Jason Heyward has signed an eight year contract to play for the Chicago Cubs. Looking forward, what can we expect from the newest addition to Wrigley?
One way to answer this question is to ask what players are the most comparable to Jason Heyward at this point in his career, and see how those players did for the next eight years of their careers.
Jason Heyward is a multi-dimensional player. His most notable asset is his defense, which has netted him three (very deserved) Gold Glove Awards as a right fielder. He has tremendous range as a defender, and an arm good enough to have twice led the position in assists. He is a smart baserunner, having stolen 43 bags in 50 attempts (easy math: 86% success rate). He has a career OPS+ of 114, and a wRC+ of 118….both metrics agree that as a hitter Heyward is comfortably above average.
The hitting is where people get a little hung up on Heyward. As a 20-year old rookie, Heyward broke into the majors as a star, posting a .277/.393/.456 triple-slash line, with eighteen homers and 91 walks. In five subsequent seasons, Heyward hasn’t really matched those early numbers: his strikeout-to-walk rate jumped (a bad thing), and though he topped 27 homers in 2012, he hasn’t hit more than fourteen in any other year. As a hitter, there is a sense that he has plateaued. As a 20-year old, he looked like a future MVP. That season hasn’t come yet.
Which isn’t to say that Heyward hasn’t been very good. Over the last four seasons, Heyward ranks behind only Trout, McCutchen, Donaldson, Posey, Miggy, and Beltre in fWAR. Win Shares is a little less bullish on Heyward, crediting him with 22, 14, 23, and 21 Win Shares over those four seasons.
The other factor is Heyward’s age: because he reached the majors as a twenty-year old, and because he didn’t sign a pre-free agency extension with the Braves or Cardinals, he is hitting free agency as he approaches what should be the peak years of his career. He has more upside than post-30 players like Robinson Cane or David Price, and there is less risk that the late years on his contract will be a significant burden to the Cubs.
So let’s find comparables. How do we do that?
What I didn’t do is use the list of players on Baseball-Reference. I love everything about Baseball-Reference, and I think their Similarity Scores are interesting, but a lot of the players they list as comparables to Jason Heyward don’t pass the smell test for me.
One of Jason Heyward’s BB-Ref comparables is Jack Clark. I remember Jack Clark: on the best day of his life Jack Clark wasn’t anything like Jason Heyward. Both are good players, but they’re not similar.
Barry Bonds shows up as a comparable. Barry is a better comparable than Jack Clark, of course: both he and Heyward are athletic and fast player and exceptional defensive corner outfielders. But Barry Bonds, at twenty-five, was coming off a season in which he hit 33 homers, stole 52 bases, won a Gold Glove, posted a WAR around 10.0, and collected 23 of 24 first-place votes for the NL MVP. Jason Heyward was very good last year, but he wasn’t that good.
Putting it another way: if I used Barry Bonds as a comparable to Jason Heyward’s next eight years, I would be using a player whose average season was a .306/37/110, with 34 steals and an on-base percentage of .442. That would prejudice the results. Barry is too good. He’s out.
Here’s what I did: I started with a big spreadsheet of names and whittled it down until I got a smaller one.
I started with outfielders, Age-14 to Age-25. Heyward just finished his Age-25 season.
I set the search years for 1901 to 2015. I didn’t want Harry Stovey or George Gore to show up as comparables, because I don’t know that they can be, really. Does a Harry Stovey home run really compare to a Jason Heyward home run, or have all of the changes between baseball in 1890 and baseball in 2015 make a comparison between Stovey and Heyward a little unreasonable?
Next step: playing time. Jason Heyward has tallied 3400 plate appearances in the majors…so I put a limit of 2000 plate appearances.
I wanted to find players who were about as valuable as Heyward, so I figured out everyone’s fWAR/162 games. FanGraphs calculates that Heyward has been worth about 5.4 WAR/162 games, so I cut out everyone above 7.0 (Ted and Mickey are out. So is Mike Trout.) Then I cut out anyone under 4.0 WAR.
