The Backup Outfielder Shuffle
Toronto Blue Jays trade for Raimel Tapia and Adrián Pinto from the Colorado Rockies in exchange for Randal Grichuk and cash considerations.
On Thursday morning (afternoon for all you filthy Laurentian elitists), MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported that the Jays had traded longtime outfielder Randal Grichuk to the Colorado Rockies in exchange for outfielder Raimel Tapia and middle infield prospect Adrián Pinto.
The Jays will also be sending cash considerations to the Rockies, with the Associated Press reporting the terms as $5,383,333 in 2022 and $4,333,333 in 2023.
The acquisition of Tapia serves the purpose of fulfilling Ross Atkins’ promise that the Jays were only really looking at upgrading with a lefty bat (I guess “upgrade” might be putting it strongly, but we’ll get to that) and ensuring that Brett Gardner does, indeed, back the fuck off. It’s no Matt Chapman, but it’s still a very interesting and dare I say, important trade with regards to how the Blue Jays will go about constructing lineups in the 2022 season. It also serves the dual purpose of working our brain cells out by pondering what exactly the hell the Rockies are doing.
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Happy Trails, Handsome Randy
If my numbers are correct, before this trade, Randal Grichuk was the longest-tenured member of the Toronto Blue Jays, who traded for him from the Cardinals in January 2018 and signed him to his current five-year, $52 million contract. Grichuk was a mainstay of a couple really bad Blue Jays teams, with the best season of his career being his first one with the Jays in 2018, in which he tied with Justin Smoak for the team lead in bWAR, and tied for the team lead in fWAR with… Luke Maile???
Fuck me, those teams were bad.
Grichuk overcame an abysmal start to the season to come back from injury strong, riding his low-OBP, high-slugging profile to a .245/.301/.502 slash line and a 115 wRC+. The logistics behind the Jays extending him were sound enough: Even if Grichuk’s low walk and high strikeout rates would always cripple his on-base percentage to an extent, his power numbers and generally fine defence would be enough to make him a solid everyday major leaguer, which is all the Jays were really paying him to be. Did he achieve that relatively low bar?
Ehhhhhhhhh… I think you’d get a pretty skewed perspective on that question if you asked your average Jays fan on Twitter, depending on the time of year. Anecdotally, Grichuk has had a tendency to get very, very hot for a month or two out of the season before collapsing into mediocrity. From 2019 through 2021, Handsome Randal slashed .242/.286/.448 with a decidedly not-solid 91 wRC+, averaging a well below MLB-average 0.7 fWAR per 162 games. While he’s gradually cut down on strikeouts and swings-and-misses, he still chases a ton of pitches outside of the zone, and his barrel and hard hit rates have tumbled from “excellent” to “average”, affecting his power output.
Does that make him the worst player ever? No. Has he contributed the amount of value that he’s being paid for? Almost certainly not, but that’s not his fault. Should fans necessarily care about whether the multibillion-dollar corporation gets a good investment on this? Probably not. Does that make his insane streakiness any more fun to watch? Certainly not. But it’s still worth recognizing the effort that he put him without being a snarky jackass about it (at least, not too much).
Over that 2018 season, there really wasn’t much worth getting excited about not named Randal Grichuk, and he performed admirably when filling in for an injured George Springer in 2021. Whether a younger twentysomething trying to show the Angels and Cardinals what they missed out on or an older twentysomething and relatively veteran presence in a young, exuberant clubhouse, I’d be lying if I said Grich wasn’t a welcome fixture on the team, beyond anything that happened on the field.
I won’t claim to have a mirror into Randal Grichuk’s mind, because he is a grown-ass man with his own thoughts and perspectives on the matter that I have no hope of knowing, OBVIOUSLY. But you have to wonder what goes through the mind of a (relatively) older player who’s, by all accounts, busted his ass off to improve his game and help the team for the last four seasons and watched the young core and new blood come in, getting to the cusp of embarking on the best season yet to come with them (hopefully) only to be unceremoniously shoved out the door. The writing was on the wall when Springer was signed, but that doesn’t make it any less sad that he won’t be around anymore, even if there are three better options in the outfield and the baseball move itself is of sound logic.
On the other hand, Grichuk will maybe get to fuck around and blast 40 home runs in Coors Field behind C.J. Cron, Ryan McMahon, and Kris Fucking Bryant somehow. Godspeed, Randal.
Raimel Tapia
Oh boy, if you’re a weirdo who thinks that the Jays being loaded with power hitters is somehow a detriment, have I ever got the guy for you!
There are two different questions to ask with regards to 28-year old Raimel Tapia. First: Is Raimel Tapia good? Second: Is Raimel Tapia interesting? The answers to both are, respectively, “only in the 80s,” and “very much so”.
The Rockies signed Tapia as an international free agent out of the Dominican Republic in 2010, and he eventually became one of the higher-regarded prospects in Colorado’s system. He made his debut in 2016, but wouldn’t become a regular fixture on the Rockies until 2019, playing a majority of Colorado’s games in left field but also spending some time in the other two outfield positions.
