Here at BPMilwaukee, Andrew Salzman surveyed Schoop’s season and the roster factors related to the arbitration-eligible veteran, and also analyzed Schoop’s batting elements in early August. Salzman noted the declining aspects of Schoop’s plate approach, which resulted in a general profile of weak contact involving groundballs and pop-ups (both headed in the wrong direction). Paul Noonan offered a thorough critique of the logic of the trade during the deadline press cycle. Noonan illustrated the confusing logic of using Schoop in potentially interchangeable roster strategies at second base (including a potential platoon scenario), and highlights the difficulty of the second baseman fitting into the batting order.

Evaluating Schoop according to his Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) progression complicates the matter. While Schoop undoubtedly declined in 2018, his stature as an arbitration-eligible player and his exceptional 2017 season impacts almost any pricing mechanism of his performance. If the Brewers take Schoop through the arbitration process, they cannot decrease his salary according to his performance (as salaries are protected through the arbitration process, which values service time more than performance). In terms of overall career progression, Schoop’s production remains close to a $11 million per season value, which is his estimated arbitration salary according to Cot’s Contracts; other estimates are similar, assessing approximately $10 million in 2019 salary for Schoop.

The following table estimates Schoop’s three-year surplus value, which roughly means evaluating Schoop’s production and scarcity (or, production and cost), and derives one-year contracts from those models. A “harmonic mean” contract is used to balance overall 2014-2018 surplus values with the highest possible value from that time period; this is an attempt to even out the roughest edges of these value estimates.

It’s not hard to see a scenario in which Schoop is worth $10 to $11 million; in fact, balancing high- and low-value figures for Schoop places his ideal contract in that neighborhood. Even if Schoop is not “truly” worth $10 million or $11 million, it should not be difficult to see a League Championship Series caliber team overpay a player if they believe they can yield the best possible performance from that player. The difficulty is determining whether Schoop fits that logic.

An additional difficulty is that because Schoop is so young, the “Aging Curve Logic” suggests that he should be working in a prime season, and therefore produce quality performances. Yet, relying on an aging curve to promote a bounce back season from Schoop is somewhat dubious, as there are numerous disagreements about peak age, evidence that season-over-season statistics become less volatile once a player reaches age-26, and a recognition that different types of players age in different ways, anyway (Silver 2015, 81-86). There is a very real sense that Schoop already “is who he is.”

As of March 30, 2018, PECOTA picked Bret Boone, Howie Kendrick, and Jeff Kent as the age-26 comparable players for Schoop. Kendrick is an interesting pick, as his 2010 season fell backwards from a 2009 breakout, but Kendrick eventually recovered to produce better offensive value. Kent is an interesting pick because at age-26 he was not yet “Jeff Kent,” and there were some real doubts about what he might become. Boone is more interesting still, as the young phenom fell back during 1995-1997 campaigns, and produced fringe average seasons prior to breaking out again during his early 30s. These last two comparisons should be kept in mind, as it could be possible that Schoop takes several years to continue developing aspects of his plate approach, and that his 2018 and 2019 season have little to no bearing on what Schoop eventually becomes. This may not appear to be a likely scenario, but it’s a possibility worth keeping in mind given the long and often unpredictable twists of player development.

The simple point is that projecting and pricing 2019 Schoop is not simply a binary exercise; his future is not one basic either/or scenario.

With these caveats in mind, I investigated MLB seasons with at least 300 plate appearances in their age-24, 25, and 26 seasons during the Wild Card Era (1995-present) with the intention of finding players similar to Schoop’s extreme plate discipline and power approach. This is a biased sample in several ways, most importantly in the sense of seeking out “starting roles,” which I roughly designated as players with 300 or more plate appearances (which reasonably excludes players with catastrophic injuries, fringe players, and many bench players). Additionally, the sample is confined to the institutional, player development, and game constraints of the last generation, which means that this survey is in no way representative of some “true population” of age-24, 25, or 26 players throughout baseball history. Additionally, by excluding minor league players of the same age groups, I am not fully assessing Schoop’s development and plate discipline against potential replacements or other developmental trends in the game, which is another limitation for assessing players by age. Given these biases, I am reasonably asking, “Who are relatively recent MLB starting players who approach the game like Schoop?,” and “How did these players age?”; since this is not any sort of sample representative of a population, I am using this to describe development trends rather than predict Schoop’s path in 2019.

