Is Yoenis Céspedes a Good Fit for the Chicago Cubs?
According to Diario Libre, the Chicago Cubs appear to be the leading in the chase to acquire Cuban defector and free agent outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. The intriguing center fielder spoke with the media on Monday night, sharing this unexpected tidbit:
“Of all the teams who have come, the most interested in me has been the Chicago Cubs,” Cespedes said Monday at the Quisqueya Stadium… “I dined a few times with them and talked a lot, but that does not mean it is certain I will sign with them. I’m just telling it like it is, they have shown more interest than others.”
(translated by Google Chrome and me, Brad)
If I had snuck into your house this morning and grabbed you by the shoulders before you reached a news device and asked you: “What team is making the biggest play for Cespedes right now?” I’m fairly confident you would have answered, “The Miami Marlins; I’m calling the police.”
But, nay, it is Chicago apparently. Much of this offseason, the Cubs have been playing the quintessential flirt, giggling as they trot around the country, driving prices up for all the free agents they don’t really want.
Well, maybe this Cespedes business is for real. And if it is, does it makes sense?
Cespedes will be 26 for the 2012 season and reportedly plays a strong center field. He hit an ungodly .333/.424/.667 slash in the Cuban league in 2011, but the Cuban league also has a guy who finished the season with an OPS of 1.583 — seriously, video game stuff here.
Anyway, the projections and translations I have heard from scouts and statisticians alike place Cespedes’s hitting talent somewhere between league average (100 wRC+) and maybe a slice above league average (110 wRC+). Add that to his decent speed (capable of maybe 15 or more steals) and a potentially good glove and voila!, he’s a decent player, maybe somewhere between 2.5 to 3.5 WAR.
So why do the Cubs want him? Well, their present center fielder, Marlon Byrd, is basically that exact some player except with maybe a touch less speed and power (but still in that 2.5 to 3.5 win range). Byrd, however, will be 34 in 2012 and entering his final year under contract with the Cubs.
Despite his age — and perhaps a testament to the value-depleted Cubs organization — Byrd is one of the more valuable trade chips at Jed Hoyer’s disposal. Behind Matt Garza, Marlon Byrd offers trading partners the most proven talent — solid hitting, good fielding, and an all-around acceptable one-year player.
The problem is, of course, that Byrd is still on the Cubs roster and owed upwards of $6M — oh yeah, and the Cubs are in reboot mode. Not rebuild mode. Reboot mode. They are basically whitewashing their system of Hendry’s guys and preparing not for 2012 but 2013 and 2014. From day one, Theo Epstein has been talking about “building assets” and developing “sustainable success” — I have not once heard him say something to the tune of: “We feel good about our team heading into the season,” or “World Series here we come, baby, yeah!”
Not only is he a possible long-term outfielder for the Cubs, Cespedes also could prove cheaper than Byrd too. My previous ruminations suggested he might reasonably catch a contract like this:
2012: $4M
2013: $4M
2014: $6M
2015: $7M
2016: $9M (player option)
…With a signing bonus of $8M, plus or minus $3M.
Who knows? I might be way off on that note, but given the unusual nature of the league he is coming from, I would certainly not pay him much more than that. For the Cubs, it would not make sense to sign Cespedes to a shorter contract (which, from what I understand, Cespedes does not want anyway) because the team is still far from sustained competitiveness.
There is no denying the Cubs would prefer Cespedes over Byrd on their roster in 2012, but the tougher question is are they willing to sell Byrd cheap in the process? On top of that, there is the problem of Brett Jackson, the Cubs’ top prospect who also happens to play center field. Maybe the team, which has no intention of starting Alfonso Soriano through the entirety of his contract, anticipates either Cespedes or Jackson will be better suited to left field?
Jackson presents a much less troubling conundrum — the Cubs have three veteran outfielders, and only one of them should be a starter by 2014 (him being David DeJesus, who is flexible enough to play wherevz).
