Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

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JL21
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Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by JL21 »

There's a lot of discussion about DeJong and where his future lies. He has an extreme profile- lots of Ks, almost no BBs, tons of power, pretty young, and a small sample size.

Let's dig around on Fangraphs and see if we can find some historical comps. First, let's define what it means to be Paul DeJong- or at least, what it is about DeJong that makes his future such a mystery.

-First, he's young. He just turned 24, so we'll want to isolate our list to players between ages 22 and 26. This helps us in two ways. First, it captures players who are on the correct side of the aging curve. Second, it also captures guys with small sample sizes. Speaking of which...

-We're talking about 270 PAs at this point. So let's whittle our sample down to guys between 200 and 800 career PAs.

-We probably also don't want to include guys from a long time ago, because the game was so different. I'm going to start my net at 1990 and expand from there as needed.

-Now comes the hard part- defining the measured parts of DeJong's game thus far. The part that screams at all of us is his K% and his BB%. To get that, we'll simply use K-BB% (currently 27.6%... ouch). We'll try to find players within 4% in either direction of him in that regard- so a K-BB% between 23.6 and 31.6%.

At this point, we're down to 32 players who fill all of the criteria above. But we've missed something- his prodigious power numbers.

-Let's use ISO for the power. He's at a whopping .276. Just to be able to still include anyone in our sample, we'll have to cast a wider net. I'll say any player with an ISO over .200. And by the way... DeJong's .276 ISO is the 2nd highest in our sample. Even in this weird world of very specific players with DeJong's attributes, he's unique.

I'm going to cheat a tiny bit and drop that ISO for our sample down to .194. Doing so gets us an extra player who is probably most pertinent to DeJong.

Whittling everything down, we get 7 players besides DeJong who have: ISO over .194, between age 22 and 26, 200-800 PAs, and a K-BB% between 23.6 and 31.6%.

Joey Gallo
Matt Davidson
Brad Eldred
Dallas McPherson
Taylor Teagarden
Jason Dubois
Tim Beckham

We can pretty much toss Gallo out immediately because his K rate is somehow even higher than DeJong, but his BB rate is 4 times the size. Plus, he's a corner bat who provides defensive value in wildly different ways.

Matt Davidson's a little older, and is playing similarly to DeJong at the same time DeJong is. We have no future Matt Davidson to use as a guide for DeJong.

Brad Eldred did his DeJongish thing at age 25 as a 1B for the PeeRats, and then slowly evaporated out of baseball like one of those kids in Marty's Back to the Future polaroid. It's probably also worth noting that Eldred was a 1B, and not even a good defensive one. He was so bad that his glove wiped out all of his value. There's next to no future for Eldred after exiting his DeJong years because Eldred didn't really have a future beyond his DeJong years.

Dallas McPherson had a similar trajectory to Eldred. He stuck around a little bit longer, but he only amassed about 50 more plate appearances in his career after he departs our DeJong age sample (older than 26). So again... nothing at all that we can infer specifically from McPherson.

Taylor of House Teagarden has been quad-A chaff since exiting his DeJong years. He's a catcher, too, which means he's different from DeJong in a key way. But I guess he's similar in another way- his position allows him to provide value with his glove. All the same, this isn't a good comp.

Dubois did his DeJong thing between 2004 and 2005, and was never heard from again at the MLB level.

And finally, we have the one that matches the most intuitively- Tim Beckham, who is also a middle infielder (a shortstop, even!). His last DeJong year was last season. This is his first post-DeJong season, and it's going about as well as it could despite the Rays throwing him away to the O's. His numbers are fluky (check out his BABIP in an O's uniform), but he's been a good defensive SS, hits for some pop, and generally has overcome his plate discipline issues.

It's an extremely mixed bag. Some observations...

-The presence of Gallo and Beckham on this list- both useful players- lends a little credence to the possibility of DeJong's staying power. Then again...

-The pile of trash that makes up the rest of the list, and how many of them disappeared from baseball altogether, should tell you just how crazy DeJong's balancing act will be.

-I also find it fascinating that half of the list of players fitting this profile are guys currently on MLB rosters, currently regulars. And frankly, none of the players on this list were around before ~2004. MLB has collectively decided to go all-in on this kind of player, more than ever before.

-What I just said implies just how wacky this profile is for a player. But even within that profile, DeJong is the weirdo. His BB rate is the lowest in the group. His ISO is the 2nd largest (behind Gallo). And to make it even weirder, he's a SS, with only Beckham in the mix as a SS. Most of the rest are corner bats and fat guys with no glove whose lone skill- a crapload of power- didn't carry them very far. In other words, Paul DeJong is truly a really [expletive] weird player.

Sadly, we have almost no recent historical precedent to use as a point of reference for DeJong. Most of the litmus tests for these kinds of players are still in the experimentation stage. And unfortunately for DeJong, the ones who aren't in the litmus test stage bordered on total failure at the MLB level. Sorry, I know that's a lot of words just for a shrug, but there you have it.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

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Yea saber-metrics.... I think.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

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If you want to skip the meat, the summation is "Paul DeJong is really [expletive] weird as a player, and he's even weird in the tiny little group of weirdos who play the same way that he does"

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by heyzeus »

This is one of the most fun posts in recent GRB memory. Good job JL.

Interestingly, if you look at his high minors numbers, this might actually be who DeJong is. He had a .271 ISO at AAA with a 24% K Rate (31% in MLB) and 4.7% BB rate (3.7% in MLB). At AA, he still had a pretty good ISO of .200 but walked almost twice as much.

