Why I like Mitch Garver and his bat
Why I like Mitch Garver and his bat
The Mariners have needed a signing like this for years now.
Quick note first: this blog is run entirely on guilt—it’s guilt fueled by the paid subscribers I couldn’t appreciate more. Because I’ve been slacking and not writing for a bit, with the holidays and some travel and what-have-you, I flipped off whatever makes the billing go for a month, until this time in February. Thanks y’all. Go M’s.
I originally planned to write a single piece on the three offensive additions but, because, that was taking forever to finish(☝️), we’re not doing that anymore.
We’ll hit ‘em one at a time. In short, I like Mitch Garver and Luke Raley and Mitch Haniger. But let’s start with Garver.
I didn’t expect to be checking FanGraphs on my phone as Christmas Eve mass was getting underway at St. James Cathedral on First Hill. But, if someone had said I would be, I’d probably be like “Yeah, can’t rule that out.”
When the Mariners make a move for someone whose game I’m not intimately familiar with, I do that. I don’t know approximately how good the entire middle class of players is so, like everyone else, I have to check.
General whelm was the reaction when I saw the move first went down. It’s a mid-level signing for a mid-level bat, I thought. I thought then and still do think this is the type of signing the Mariners should’ve made each of the last couple offseasons. Really, almost every offseason.
When we think of the success of the early-aughts Mariners, the names that first come to mind are the likes of ARod and Ichiro and Boone and Edgar and so on. But whew, John Olerud was a hell of a pick-up on a mid-level three-year deal. Over the initial contract, just $20 million total, he hit .289/.392(!!!!!!)/.448.
The people clamoring for the Mariners to bump payroll aren’t only clamoring for Marcus Semien and Juan Soto and the like, but also rounding out the ancillary parts of your roster with full-blown real solid (or better!) MLB regulars.
Mitch Garver is that and it’s nice for the Mariners to add such a player.
That was the early take. But then you take a closer look and…well, dude can hit the ball. And hit the crap out of it.
When he’s healthy, he rakes.
That .273/.365/.630 line for a 155 wRC+ in 2019 is absurd. Starting that year, through now, he’s one the 30 best hitters in the sport by wRC+. For some context, here are his neighbors on that particular corner of the leaderboard.
Anthony Rendon is a bit of a shithead an outlier given what he’s done (or not) recently but, otherwise, these are all dudes who can hit.
It’s not the level of impact we were hoping for—but, then again, it maybe could be.
I can’t find the tweet that brought this to my attention so, apologies on credit but—towards the end of August, Garver stopped catching regularly. After August 21st, he caught only twice more (last appearance September 2nd) and would post a .256/.379/.512 line over that span, good for a 144 wRC+.
Garver is freshly 33 years old, so that’s obviously a concern. Players, by and large, get worse when they reach this age. So the odds are against him there.
But, hell, Carlos Santana’s best full offensive season was his age-33 campaign, posting a 138 wRC+ in 2019 with Cleveland, long after his catching days. He was younger but Evan Gattis, at 29, had his second-best offensive season (121 wRC+) when playing 73 of 128 games off the catcher position.
It’s notable that Garver has more room for decline from his peak. In his 93-game 2019 campaign, only six players in the game (min. 350 PAs) were better offensively than he was with a 155 wRC+. He’s fresh off a 138 wRC+ campaign that had him top 20 (min. 300 PAs) across baseball. Santana only hit like that in the aforementioned career year.
The guy, Garver, had a .370 OBP last year. You know what having a .370 OBP dude in the lineup is like? It’s great. It’s freaking great. In the last ten years, only three Mariners (min. 300 PAs) have met or exceeded that mark—J.P. last year, Nelson Cruz in 2017 and Robinson Canó in 2014 and 2018.
Last thing on Garver is maybe the most interesting and noteworthy. He has a very strong approach at the plate. It isn’t just that he’s selective—and he is, his chase rate was among the best in the game last year—he’s selectively aggressive.
During the playoffs Baseball Prospectus’s Robert Orr set out to create a metric that did captured Corey Seager’s uniquely powerful approach and, specifically, his swing decisions. Orr describes that approach better than I can:
The important thing about the pitches that Seager swings at isn’t that they’re strikes. It’s that they’re hittable, regardless of balls and strikes, because of their location. Letting a hittable pitch land in the zone often leads to worse outcomes down the road for a hitter. The key part of making any decision is weighing up the benefits of an action vs. the cost of inaction. For Seager, that equation is straightforward: if he’s able to drive it then he hits it, and if he can’t then he doesn’t. He’s not waiting for a specific pitch that may never come, but just the first one that he can damage. In that way he never cedes control of his at-bats to the pitcher. Pitchers can hide their fastballs from hitters who hunt them, but they can’t stay out of the zone altogether if they want to stay in the game very long.
He swings at the pitches he can do damage on, he doesn’t on the ones he doesn’t. Simple enough.
The metric Orr created—which factors in the count and how that impacts the value of each swing, plus how often certain pitches are called one way or the other—is called SEAGER (SElective AGgression Engagement Rate) and has better predictive ability when it comes to power than more basic plate discipline stats (like O-Swing% - Z-Swing% or chase rate).
And if you couldn’t guess, because I wouldn’t be talking about it otherwise, Garver was one of the best in baseball last year by this metric.
On the left, we have the guys with the best approach sorted by SEAGER. And on the right, the worst.
It’s not perfect. But, again, Garver has some solid company. And, if Orr and his research are right, the power he showed in 2023 should carry over into 2024.
Overall, again, it’s a really nice pickup. The whole thing really hinges on Garver playing more than he ever has, at age 33, but there’s almost no way ceasing playing the game’s most demanding position does anything but help that.
And if the Mariners get that, they get his bat in the lineup on a regular basis, it’s a bat that should help them win games.