What Does Tommy Pham Bring To The Padres?
It’s hard to win a trade with the Tampa Bay Rays. They have arguably the best front office in baseball, and inarguably the most efficient front office in baseball. The Rays only have one weakness: dollars. They don’t have many of them to spend and, while they are very good at spending them wisely, their lack of authorization to run anything close to a league-average payroll means they have to do a lot of shuffling when their players start to get remotely expensive. The Padres have attempted to exploit this weakness by acquiring one Tommy Pham in exchange for Hunter Renfroe and Xavier Edwards, a well-regarded prospect that Blake Snell did not appear happy to acquire.
Tommy Pham is not like most baseball players. He’s an absolute machine when it comes to using analytical information to improve his game. As a person who writes about baseball analytics, he is my favorite Padre for that exact reason. So, what’s the story on Tommy Pham, and what should we expect from him now that he’s a member of the Padres?
Pham was a bit of a late bloomer. He was drafted in the 16th round back in 2006 but – thanks to some unusual vision problems – he didn’t make his first MLB appearance until his age-26 season, and that was only in a four-game cameo for the Cardinals. Even after overcoming his vision problems, he had a hard time staying on the field, playing only 136 games from 2014-2016. In 2017, though, everything changed for Pham.
2017 Season
In 530 PAs across 128 games, Pham put up a .306/.411/.520 line with 23 homers, good for a 149 wRC+ (!) and 6.2 fWAR. That is an absolutely elite season. Unfortunately, Pham has not been able to match that level of production since, but it’s also really hard to match that level of production. Only 16 players exceed that mark in 2019, so he doesn’t have to be nearly that good to give the Padres a major boost in 2020.
2018 Season
Pham was excellent again in 2018, posting a 130 wRC+ and 4.1 fWAR for the Cardinals and Rays. That’s not quite as good as his 2017 season, but it’s still right around what’s generally considered to be the “all-star threshold,” and would’ve put him in the top 50-ish players in baseball last year (pitchers included).
2019 Season
Pham’s 2019 is a bit deceiving. He was still good, although he ended up “only” accumulating 3.3 fWAR in 145 games. That’s not an elite season, but it’s far better than any Padres outfielder was in 2019. His slash line was almost identical to his 2018 season, but he wasn’t making quite the same quality of contact, as evidenced by his good-but-not-spectacular .357 xwOBA.
Why is he a great fit for San Diego?
Pham brings one particular skill that the Padres are in desperate need of: he gets on base. Pham has a career .373 OBP, propped up by a 12.2% walk rate (MLB average in 2019 was 8.3% per Baseball Savant). The 2019 Padres were 26th in baseball with a .308 OBP, which is not going to cut it if the Padres plan to be a playoff team in 2020. Pham maintains his excellent walk rates by not swinging at bad pitches. That sounds simple, but it’s something we can quantify pretty well. Check out Pham’s O-Swing% (percentage of pitches swung at outside of the strike zone):
Pham has consistently been around 10% above average, and he was close to 12% above average in 2019. This gives him a very high floor as far as OBP is concerned, so expect to see him continue to produce more high-OBP seasons in the future. He generally carries a patient approach, swinging at a slightly lower percentage of strikes than league-average, but that’s fine as long as he continues to make plenty of hard contact, and he’s been well above-average in that category on an annual basis. If he can combine that hard contact with an increase in average launch angle, he’ll become an absolute monster at the plate. He’s not quite the ground ball machine that Eric Hosmer (career 54.5 GB%) is, but Pham does hit enough ground balls (career 50.8 GB%) that it hurts his overall performance quite a bit.
Defensive weirdness
Here’s the thing about defensive metrics: they do not necessarily attempt to determine if a fielder is good or bad, but rather how good/bad the player was in a specific time frame (usually a season). Players have up and down defensive seasons in the same way that they do offensive seasons, and we have a lot more ways to quantify offensive value than defensive value. That does not mean that defensive metrics are “useless,” but it does mean that they aren’t really meant to be predictive for the most part. That being said, Pham is something of an interesting case. Here’s a quick look at his defense over the past few years by Outs Above Average (OAA) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR):
Both OAA and UZR are in agreement that Pham was good in 2017 and roughly average in 2018. It gets weird in 2019, though. UZR saw Pham as roughly average, while OAA had Pham as one of the worst outfielders in baseball, with -11 outs above average, the 4th worst OAA among qualified outfielders in 2019. It’s unusual to see a split this large, but it happens occasionally. Why would there be such a large discrepancy in these numbers? How could he be an average defender according to UZR while being worse than Nick Castellanos, Adam Jones, and Kyle Schwarber according to OAA? Time to chase a rabbit for a moment. Here are a few differences in the methodology of how OAA and UZR are contrived:
– OAA measures defensive value against all outfielders, while UZR measures defensive value against other outfields at the same position.
-Each metric uses a different unit of measurement. OAA measures defensive value in the form of outs (duh), while UZR converts the value of each out into runs.
-The run value of a batted ball is dictated by the type and direction of the batted ball, meaning a ball requiring an outfielder to travel back towards the wall has a higher run value than a ball hit in front of the outfielder. This is incorporated into UZR’s formula. The value of an out does not change with direction, it only changes with catch probability. This is what OAA is measuring.
-UZR also factors in arm value, double play value, range value, and errors. OAA is strictly about catch probability, so it’s mostly measuring range.
The third point is particularly important for Pham. OAA actually had Pham at +1 OAA on balls in which he traveled “back”, while he had a total of -12 OAA on balls hit in any other direction, arriving at his net total of -11 OAA. So, Pham was roughly average on the balls that are weighted the most heavily by UZR, which gives his overall UZR a major boost. Additionally, Pham had a solid arm and made no errors in 2019, earning him an extra 1.5 and 1.4 runs, respectively, according to UZR. Furthermore, he was only being compared to other left fielders by UZR, while OAA compares him to all outfielders (remember, he was still terrible by OAA when compared to other left fielders). OAA doesn’t care about arm value or errors, so while Pham may have avoided official errors in 2019, he failed to make at least six plays which had a catch probability of 95% or greater. Scorebook errors are subjective, and the ability to remove errors from the equation is one of the strengths of OAA. Since we know OAA is all about covering ground, let’s take a look at his “jump components”:
Pham really struggled with getting a jump on the ball in 2019 relative to his career numbers. Obviously, if a player is getting a worse jump on the ball, they’re going to cover less ground. This hurt Pham’s UZR (he had -2.5 “range runs”), but it absolutely killed his OAA. Also of note: the Rays positioned Pham four feet deeper on average than he’s been positioned in any other season, presumably because they believe that preventing extra-base hits is everything, which is probably correct. Take from that what you will since we’ve already spent entirely too much time covering defensive metrics.
What’s Pham going to look like in 2020?
Steamer projects Pham to perform almost exactly as he did last year, predicting a 120 wRC+ and 3.3 fWAR. Zips is right there with Steamer, projecting Pham for 3.4 fWAR with a 122 OPS+ (wRC+ isn’t available from ZiPS at this time). He’s a pretty safe bet to match this projection, and while his ceiling isn’t what it used to be, he can still do enough damage to clear that mark by a significant margin. There’s probably some age-related decline going on, but not to the extent that we should be terribly worried. One thing is for certain, if he can get the ball in the air more often while continuing to make lots of hard contact, he can blow his projections out of the water.
All stats are courtesy of Fangraphs unless otherwise noted.
