Red Sox Video
On Sunday, our Daniel Fox took a look at Ceddanne Rafaela’s Plate “Discipline,” and the quotation marks were not an accident. Rafaela chases more and walks less than any qualified player in baseball. It’s hard to overstate how disastrous that is. Plate discipline is the problem that can either cause or solve all the other problems. You whiff too much? Well, if you only swing at hittable pitches, you’re going buoy your contact rate by cutting out lots of whiffs on balls in the dirt and fastballs above the zone. You don’t swing very hard? Well, if you only swing at pitches you can really crush, you’ll send your hard-hit rate and exit velocity skyrocketing, because you’ll be cutting out all those mis-hits that come from chasing sliders and getting jammed on high cutters. For a player like Rafaela, who can struggle in both categories, it’s all the more important. Rafaela’s saving grace as a hitter is that he’s pretty good at copying the Isaac Paredes playbook — pulling the ball in the air — and he also benefits from playing in a ballpark well suited to that gambit. He doesn’t necessarily have to crush the ball to lift it over the Green Monster, and when he bounces an even softer-hit ball off it, his speed ensures extra bases in cases where other batters would have been forced to settle for a single. Here's a classic Rafaela double.
Rafaela launched it at just 81.7 mph, nowhere near the 95-mph threshold for hard-hit balls, but he’s got so much speed that the left fielder never even considers trying to throw him out. Still, these skills have combined to bring him just an 82 wRC+, meaning that he’s 18% below league-average as a hitter, which makes him the fifth-worst qualified batter in baseball.
That’s a big problem, especially because plate disciple is very sticky year-over-year. Sports Info Solutions has been tracking plate discipline data since 2002. Over that timeframe, I compared the rookie and veteran chase rates of every player who made at least 250 plate appearances as a rookie and at least 1500 in total.
What you’re seeing is an extremely strong correlation. Once they graduated from rookie status, the average player saw their chase rate improve by just 1.7 percentage points. Evan Gattis, the player with the biggest drop, knocked 8.2 percentage points off his rookie chase rate. But keep in mind that there’s almost nobody on this graph with a chase rate as high as Rafaela’s 46% mark. Even if he were to somehow knock a literally unprecedented 10 points off it, he’d still have one of the highest chase rates in the league. All of this is to confirm what Daniel said on Sunday, that Rafaela “only really has average offensive upside.” His upside as an all-around player, however, is much higher, if he’s put in the right position.
There were plenty of reasons to celebrate the early return of Trevor Story last week. Story has spent so much of his time with the Red Sox on the IL, and he deserves some good news. Rafaela’s defensive performance at shortstop is another reason to celebrate the return. In Story’s absence, the advanced metrics rated Rafaela extremely poorly at short. DRS indicated that he cost the Sox just one run, but both DRP and FRV saw him as losing five runs. That ranked him in the bottom five in baseball, even though he spent fewer than 700 innings at the position. I’m sure that he’d improve if he got more time there, but I think one of the big lessons of this season is that shortstop is not Rafaela’s future. It’s time to get him in center field and let him cook.
Jarren Duran didn’t just handle center field while Rafaela was in the infield, he absolutely crushed it. However, this is where we need to trust what scouts have been telling us for years: Rafaela can be – in fact, might already be – one of the greatest defensive center fielders in the world. Versatility is great, but with his offensive upside capped right around league-average, he’s just not going to be as valuable to the Sox as a middle infielder. In center field, he can be a legitimate weapon, and with Duran manning a corner, the Boston outfield becomes one of the most fearsome defensive units in all of baseball. This season, Statcast has them saving 16 defensive runs; imagine what that number would be with Rafaela and Duran getting everyday reps in the same position.
According to FanGraphs, since 1990, there have been 36 seasons when a position player put up a 4.0-WAR season (which is generally considered All-Star performance) despite being a below-average hitter. Sixteen of those 36 seasons came from center fielders, way more than any other position. In other words, if you’re a player with an iffy bat, playing a fantastic center field represents your best chance by far of playing like a star.
Even before the team decides what to do with Tyler O’Neill, the outfield looks mighty to be crowded next season. Duran and Wilyer Abreu demand a place, and Roman Anthony is doing his best to bust down the door as soon as humanly possible. Still, Rafaela’s contract ensures all but ensures that he’ll be on the roster and in the starting lineup for a long, long time. He should get a chance to make the most of it.
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now