(1) Schoop and Grichuk. In the last 24 seasons, there is one player who matches Schoop’s general trend of striking out more than 20 percent of the time, walking less than 6 percent of the time, and homering more than 3.5 percent of the time during each of his age-24, 25, and 26 seasons. Interestingly enough, that player is also a contemporary of Schoop, Randal Grichuk. Even within these general parameters, Grichuk is quite different than Schoop, as his walk totals are sometimes closer to that 6 percent threshold, and the strike outs are also much higher; Grichuk is more of a “Three True Outcomes Hitter” (relying on strike outs, walks, and homers) than Schoop, who is more of a bizarre type of contact hitter.

It is startling that even given the general acceptance of strike outs over the last generation, and the proliferation of home-run based batting approaches, baseball simply does not produce batting profiles like Schoop. This could be a good thing for the Brewers, as the club certainly seems comfortable working with unorthodox plate approaches; for example, another recent Stearns era player with an unprecedented approach is Keon Broxton; additionally, another unprecedented role on the Brewers’ roster is Hernan Perez. It certainly cannot be said that Stearns is squeamish about working with relatively oddball player profiles, and that trait probably helps to explain his ability to quickly turn around the Brewers franchise by assembling a bunch of high-floor players with extremely prominent scouting flaws. The only question now is whether Stearns will pay $10 million for that privilege.

(2) Examining “low walk” players (Schoop and Salvador Perez). Working with the parameters defined above (1995-present survey), Baseball Prospectus CSV provided 29,397 players overall, which whittled down to 6,495 players with 300 (or more) plate appearances; when searching for players with at least 300 plate appearances in each of their age-24, 25, and 26 seasons, I constructed a batch of 246 players for analysis (thus the above caveats for sample bias). This is quite an interesting group of players, and as one might expect from the present biases, it’s a very productive group of players:

Within this group of players, the most striking and promising trait for comparison with Schoop was walk rate, which was a good indicator to separate comparisons and descriptions of development from big walk, big strike out, big home run players. For Schoop’s intriguing trait is generally huge power (and indeed, he consistently produced better-than-median power for this group) without corresponding high walk totals. Thus, it wouldn’t do much good to compare Schoop to Mike Trout, Adam Dunn, Prince Fielder, Edgardo Alfonzo, and other age-26 walk monsters; those players are doing something different at the plate to reach their prodigious power. So, I isolated a group of 37 low-walk total players that posted an additional 300 (or more) plate appearances during their age-27 campaign, in order to describe an age-26 to age-27 aging pattern for these players. This is quite a fun group!

Here, the top table shows the change in category performance from age-26 to age-27 season, while the bottom table shows the basic age-26 production for Wins Above Replacement Player, Plate Appearances, True Average, and Strike Outs / Walks / Home Runs.

By plate discipline (K / BB / HR), the most comparable player to Jonathan Schoop on this table was Salvador Perez. Perez was able to cut down the strike outs and tap into more power during his age-27 campaign, which provided a boost back to league average batting production for the catcher. Jedd Gyorko was the best of these players at age-27, but did so by completely retooling both walks and home run power; this is a demonstration that large scale plate discipline changes can occur on a season-over-season basis. What is striking is that even among players who are comparable to Schoop in terms of low walk rates, there are very few that strike out as much as Schoop, or hit for big power. Hence the lack of comparable players, save for Randal Grichuk.