In short: There's almost no way a guy with this plate discipline can maintain a .900 OPS and a 40+ HR pace. (counterpoint: his LD% is just a shade below Aaron Judge's). He also does not have to in order to yield value, as a shortstop who rates above average defensively so far.

What a weird player. And a good one to have, who only cost a 4th round pick 2 years ago.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

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Just for grins, I went back and looked from 1960 to 1989 to see if anyone from that time period fit the parameters I mentioned.

Just one.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by Fat Strat »

JL21 wrote:If you want to skip the meat, the summation is "Paul DeJong is really [expletive] weird as a player, and he's even weird in the tiny little group of weirdos who play the same way that he does"
I wonder what happens to his comps if his MiLB BB% (which we also don't have much of) ends up being truer. At his longest stops in '15 and '16, he had a BB% of 9.3% and 7.2% respectively. His ISO was .151 and .200 respectively. Projections seem to think that his BB% should be in the 5's and his ISO should be just under .200.

I bet if you re-ran everything and just looked for players who have had BB rates between 5-9 and ISO's of around .200 you would see much different comps and much better careers.

I don't think that a BB% of 6.5% and a ISO of .200 is that much of a stretch for DeJong going forward, considering his MiLB profile and the apparent oddities of his current production. Not only does DeJong's MLB #'s look like an aberration compared to the rest of the league. They look like an abberation compared to his own professional career.

AA, age 23: .260/.324/.460; 7.2% BB rate, .200 ISO, .318 BABIP in 552 PA's.
Last edited by Fat Strat on August 17 17, 11:59 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

JL21 wrote:Just for grins, I went back and looked from 1960 to 1989 to see if anyone from that time period fit the parameters I mentioned.

Just one.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by obucard »

Joe Shlabotnik wrote:
JL21 wrote:Just for grins, I went back and looked from 1960 to 1989 to see if anyone from that time period fit the parameters I mentioned.

Just one.

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OMG - Paulie D!! Take care of that hip!
Not playing football will help.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

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Fat Strat wrote:I wonder what happens to his comps if his MiLB BB% (which we also don't have much of) ends up being truer. At his longest stops in '15 and '16, he had a BB% of 9.3% and 7.2% respectively. His ISO was .151 and .200 respectively. Projections seem to think that his BB% should be in the 5's and his ISO should be just under .200.

I bet if you re-ran everything and just looked for players who have had BB rates between 5-9 and ISO's of around .200 you would see much different comps and much better careers.

I don't think that a BB% of 6.5% and a ISO of .200 is that much of a stretch for DeJong going forward, considering his MiLB profile and the apparent oddities of his current production. Not only does DeJong's MLB #'s look like an aberration compared to the rest of the league. They look like an abberation compared to his own professional career.

AA, age 23: .260/.324/.460; 7.2% BB rate, .200 ISO, .318 BABIP in 552 PA's.
Part of the problem is that it's not just the cratered BB rate. It's that it's combined with a miserable K rate, leaving us with a ratio indicating he hasn't yet figured out how to master the strike zone, at least at the MLB level. Hell, for that matter, his K-BB%s in AA and AAA weren't good either. His AA ratio, at the MLB level, would be in appx. the bottom 80th percentile this year. His AAA ratio, at the MLB level, would make him one of the 25 worst in MLB.

But, it was definitely better in MiLB than it has been in MLB. So let's run the same comp treatment, but this time I'll swap out a 6.6% BB rate (his AA/AAA rate) and a 25.6% K rate (again, his AA/AAA rate). I'll leave everything else the same but we want guys with a K-BB% within 4% in either direction of DeJong's 19%. So 15-23%.

Now... this gets us a larger sample- we have 28 players in here. But it's predicated on the assumption that DeJong's AA/AAA plate discipline is more indicative of how he'll do against MLB pitching compared to... how he's actually done against MLB pitching. And that just doesn't seem right. Plus, it's not like we're giving this same MiLB adjustment to these other guys in the sample.

So I'll meet you halfway. I'll weight his current K-BB% at MLB as his most recent performance, weighting it as most recent (62% of the weight) and the rest going to his MiLB rates. That puts him at a 24% K-BB (looking for 20-28% as comps).

Our comps:

Joey Gallo
Ian Happ
Hunter Renfroe
Darin Ruf
Victor Diaz
Dallas McPherson
Fernando Seguignol
Tyler Naquin
Chad Pinder
Freddy Garcia
Tim Beckham

Pretty much the same group and similar results. Add Victor Diaz, Fernando Seguignol, and Freddy Garcia to the pile of guys who couldn't hit with enough power to stick in a corner. Add Pinder, Happ, Renfroe, and Naquin to the list of guys who, like DeJong, haven't had their post-DeJongish Years future yet, adding fuel to the notion that MLB has suddenly decided that these kinds of guys can stick on a roster now.

Darin Ruf is slightly unique from Diaz/Seguignol/Garcia if only because he got in a little bit more playing time than the others from the first list did before he crapped out of MLB.
Last edited by JL21 on August 17 17, 12:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment

Post by wart57 »

JL21 wrote:If you want to skip the meat, the summation is "Paul DeJong is really [expletive] weird as a player, and he's even weird in the tiny little group of weirdos who play the same way that he does"
I could have said that using no saber-metrics...

Actually I couldn't have, and I am all for using stats to try to make sense of the game and project what a guy could be in his career. DeJong is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, wearing a Cards Jersey.

I was just being an ass hat.

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