So is Cespedes a good fit for the Cubs? If I am Jed Hoyer — and most days I wish I was — then I would say yes. If I cannot find a trade partner for either Soriano or Byrd, then I would happily make Soriano a platoon partner for DeJesus, Alfonso’s contract be damned. Because Cespedes makes sense, and not a lot has for the Cubs in the last 100 years.
NOTE: Look, I have no f’ing clue which is the right spelling for Cespedes. I know it’s either Yoenis, Yoennis, or Yoeni, so I just pick one of those at random each time I write about him. If that bothers you, then by all means set up an interview with him for me and we’ll sort this whole thing out.
It’s almost certainly not Yoennis, two Ns make no sense from a linguistic perspective in Spanish
He speaks Cuban, duh. He’s not from Spain!
Is there a Cuban language or is it a derivitive of Spanish? I’m not certain but think it’s the latter. Or is it ladder, later….
Oh… I was just joking. They speak Spanish.
are you making fun of rick perry?
I’ve got three things to say about that.
1. I’m slow on that stuff Brad.
B. I like Rick Perry bS.
And III. III. III. I don’t remember.
I guess we’ve been spelling Yuniesky wrong all these years, huh?
I Believe it is y-o-u-i-s-h-i-t-t-y
I thought it was Y-o-u-s-u-c-k-y B-e-e-n-o-n-t-h-e-c-o-u-r-t
Being that Cespedes is most likely going to spend a year or maybe half a year in the minors, and potentially not reaching the bigs until his year 28 season, doesn’t it make more sense for the Cubs to target Soler, who is only 19 or 20? Or is the consensus that he can jump right onto a MLB roster?
From what I understand, they are one of the leading teams in the Soler race too.
It’s my understanding that the Cuban league is about the equivalent of A-Ball. If you run Cespedes’ 2011 season through the MLE calc as if it had happened in the MWL, you get a MLB line of .226/.277/.401. And that’s not to mention that there wouldn’t be a lot impressive about a 26 YO putting up Cespedes’ 2011 Cuban League numbers in A-ball.
Take that in concert with Fangraphs’ own Jack Moore’s contention that there’s some disconcerting noise in Cespedes’ K:BB numbers, and I think I’d stop a ways short of saying Cespedes can be reliably expected to produce at the same level as Marlon Byrd.
That’s a fair assessment. However, we rarely see players dominate A-ball like he has dominated the Cuban league. Equivalence calculators are great for most players, but they are suspect when looking outlier players playing in unknown leagues.
Yeah, I don’t doubt there’s a lot of noise in the equivalencies here. But I’m still very wary of Cespedes ability to (1) contribute immediately, even at all this season, and (2) his ability to come anywhere close to his CL numbers in MLB. I certainly don’t think he’s worth $30-50 mil. If he were doing this at any level except AAA in MiLB we’d all be saying he was old for his level and there wasn’t a lot to be enthusiastic about. And if he were doing this at AAA, well, he’d be Brian LaHair at premium defensive position.
That’s very true. Still, Aroldis Chapman needed only a partial year of seasoning in the minors before coming joining the Reds top squad and Alexei Ramirez (who was not as strong a hitter as Cespedes in the CL) never spent a moment in the minors.
I think people are getting too hung up on the supposed Single-A quality of the CL. We need to ask ourselves: How well would an MLB regular hit if left in Single-A for a whole season? We don’t know.
All our equivalencies are designed for guys with little or not MLB experience. There may be some considerable diminishing returns on hitting talent in the low minors.
In other words: Albert Pujols might be able to crush Single-A pitching, but he is not going to get a hit every single time. Is there a point at which BABIP settles because it’s humanly impossible to hit more line drives? We don’t know. We can’t know.
What was I saying?
I dunno. Maybe just this: Don’t assume the CL predisposes Cespedes to failure in the majors. I think he could easily be Jeff Francoeur by day one.