Schoop has his work cut out for his age-27 season, as the middle infielder can retain value through his power if his strike outs and groundball / pop-up fluctuations do not impede that power. He’s a strange $10 million gamble for a front office, as the general ideal of age-27 seasons from players with 4.0+ WARP seasons on their resumes suggests bright futures rather than large question marks. Yet, there could be reason to suspect that Schoop may age differently than other prime age middle infielders, both due to his consistently better than average power and due to his extreme plate discipline. Nobody hits like Schoop, and in some sense this ought to result in a vote of confidence from GM Stearns when the opt-in is a one-year gamble. But the lean months of 2018 speak loudly, where the power was rendered empty by low batting averages and the lack of another offensive carrying tool when that one vanished. So here we are, fixated on a relatively marginal roster deal, looking for excellent production in the middle of the diamond.

Citation

Silver, Nate. 2015. The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t.. Penguin.

This post was updated at 5:24 PM on November 23, 2018 to correct the figures in the Grichuk / Schoop table.

The top play of the game instead went to Matt Carpenters double in the second inning.

Wily Peralta was in his usual bad form today, leaving the ball in the middle of the plate and giving up a lot of hard contact. Grichuk opened the frame lining a single to left field. Yadier Molina followed with a double putting runner on second and third. Kolten Wong then hit a sacrifice fly to left field, to score Grichuk and putting the first run on the board. After Aledmys Diaz flied out, for the second out of the inning, opposing pitcher Jaime Garcia singled putting runners on the corner with two outs and Matt Carpenter at the plate. Carpenter is famous for grinding out at-bats and this one was no different, as, on the seventh pitch of the at-bat, he took the Peralta offering to right field on a liner for a double, scoring two runs and giving the Cardinals a 3-0 lead early on.

WORST PLAY (WPA):
When the opposing pitcher gets more hits than your entire team, you know it’s been a pretty bad day. Ya, if you missed this game, Garcia got more hits than he allowed.

On the bright side, Martin Maldonado made this pretty sweet play.

Ok, so Jeremy Hazelbaker probably shouldn’t have been stealing in that situation. Maldonado’s one of the best defensive catchers in the game and he’s got a pretty damn good arm, plus with Halliday at the plate, Peralta pitching and only one out, the Cardinals might have wasted a good opportunity to get ahead early on. Of course, though, none of that really mattered.

Key Moment:

You probably know what’s coming here. After striking out Matt Holliday and walking Brandon Moss, Wily Peralta gave up this homer to Randal Grichuk.

Keon Broxton almost, and probably should’ve had that but that wasn’t the weirdest part of this play.

Ya, Grichuk passed Moss who was tagging up at first base.

It’s one of those plays that makes people say, “I’ve never seen anything like that before and I’ve been watching baseball for X years.”

That’s a pretty weird play indeed. But, again the play itself wasn’t the strangest part of the events that unfolded. The strangest part was that A) the umps missed it and didn’t call Grichuk out, and B) worst of all the Brewers also missed it and didn’t ask for the play to be challenged.

No excuses from #Brewers on missing Grichuk passing runner on HR. Counsell: “All our eyes missed it. Everyone missed it.”

— Tom (@Haudricourt) April 14, 2016

Counsell did note that 1B umpire John Hirschbeck also missed obvious call on Grichuk: “His job is to watch that.”

— Tom (@Haudricourt) April 14, 2016

TREND TO WATCH:

If the plan to start Wily Peralta on opening was done to give him more confidence, well then Counsel is going to need to come up with a new plan, and quickly.

Peralta has made three starts thus far, in the first start he pitched four innings and a third and gave up 6 runs. In his second start he performed slightly better giving up five runs in four innings pitched, and finally today, he went five innings giving up five runs. If quick with your math, that’s good for a 10.13 ERA and a 7.45 FIP.

