Christian Yelich: Will Marlins OF be MLB’s next star?

There are plenty of young MLB players who look to have star potential. More and more, players are showing they are ready earlier, and are getting chances to produce in their early 20’s. Teams see this potential, and are starting to do what they can to lock up these All-Star hopefuls before they are able to hit free agency and cash in.

The most obvious name that comes to mind is Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. There are plenty of colorful adjectives that come to mind when describing Trout’s career to this point, including, but not limited to: torrid, scorching, awe-inspiring and legendary. The Angels seem to agree, and chose to give him a six-year, $144.5 million contract after posting two straight 10+ fWAR seasons.

Now, it isn’t fair to compare the other up-and-comers to Trout as though he is the bar, or that you must be a similar player in order to be considered a star. Trout is much closer to the exception than the rule. It just so happens Trout is the poster boy for young offensive stars.

That being said, I would like to present a name to you that you may not be all that familiar with — for various reasons, namely that he plays in Miami, in the shadow of Giancarlo Stanton, who is probably second only to Trout in terms of early twenties stardom. That player is Christian Yelich, 22-year-old outfielder for the Marlins.

Yelich was a big time prospect, so I can’t act as though he is totally unknown. He was ranked 13th in MLB.com’s 2013 Top 100 prospects, and 15th by Baseball America in that same year. So it may seem that there were quite a few other hitters ranked higher than him — and there were. But of the six position players MLB.com liked more, only two (Will Myers, 4th and Billy Hamilton, 11th) have over 400 MLB plate appearances. Travis D’Arnaud (6th) and Jurickson Profar (1st) both have roughly 350 PA, Oscar Taveras (3rd) has just 97, and Miguel Sano (12th) has yet to reach the majors.

And while reaching the majors sooner and/or finding early success doesn’t guarantee more success compared to his peers in the future, it certainly doesn’t hurt. We have more data on Yelich, and we have seen him succeed for most of it. That isn’t the case for the rest. It doesn’t mean anything definitive, but we can say pretty confidently that Yelich will at least be an MLB caliber guy. The rest, while all ranked that high for a reason, could still conceivably not find success, or at least not to the degree they were supposed to.

To this point in his career, as of writing this, Yelich has posted a .281/.361/.408 line, with a 117 wRC+, and 4.0 fWAR. In 2014 specifically, he has been good for .276/.355/.417, a 117 wRC+ and 2.7 fWAR (a 4-win pace over 600 PA).

So as you can see in some of the overall numbers, Yelich is off to a fine start of his own. Nothing Trout-like, but very good, especially for a 22-year-old.

But we can dig deeper, and get a more clear picture of the kind of guy Yelich could be, starting with the walk rate. He has walked at a tremendous 11.1% clip in his young career, compared to 22.5% strikeouts. That is an extremely good sign, as one of the more common problems unexperienced hitters have is plate discipline, or lack thereof. For him to have that kind of eye at 22 years old, to me, screams advanced beyond his years.

The K-rate may not be all that pretty, but we can learn from our old friend Mike Trout that strikeouts aren’t always that bad. Would you prefer a lower rate? Of course. But Trout striking out 24% of the time this season has not prevented him from being the best player, in the league.

If you can draw walks, and your K-rate isn’t absolutely absurd, the strikeouts become borderline unimportant. You can read more about these ideas at places like Fangraphs, but the general idea is that strikeouts, while not ideal, aren’t the killers some believe them to be, especially if the player walks a good amount, and can sustain a solid BABIP (which Yelich can and has).

In fact, Yelich and Trout have posted similar K and BB rates, with Yelich at 22.5% to 11.1%, and Trout at 21.3% to 12.5%. Those are two underlying skills that can help us compare players true performance. It obviously isn’t everything, as Trout is on another planet despite the similarities. But it does tell us good things about Yelich’s overall approach at the plate.

Where the major difference comes is in the power. Trout hits the ball harder and farther than Yelich does. That seems pretty clear, as he has a career .243 ISO (isolated power) to Yelich’s .128. This is the only real area Yelich needs to improve on to take that next step into stardom.

We know he can draw walks and thus get on base at a good rate. With his above average speed and good batted ball profile, he should sustain an above average BABIP. But the power thus far has not been what it needs to be for him to be a legitimate star. A .290/.370/.420 guy is very valuable, but it isn’t quite what I would label as elite. It more closely resembles a 2nd or 3rd tier guy, and would probably put him in the 120 wRC+ range.

But there is reason to believe the power will tick upward along with the rest of his numbers as he gets older and more experienced. His career ISO in the minors was .186, 58 points higher than his current MLB mark. Obviously, you can’t just take minor league numbers and think they will transfer right over. But he has shown above average power before, so I suspect he will show it at some point again.

All he really needs, by my calculations, is average power, or slightly better. If he progresses into the .285-.290 range, with the same amount or more walks, a slightly above league average .155 ISO would make him a .290/.370/.445 guy, or better. We don’t know how high the average will get. It could very well be over .300, which pushes everything up even higher.

But that is just the offense. What I haven’t really touched on is the defense and base running.

It’s a small sample, so the defensive metrics are far from perfect yet. But so far, in over 1200 innings in left field, he has been a +6 defender by DRS and UZR. And I haven’t personally heard anything negative from those who watch him regularly, so I think we can say he is at least a slightly above average defender in a corner already, with time to improve.

On the bases, he has been worth 2 base running runs above average, and has stolen 13 bases in 16 attempts. Both point to an above average runner, which is always nice to have, especially at the top of the order.

Now that we have a more specific look at Yelich, we can roughly estimate his total value. An .815 OPS, in a park like Miami, is a good for around 130 OPS+ or more. Combine that with +5 defense, and +2 to +3 base running, and Yelich is worth about 44 runs above average. (WAR Calculator from Wahoo’s on First).

However, the calculator uses an outdated runs to wins conversion. This study tells us it is closer to 8.3 runs/win, which would make our future Yelich a 5.3 WAR player. That is no doubt All-Star caliber, and there is a real possibility he ends up even better than that, if the average climbs even more and/or he develops an unforeseen amount of power as he gets older. Of course, he could also struggle and fail to improve upon what he has already done, but that seems pretty unlikely. Players almost always get better as they age into their late 20’s. Rarely do they peak much earlier.

I hope I didn’t lose to many of you with all of that, and those I did, the links I posted throughout should really help. But if not, in more conventional terms, my predictions suggest Yelich could be a player who is about as valuable as guys like Hunter Pence or Shin-Soo Choo were last season, making him a Top 15-20 player in baseball.