I think that’s a welcome caution against my pessimism. I guess what I’m concerned with re: the reaction of Cubdom to Cespedes is this: if this were a 26 YO prospect at any level of MiLB baseball, I think it’s fair to assert that most rational baseball fans and writers would temper their expectations for him. They certainly wouldn’t advocate tossing him a MLB deal worth $30-50 mil. I think the same should be true, then, of Cespedes, regardless of the noise in the equivalencies. In short, I’m as wary of Cespedes as I would be of any prospect at any level, at his age. But I’m also as hopeful as I would be of a player whose K% has given signs of stabilizing at a solid level and who has showcased solid defense, good power and good speed, albeit in limited samples. I think Cespedes is an excellent example of a player whose highs should not be overly celebrated and whose lows should not be overly emphasized.
You should have said this ^ in the article!!
The Rangers just spent over $100 million on a prospect.
My concern is that even if Cespedes can join the MLB roster immediately, he is already 27 years old and (theoretically) in the prime of his career. By the time the Cubs are ready to contend (2014 at the very earliest, and more likely 2015 or beyond), Cespedes will be on the downside of his career. If the contract is backloaded, the Cubs might be stuck paying above-market rate for a 31-year old outfielder and will only have him under contract for a year or two of contention. That’s all assuming he turns into an effective MLB player, which is far from a sure thing at this point.
I agree with Mike, going after Soler makes more sense with the Cubs’ long-term plans.
He will be 26 for the 2012 season, and I would imagine pursuing Cespedes or Soler are not mutually exclusive activities. Still, there is a risk in getting Cespedes, but at the same time, that will figure into any and all contract considerations.
My mistake, I was under the impression that this year would be his age 27 season. And you’re right, I don’t believe that the two are mutually exclusive.
The issue for me is that it is hard to say with any degree of confidence how good of a player Cespedes will be. There is still a ton of uncertainty about the translation from the Cuban League to MLB, and that fact that he is older than most prospects adds another level of uncertainty. As MO said above, we wouldn’t be quite as excited about a a guy his age putting up these numbers in AAA.
On the flip side, the Cubs are fortunate enough to have the financial resources that most teams don’t have. They are one of the few teams that can afford to take a risk on an unknown foreign player and hope that he pans out. If he works out, great. If not, the financial obligation won’t cripple them. In the Cubs current situation, if he doesn’t pan out, it’s not like he’s going to be the difference between making the playoffs or not the next few years. Couple that fact with the upcoming caps on amateur spending, and a Cespedes signing, upon further investigation, makes a lot of sense. I can see both sides of the argument.
The Cubs should definitely pay whatever this man is asking since he’s only slightly better than me and John Sickels had me as a top-15 prospect just last year!!!
Hi Bradley,
Good read! I am 100% sure his name is Yoenis with one “n,” there is another player out there who is Yoannis.
The phrase “I’m calling the police” and the quasi slang term “whatevz” used in the same article about baseball? +1 for that!
As a Nats fan I hope the cubs sign Cepedes then trade Byrd because it increases the supply of CFs and we need one badly. More supply = more chance we get a solid Cf like Byrd for a reasonable amount of money.
sorry thats Cespedes. Someday I will learn to type.
Still don’t get the hype. You have any idea how many 26 year old latin american players crush minor league pitching at a similar clip? He’s not special. Maybe sign him and put him on the ML roster and hype him up for some tickets/jerseys or whatever. He’s nothing special….at all. May as well trade for Jeff Francoeur. I’m thinking Cespedes is older than he says and on PEDs. Maybe that’s racist of me to assume a huge, fast, latin american player who is “26″ and just now getting recognition isn’t who he says he is. However, the risk and extreme unlikelihood that he’s anything close to the hype is warranted. the fact that Epstein might be jumping on him sort of helps cement my opinion as Ep hasn’t been the best with free agents. I don’t consider Cespedes a prospect, to me prospects are 16-24.
You can remove the “maybe” from the “Maybe that’s racist of me…” comment.
That’s not being racist. It’s called “racial profiling”..
“Much of this offseason, the Cubs have been playing the quintessential flirt, giggling as they trot around the country, driving prices up for all the free agents they don’t really want.”