Jason Heyward is a good defensive outfielder, so I cut out anyone left who rated as bad defensive outfielders. This was useful because it meant cutting out a lot of players who were much better hitters than Heyward, but gave some of it back on defense. Say-o-nara, Jack Clark.
I also cut Andruw Jones.
Why did I cut Andruw Jones?
FanGraphs credits Jason Heyward with 61.9 Defensive Runs Above Average (DEF). This is very good for an outfielder: as a defensive player Jason Heyward is right in line with players like Al Kaline and Ken Griffey Jr. He is ahead of Dwight Evans and Roberto Clemente.
Heyward is at 61.4. He is actually 7th on the list, through his Age-25 season. Keeping in mind that DEF is a cumulative metric, not a rate metric.
Willie Davis is at 84.1 He is 2nd on the list.
Andruw Jones is at 174.9.
Andruw Jones, as a defensive player, is in his own orbit, at least by the system that FanGraphs uses. And it’s not like other systems don’t agree: Baseball-Reference has Jones as the best defensive outfielder, by a similarly wide margin. And I’ve never heard an observer of Jones’ career who thought his early defense needed work.
So Jones is out, for being too ridiculously good at defense for him to be a useful comparable for Jason Heyward.
I kept winnowing. I won’t bore you with the details of where I made cuts, but I will say that the process was utterly blind: I didn’t look at the names at all until it was down to ten.
I looked at slugging percentage and home run totals, and cut the guys who hit a ton of dingers. Jason Heyward might become a power hitter, but he isn’t really a power hitter now. There’s no reason to compare him to Jose Canseco. He’s not anything like Jose Canseco.
I filtered by strikeout rate and walk rate. I looked at wRC+ (Adjusted Weighted Runs Created) and slugging percentage and on-base. I looked at total stolen bases, and cut some of the burners off…Willie Wilson or Carl Crawford. Rickey got knocked off somewhere, just because I thought that comparing anyone to Rickey Henderson was ridiculous.
I intended to get a list of ten comparable players….ten plus Jason Heyward. I did that, and crunched all the ‘before’ numbers and all of the ‘after’ numbers.
Then I hit a problem: one of the players is a contemporary of Jason Heyward: he didn’t have enough ‘after’ to qualify. We couldn’t use him to project Heyward’s future, because he is still putting up his future.
You can guess in the comments who that tenth player is. First one to guess it wins…nothing, actually. There’s no prize. Just the respect and admiration of your peers.
So I ended up with a list of nine comparable players. Here they are, with their counting stats adjusted to 162 games played:
Name
|
G
|
R
|
H
|
HR
|
RBI
|
BB
|
SB
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
WAR
|
Reggie Smith
|
609
|
94
|
169
|
20
|
79
|
60
|
15
|
.279
|
.344
|
.457
|
4.8
|
Johnny Callison
|
780
|
91
|
160
|
21
|
76
|
57
|
7
|
.276
|
.343
|
.467
|
4.3
|
Jimmy Wynn
|
557
|
88
|
151
|
25
|
83
|
74
|
24
|
.254
|
.336
|
.444
|
4.0
|
Jason Heyward
|
835
|
87
|
156
|
19
|
68
|
72
|
17
|
.268
|
.353
|
.431
|
5.4
|
Grady Sizemore
|
682
|
114
|
179
|
26
|
83
|
81
|
28
|
.279
|
.370
|
.491
|
6.7
|
Ellis Burks
|
526
|
107
|
187
|
22
|
93
|
58
|
25
|
.291
|
.350
|
.470
|
4.4
|
Duke Snider
|
685
|
98
|
177
|
26
|
99
|
58
|
13
|
.293
|
.356
|
.497
|
4.4
|
Chet Lemon
|
691
|
83
|
165
|
15
|
70
|
58
|
9
|
.286
|
.360
|
.445
|
4.4
|
Carlos Beltran
|
585
|
109
|
184
|
23
|
101
|
57
|
30
|
.283
|
.341
|
.469
|
4.3
|
Carl Yastrzemski
|
743
|
91
|
185
|
17
|
83
|
78
|
7
|
.296
|
.374
|
.464
|
4.4
|
All of the counting stats are adjusted to 162 games played, to give a better picture of how they compare to one another.
