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The San Francisco Giants signal LF/DH Jorge Soler to a three-year, $42 million contract.Soler is the large title on this number of strikes however not a giant WAR-accumulator. By all three calculations, he solely has two seasons value no less than one win. That’s the identical variety of detrimental WAR seasons that fWAR, rWAR, and WARP give him, too. However it’s tough to conceive of Soler as overly compensated for his abilities, not that I used to be ever prone to enchantment to Charles Johnson’s proper to save lots of the cash for his authorized battles with native clam shacks.
Soler is not like different sluggers in that his strategy will not be merely satisfactory however glorious. In 2023, he ranked fifth-highest in SEAGER, 14th the 12 months prior, and second (KC) and sixteenth (ATL) in 2021. His contact charges are usually not as robust, however they had been at or close to a career-best final 12 months, and solely barely worse than the league commonplace—72.4% to his friends’ 74.2%, or 80.5% to 81.9% for in-zone pitches. I don’t even know what a clam shack is.
Whereas most warning indicators on this deal are harm or efficiency associated, the best could lie within the Giants capacity to get energy out of their gamers. Wilmer Flores and Thairo Estrada ranked among the many greatest in baseball on the share of their fly balls that had been pulled, however the workforce’s two new nook outfielders misplaced vital floor on this regard. This was notably true of Mitch Haniger, who misplaced almost half of his beforehand robust pulled fly ball share in his one 12 months in San Francisco. Soler is already considerably pull-agnostic in his fly balls, elevating greater than most however pulling that subset at a median charge. He hits for loads of energy in any case, and also you wouldn’t wish to miss out on the primary righty splash hit to vary one thing that isn’t damaged. However you wouldn’t be improper to say that the Giants have already damaged one Jorge Soler.