In poker, top players put a great deal of thought into making their play “game theory optimal” against other strong players, i.e finding the Nash Equilibrium in each hand where they are indifferent to how their opponents respond . Essentially, they want to make it difficult for opponents to be able to deduce significant evidence of their actual holdings from their actions. One way to do this is to play hands of wildly different levels of strength in similar ways. For example, in Limit Holdem, a simplified GTO strategy is to always bet the flop heasup if you were the pre-flop raiser, as it won’t leak any information to your opponent about your holdings (and betting for value makes sense 80-90% of the time anyways, so you are rarely leaking value to pay for this information hiding).
I’m wondering if Theo has considered a similar GTO strategy for asset acquisitions. It’s important to express a strong interest to a free agent that you value highly as a fit for your needs, but if you only do that with your highest priorities, you are leaking information to your competition and they can strategically outbid you for the high priority needs and save money when bidding for a FA who is clearly not a priority for you.
If instead you express strong interest in many free agents, competing teams can’t perceive you have differing levels of interest to gauge how aggressively the Cubs will bid for those assets. You get the benefits of forcing up prices on assets your opponents want that you have little interest in and over time as your opponents realize your expressions of interest aren’t well correlated with your actual actions, it might help you out bid them for assets you have substantial interest in.
This might not be an important strategy for a team like the As, but for teams like the Cubs and the Yankees, I wonder if it’s there is enough value in a consistent strategy like this to make it worthwhile to implement. Implementation cost is the problem. You can’t fly Theo & Hoyer to every minor U.S. and International Free Agent just to put up many smoke screens, and if the Cubs default to sending a lowly assistant GM to FAs they have little interest in, it their true interest levels become easy to discern.
The most direct way to reduce the work is to only use this strategy with assets that have a reasonable fit with the clubs obvious needs and public plans, but being sure to express equal interest in a similar number of assets at the bottom of the priority list to those at the top.
For example, assume they really wanted to re-sign Pena on an affordable short term deal (given Rizzo in the pipeline), but only wanted Fielder if he was to substantially drop his requested contract cost and length. So Pena is top priority, Fielder towards the bottom. So by expressing strong interest in Fielder and Pena, the other bidders can’t be sure where their preference lies. Their competitors might feel compelled to overpay for Fielder to get him before the Cubs can, while they are actually working on final terms for Pena.
This is all assuming that competitors know when the Cubs are in serious negotiations with free agents, even if it’s not reported publicly. If not, the need for information hiding is moot, but the Cubs recent behavior makes me wonder if they feel teams have enough proprietary informational sources (the agents, employees of the agents, friends of the players, paid investigators) that means information hiding provides significant value in the pursuit of free agents.
I don’t think the poker strategy makes any sense. You don’t give any strategy because you have no strategy. And you’ll give away money almost every time you get raised. If you bet blind on the flop, I’ll play any meaningful cards, toss away any dead hands, and raise any good hands. You’ll wind up winning hands you’d likely win anyway, and lose hands you’d likely lose anyway, but the added issue of losing your additional bet.
BTW: GTO strategy is really only solvable in a game with two competitors, one a third is introduced new strategies are possible (including some that are cooperative ways of competing). So that may make all my random speculation moot in most free agent pursuits if you always perceive you’ll have more than one significant competitor.
Not to mention that the agents get to see your cards.
IRT Cespedes, I’m not a fan of acquiring a player that provides no tangible upgrade over what you currently have. In your example, if doesn’t upgrade RF because of the presence of Byrd, then it’s kind of the same as paying him $21M/3 as opposed to $21M/4. And that doesn’t begin to address the fact that you’re paying him that money to achieve a higher level of mediocrity for 2-3 years. I think he’d make a better bet for someone looking to win over the next 2-3 years.
HAHAHa look at me now bitches, im getting PAPER. Take your calculator and suck a fat one
2012 OAK 71 269 35 82 15 2 14 54 20 63 8 2 .305 .361 .532 .892