guys who are going to be available. How do I know that? If they did, they’d have signed him by now.

None of that stuff above is likely news to you, so thanks for reading this far. Let’s look at a counter-argument to all that.

Let’s start at the top. When you have the opportunity to keep a great player, you keep him and work around any other issues.

What if Xander’s defense falls off as he ages? It might! Or, more accurately, it will! He may and probably will have to move off of shortstop at some point. Oh no! A good player who needs another position! Whatever will we do?!?

This is a little bit like when there are two highly rated minor league shortstops in the same system. It’s not uncommon for fans to think one of them has to be traded. After all, there aren’t two shortstop positions on a major league team. Except, smart prospect people say, the problem you are trying to prevent from occurring - where two All Star shortstops show up at major league spring training simultaneously - never happens. Players move around, players can be traded to fill other positions, stuff happens. Having two good players is not actually a problem, in fact it’s two solutions.

Xander is that. He’s both the starting shortstop and the solution to a problem you don’t know exists yet. He might not be a shortstop long-term. That’s okay. Someone might argue that with Marcelo Mayer and Mikey Romero and Nick Yorke and Cedanne Rafaela and Trevor Story and probably other guys I’m not thinking of there’s no place for Xander on a seven year contract (or whatever he’d sign for). I’d say figure that out when it’s time to figure that out. What’s the worst case scenario? That you end up with two great players (or more!) and only one place on the diamond for them both? Boo hoo. Call me when that happens.

What about potential better options on the free agent market? It’s possible the Red Sox might be better off with Trea Turner or Carlos Correa or Dansby Swanson long term than Xander Bogaerts. But that sort of ignores this one thing: you can sign Xander right now. You can’t sign Turner, Correa or Swanson until they reach free agency, at which point you’ll have to compete with the Dodgers, Braves, Giants, Yankees, and who knows who else for their services. What’s more, the way you sign free agents is typically by being the highest bidder. It’s going to be very expensive to get any of them, probably as expensive as re-signing Bogaerts, and maybe more because nobody really knows with the free agent market.

With Bogaerts you know you’re not going to go to spring training with Christian Arroyo as the starting shortstop. Let Xander walk and all of a sudden that or something catastrophic like that is a possibility.

Well what if Xander isn’t worth his contract? The worst contracts are never because a guy got paid slightly above his “worth.” If he’s productive, being slightly overpaid is a minor problem at most, and an easy one to work around. Nobody complains that Mike Trout produced six WAR when he’s being paid for eight. The problem comes when Anthony Rendon is being paid for five WAR and he’s producing negative two. If Xander stays healthy there’s no real reason to expect a massive drop-off.

But what about all that stuff about batting average on ground balls and stuff? Yeah, that’s a concern, but here’s what I keep coming back to. Xander has been a great player over the course of his career, and that greatness has taken many forms. Ultimately, given everything, his track record, the different skills he’s exhibited over the course of his career, his personality and work ethic, it’s not unreasonable to expect that to continue.

Players great and not all have up and down years in many different ways. Look at the top WAR performers in the league. Many of them have had down seasons in various forms. Nolan Arrenado posted a .312 on-base percentage last season. Manny Machado hit .256 with negative defensive value in his first season with the Padres. Mookie hit .264 last season. Heck, a bunch of young stars (Vlad Guerrero Jr, Ronald Acuna, Fernando Tatis Jr, Juan Soto) have had rough-to-outright-bad 2022 seasons.

There are reasons to not re-sign Bogaerts and those reasons aren’t necessarily wrong or stupid. If the goal is to ‘win’ every contract then signing a 30-year-old shortstop to a big money deal isn’t something you’re going to want to do (and neither is buying a replacement at the top of the free agent market).

Ultimately, smart teams get good players and smarter teams hold on to those good players. If a team is lucky/good enough to have a player like Xander Bogaerts, the smartest thing to do in my opinion is not to overthink it. Sign him, cross shortstop off the 2023 to-do list and move on to the next if many many items.

There are times when, from the outside, things look easy. It’s a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t do that? But we’re outside. We’re not inside. We don’t have all the information. Things can be more complicated than we know on the inside. There are, after all, millions of factors, feelings, plans, emotions, ideas, desires, and it’s just impossible to put them all together when you’re not there, in the middle of it.

This is not one of those times. Sign Xander.