Going a little more advanced: all of them rate as solid-to-good defensive outfielders, except for Jimmy Wynn. All are either positive (Sizemore, Beltran, Wynn, Snider) or neutral on the bases.
Everyone has 20-HR power. Everyone walks, but not that much…there’s no Eddie Yost isn’t on our list. The range of on-base percentages is between .336 and .374, with Heyward right in the middle. The range of slugging percentages is from .431 to .469….our man is taking up the rear on that one.
What I like about this list is that all of these players seem like good fits…they pass the smell test. Ellis Burks is a lot like Jason Heyward: athletic, fast, 20-homer power. If you watched Ellis Burks as a young player, and watched Jason Heyward twenty years later, you mightdraw a connection between the two of them. This Heyward kid reminds me of a young Ellis Burks.
And there’s a nice range of abilities. Burks wasn’t as good a fielder as Heyward, but he was faster, and could handle center. Beltran, as a young player, was a lot faster than Heyward, but he wasn’t as patient a hitter. Snider had more power as a young player than we can credit Heyward with.
I know less about Johnny Callison than any of these other players…less by far, actually. Callison was a good hitter for the Phillies, he came up young (like Heyward), and had his best years in his mid-twenties. A good defensive outfielders in his prime, talented enough to show up on the MVP ballots four years in a row, including a 2nd-place finish in 1964 (Ken Boyer).
It’s worth noting that Jason Heyward does much better by fWAR than the other candidates on the list….all except Sizemore. I think that’s a useful ‘check’: we’re generating a list of players who, at least by one metric, are a bit worse than Heyward. We’re not stacking the deck with players are decidedly better than Heyward, so we’re not generating a list of best-possible-scenario comparables.
And it’s not really focused on WAR. I used WAR as an early way to winnow down the pack, and then I ignored it. I narrowed the list by looking at the remaining players through a varying sequence of metrics because I didn’t want to use WAR as the default measure of these players. I like WAR, but I didn’t want a list purely created by that metric.
So that’s how we got our list. Let’s see how they did for ages twenty-six through thirty-three:
Name
|
G
|
R
|
H
|
HR
|
RBI
|
BB
|
SB
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
WAR
|
C.Yastrzemski
|
1226
|
97
|
167
|
28
|
95
|
106
|
12
|
.289
|
.397
|
.491
|
6.8
|
Carlos Beltran
|
1041
|
111
|
171
|
31
|
108
|
86
|
28
|
.281
|
.369
|
.509
|
6.1
|
Chet Lemon
|
1066
|
81
|
150
|
21
|
77
|
62
|
2
|
.270
|
.354
|
.457
|
4.9
|
Duke Snider
|
1073
|
109
|
171
|
39
|
116
|
88
|
6
|
.307
|
.400
|
.594
|
6.3
|
Ellis Burks
|
904
|
98
|
165
|
28
|
93
|
62
|
14
|
.289
|
.361
|
.517
|
3.1
|
G. Sizemore
|
419
|
70
|
133
|
15
|
65
|
54
|
10
|
.238
|
.309
|
.393
|
0.2
|
Jimmy Wynn
|
1149
|
100
|
144
|
26
|
84
|
114
|
17
|
.257
|
.382
|
.450
|
5.3
|
Johnny Callison
|
1061
|
73
|
147
|
19
|
71
|
57
|
6
|
.258
|
.327
|
.429
|
2.3
|
Reggie Smith
|
1071
|
95
|
169
|
29
|
97
|
82
|
10
|
.291
|
.377
|
.511
|
5.6
|
Again, I’ve put up their numbers into per-162 game averages. As you’d expect, this group of players saw an uptick in their power (jumping from 22 to 27 homers per 162 games), and a parallel decline in speed (from 17 to 12 steals per 162 games). As a group, they saw a spike in walks, from 65 walks per 162 games to 82 walks.