Tapia’s selling point as a prospect was his ability to put the bat on the ball, and he’s certainly done a lot of that. He doesn’t swing and miss much, with 2021 being Tapia’s best season in that regard, ranking in the 95th percentile for whiff rate. The man known for some reason as “El Fifty” also refused to strike out in 2021, ranking in the 96th percentile for strikeout rate. While he tends to chase pitches out of the zone, he’s also one of the best in the big leagues at making contact on those outside pitches, ranking sixth in the big leagues in O-Contact%.
Since he doesn’t walk much, Tapia’s main pathway to getting on base is through hitting. Quality of contact is very important to a hitter like him. While Tapia doesn’t hit the ball hard at all, he was a line drive and fly ball hitter in his first few seasons, and even soft line drives have a really good chance of landing for hits. So long as he’s able to keep the ball in the air, I think everything should be alr-
…Statcast. What the FUCK just happened?
Those of you who knew Raimel Tapia’s name going into this may recognize him from the Jolly Olive video on him. And if you did that, you know that as the years have gone by, Tapia has gradually hit more and more ground balls, to the point where his average launch angle in 2021 was -4.4. For those of you who don’t speak nerd, Tapia has essentially pounded the ball straight into the ground. His ground ball rate in 2021 was 67.4 percent, the highest for a single season in the history of Major League Baseball.
Tapia runs very well, which will help him beat out some of these ground balls, but this is not a consistent skill set to bank on, and the results have shown that. Even taking into account a BABIP-assisted .321/.369/.402 season in 2020 (smaller sample size, etc. etc.), Tapia’s offensive line has been pretty terrible over the last three seasons, slashing .282/.327/.394 with a 79 wRC+. That slash line, as well as his 37 stolen bases along that span, might look appealing to those looking for a leadoff hitter from the 80s, but in the modern game, that unremarkable on-base percentage combined with a massive lack of power production (his .112 Isolated Slugging ranks 152nd out of 159 players with at least 1000 plate appearances over the last three seasons) just isn’t going to be even consistently okay.
This begs the question: Why the hell is Toronto even bothering with him? First of all, the Jays were never going to get much for Randal Grichuk, even if they are paying for most of his contact. Second, to paraphrase Andrew Stoeten: Tapia may not be great, but he is not great in a more useful, less redundant way than Randal Grichuk was not great. The Jays front office has been consistent in expressing a desire for a left-handed hitter, and while Grichuk is technically a better hitter than Tapia, there are also a couple better versions of the right-handed-hitting high-strikeout power hitter on the Jays in Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. Raimel Tapia is not only a lefty bat, for whatever that’s worth, but he also provides an offensive profile that fits into a bench role that the Blue Jays haven’t seen much of since 2015-17 Ezequiel Carrera, another speedy backup outfielder, albeit one who both walked and struck out more than Tapia does.
Ideally, Tapia isn’t going to be starting every day over the likes of Teoscar, Gurriel, or even Alejandro Kirk, hopefully. But what he does do is provide speed off the bench, as well as good fielding to relieve the starting corner outfielders. He’s not blowing anyone’s mind in left field, but the metrics like his arm and his speed. Speaking of speed, he does have the velocity to play center field in theory, though there isn’t much reason to believe he would be better than Grichuk there.
Offensively, he doesn’t provide much overall, but there is some value to thinking that even if the Jays can’t make him lift the ball as he did earlier in his career, the unique offensive approach he provides can be utilized to put him in the best position to succeed. Even if that position is just “pissing off opposing fans with dinky infield singles” or “occasionally fucking around and hitting a dinger off of Jacob deGrom or Max Scherzer” something he has somehow done because there is no logic or rule to the universe. Summon an eldritch being. Kill God. Have Raimel Tapia take the best pitcher on the planet deep. It doesn’t matter.
Most importantly, he’s just fun, both in terms of an electric if flawed skillset and in terms of his flair and personality. And the vibes must flow.
Even more importantly. He’s not Brett Gardner.
Adrián Pinto
Lost in the conversation over Grichuk and Tapia is 19-year-old Venezuelan infielder Adrián Pinto, who has a shot at being the most important piece in this deal. Potentially high praise for someone whose picture I just can’t find for the life of me, but knowing how the Colorado Rockies go about their business, which is to say “with all the skill and tact of a man slathering himself in honey and running screaming off a 20-foot cliff into a circle of starving grizzly bears”, it’s not exactly impossible.
I like to think I know what I’m talking about when it comes to assessing major league players, but minor leaguers are a fair bit tougher, especially teenagers who haven’t yet played above the Rookie-level Dominican Summer League. That said, Pinto had a terrific year by any metric, winning the DOSL MVP in his first season of pro ball. He slashed .360/.486/.543 with a whopping 185 wRC+ over 54 games. He’s a spray hitter (he went the opposite way about a third of the time) with a lot of sneaky extra-base pop off the bat of someone listed at an Altuve-esque five feet, six inches. He also had a rare season in that he walked (17.6 BB%) way more than he struck out (8.0 K%). You like speed? He stole 41 bases in 49 attempts. Again, that’s in just 54 games.
Defensively, Pinto mostly played second base but has seen some time at shortstop and center field. There isn’t a ton of widely available scouting reports on him out there, but from the information that’s out there, scouts like his speed and his arm in the field. He didn’t light up the prospect rankings (he missed out on the MLB.com and Fangraphs lists and reached #19 on the Baseball America rankings), but he seems pretty well-regarded.
Could be something! Alternatively, he is literally a teenager, so it could be nothing! Who knows!