The rumor around the water cooler is that the Braves are aggressively shopping Evan Gattis. The Cubs are in the market for an upgrade at catcher, kicking the tires on Russell Martin (who wants a 5/75 deal. move along, little doggie.). Martin is known for great pitch framing and plate discipline. Evan Gattis isn’t known for either, though he has some pop in his bat that Martin lacks. How much value does Evan Gattis have?
I’d wager it’s a good deal. First, while Gattis is 28, he isn’t even arb-eligible until 2016. He’s cost-controlled through his age-33 season, which is when you probably don’t want Gattis anymore anyway. Gattis doesn’t walk, but he does hit for power, with 23 HR in 2014 and 22 HR in 2013. I think Gattis is probably league-average with the bat with limited upside, but with a relatively stable floor (his success isn’t predicated on things likely to regress without warning). A 100 wRC+ at catcher is already a 3-4 WAR per 162 player (Gattis plays 100 games a year, so he’s really a 2.5-3.0 WAR player) with catcher-average defense.
Gattis isn’t average defensively, but he’s not awful either. Statcorner has his framing as consistently below-average, but only to the tune of 1-2 runs a year. The defensive metrics and scouting consensus is that Gattis is a slightly below-average defensive catcher, but that he is athletic enough to play LF on days he doesn’t catch (which I imagine the Cubs would not utilize, as you want your backup catcher to rest).
Steamer has Gattis at 2.9 wins next year, but Steamer also projects 140 games. I’d say a reasonable profile to expect over the next 4 years is something like:
| WAR | 2.5 | 2.5 | 2 | 1.5 |
| Cost/$ | $6.0 | $6.3 | $6.6 | $6.9 |
| Value | $15.0 | $15.8 | $13.2 | $10.4 |
| Contract | $0.6 | $6.3 | $7.9 | $8.3 |
| Surplus $ | $14.4 | $9.5 | $5.3 | $2.1 |
The total surplus is $31.2 MM, but I’d posit that due to the way arb raises are given out in practice, the actual value is closer to $30 MM. That passes the smell test, in my opinion. Gattis is definitely a scarce asset (league-average catcher with 4 years of relative cost-certainty), so the implicit value might be even more than this.
To give a sense of what $30 MM actually means as far as trade value, I pegged Jeff Samardzija at $23 MM last year. In the end, he actually brought in much more than that – if you part the Shark/Hammel trade as Hammel for McKinney ++ and Shark for Russell straight-up, Shark actually fetched $61MM (and was actually worth roughly $25 MM due to the extra starts he’d provide). I chalk the massive difference in Shark’s perceived and realized value to equal parts poor assumptions and the increased marginal value of the wins that Oakland was hoping to receive. Still, I think it’s relatively safe to assume that Evan Gattis is roughly as valuable as Jeff Samardzija was when the Cubs traded him, so I’ll stick with the $30 MM I came to.
That’s basically the equivalent of a single prospect in the 15-40 global range, or two prospects in the 75-100 range.
Luckily, that brings two easy packages to mind: Kyle Schwarber for Evan Gattis, straight up, or Pierce Johnson/Billy McKinney for Evan Gattis combined.
I’d probably pull the trigger on either of these, and they both seem pretty fair.
On the other hand, most of the reports on these Gattis trades say that they think Gattis ticketed to an AL to DH (and catch only sparingly). If that’s the case, perhaps I should be more worried about his defensive abilities.
The last little wrinkle is that this slightly depresses the market for Russell Martin. Some team will end up with Gattis instead of Martin, and that reduces the suitors for his services by one. I can imagine a scenario in which that team is the Cubs.