The overall WAR of the group increased a tick, from 4.7 to 4.9 per 162 games. Saying that there is only a slight uptick in the performance of these players, however, is underselling the group:
Name
|
WAR/162 Thru Age 25
|
WAR/162, Age 26-33
|
Change
|
Carl Yastrzemski
|
4.4
|
6.8
|
+2.4
|
Duke Snider
|
4.4
|
6.3
|
+1.9
|
Carlos Beltran
|
4.3
|
6.1
|
+1.8
|
Jimmy Wynn
|
4.0
|
5.3
|
+1.3
|
Reggie Smith
|
4.8
|
5.6
|
+0.8
|
Chet Lemon
|
4.4
|
4.9
|
+0.5
|
Ellis Burks
|
4.4
|
3.1
|
-1.3
|
Johnny Callison
|
4.3
|
2.3
|
-2.0
|
Grady Sizemore
|
6.7
|
0.2
|
-6.5
|
Most of these players improved a lot. Yaz, Duke, and Beltran each improved by about two wins per season, a big jump in performance. They went from good players to Hall-of-Fame candidates, essentially.
Jimmy Wynn, Reggie Smith, and Chet Lemon also improved, though not as drastically as the first three guys on the table. In the case of Wynn and Smith, they built careers that at least merit consideration for enshrinement. Wynn and Smith aren’t in, but a lot of folks think they should be.
Ellis Burks and Johnny Callison didn’t improve: their performance declined, though they were still effective major league players.
And there is Grady Sizemore. Sizemore didn’t just rate as the best player in the group thru his Age-25 season: he was way out ahead of the pack. He was on a Hall-of-Fame trajectory:
Player
|
WAR/162, Thru Age 25
|
M. Schmidt
|
6.8
|
Cal Ripken
|
6.8
|
K. Griffey Jr.
|
6.8
|
Johnny Mize
|
6.7
|
G. Sizemore
|
6.7
|
Hank Aaron
|
6.7
|
Mike Piazza
|
6.6
|
R. Henderson
|
6.6
|
I just wanted to throw that table up. Grady Sizemore was great. He was a great player. And then he fell off a cliff.
When we look for comparable to Jason Heyward, we’re trying to see what’s going to happen. We’re trying to find out what story could unfold over the next eight years.
These years could be the years when he makes his case for the Hall of Fame. Certainly, that’s what the Cubs hope for: they are hoping that Heyward takes the same leap forward that Yaz and Snider and Beltran took.
It could happen that Heyward improves, but only by a little bit. The Cubs certainly wouldn’t be upset about that: Jason Heyward finished 15th in the NL MVP vote this year, which is nothing to sneeze at. If he posts a bunch of seasons where he produces the same value he did in 2015, the Cubbies aren’t going to regret the deal.
It could happen that he declines. And it could happen that a bunch of nagging injuries turn catastrophic, and his career joins Sizemore’s as one of the great ‘what-ifs’ in baseball lore.
I think that last one is unlikely. Heyward is an aggressive player, but he doesn’t seem to be the same kind of aggressive that Grady Sizemore was. He is not as physically reckless as Sizemore was…he is more controlled as an athlete.
Last year, I expressed optimism over the mammoth Giancarlo Stanton deal: players who can hit as well as Stanton generally maintain that ability for a long time. I liked that deal.
But I am more confident about this one: if you had asked me what a team would have had to pay to lock up Heyward’s next eight seasons, I would have guessed that the bid would start at $200 million. The Cubs signed him for $16 million less than that. Maybe I misjudged the market, and maybe Heyward took a bit less to play for a juggernaut of a team, one that is in a terrific position to end the longest-running championship drought in baseball. Whatever the reasons, the Cubs signed a terrific player who is probably going to get better. Good news for the North Siders.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.