In other words, Peralta’s off to a rough start. The question now is, how long to the Brewers stick with this performance. They have options in the minors with Zachary Davies and Jorge Lopez. Lopez hasn’t gotten off to a strong start in Triple-A but Davies is sporting an ERA of 2 after his first two starts.

If Peralta keeps up this type of performance, then the Brewers might be looking to give one of these young starters a chance sooner rather than later.

UP NEXT:
The Brewers will be back in action Friday against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Jimmy Nelson will get the start for the Brew Crew and will look to keep up his solid performance.

The Brewers will be facing Jeff Locke who’s gotten off to a good start with his 1.50 ERA.

Top Play (WPA):
The only candidates for top play came in the bottom of the first, as the Cardinals jumped out to a 3-0 lead which they would not relinquish. The top play according to WPA was Randal Grichuk’s double with one out (.095). Matt Holliday scored on the play, scoring the game’s second run.

The inning was set up by Jeremy Hazelbaker’s triple with one out. Ryan Braun made an ill-fated attempt at a sliding catch and the ball bounced past him to the wall. It was a hit regardless, but the slide gave Hazelbaker the opportunity for at least an extra base. The ball tailed away from Braun, but he should have played it more conservatively. Matt Holliday followed that up with a double to right field, before he scored on Grichuk’s double. The Cards would score their 3^rd run of the inning on a Yadier Molina single.

The second inning featured two more Cardinals runs to make the game 5-0. Alemdys Diaz hit a double which bounced off third base, and then scored on a triple by Matt Carpenter, which was misplayed by Domingo Santana. The fifth run was scored on a Hazelbaker sacrifice fly.

Jungmann was pulled in the 3^rd inning after allowing two doubles and a walk. An optimist would look at his start and think he may have had a better day if Braun and Santana hadn’t flubbed balls hit their way. A pessimist would say that the misplays hurt, but Jungmann got knocked around and was giving up consistent solid contact. There are only so many explanations one can give when a pitcher gives up 7 extra base hits and takes 60 pitches to record 6 outs.

Worst Play (WPA):
Jonathan Lucroy grounded into a double play in the top of first with one out and runners on 1^st and second. WPA recorded the play as -.085. After that play, the Brewers never threatened. As the Cardinals scored nine runs in the first three innings, the Brewers’ only base runner in the 2^nd and 3^rd was a two out walk from Domingo Santana. No play was worth more than .002 after the 3^rd as Wacha made fairly easy work of the Brewers, whose only run was scored on a Chris Carter home run.

Trend to Watch:
It’s been a week, and so it’s hard to get too worked up about anything that’s happened so far. However, Scooter! Coming into the season, it’s fair to say that Gennett’s future with the Brewers was by no means assured. Though the Brewers seem to want Gennett to succeed, his profile isn’t much to write home about, as Seth Victor has discussed here and here. His defense isn’t great, he can’t hit lefties, and any power he may have had has been MIA since 2014.

But Gennett has started 6 of the Brewers’ 7 games so far, and has a hit in each start. He also has four walks. As a reference point, his fourth walk last year occurred on June 24. If he’s worked on his pitch recognition, then there’s a chance that perhaps he’s grown as a hitter and can at least be a serviceable second baseman and lineup regular. He’s never had an OBP approaching his current batting average of .409, but even chopping 50 points off that would put him close to his rookie year OBP, when he showed promise.

This slightly disingenuous chart shows his exit velocity has also increased at least through the first week of the season. However, there’s some reason for skepticism. While he’s hit three home runs this season, those are also his only extra base hits. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he’ll be exposed as his home run rate lowers to a realistic level. So we may be a seeing a new Scooter, or these paragraphs will be laughable by the middle of June. Yay early regular season baseball!

Up Next:
The Brewers have today off to lick their wounds and get ready for the rest of the series. Chase Anderson will look to follow up his first solid start of the season against Mike Leake on Wednesday evening, followed by the series finale on Thursday afternoon.