Colby Rasmus Is Diamond in the Rough of Shrinking MLB Offseason Market

Right now, Major League Baseball's free-agent market looks...well, like it usually does this time of year.

Sure, Max Scherzer and James Shields are still available and still very much worthy of attention. But after them, there's not much. No real talent. No real upside. Alas, no players who have lots of both.

Save for one guy, that is. If you missed it in the headline, here's his name: Colby Rasmus.

You wouldn't think so from looking at Rasmus' 2014 performance with the Toronto Blue Jays. The left-handed swinger struck out in a third of his plate appearances, and ended up hitting just .225 with a .287 OBP. Only his 18 homers and .448 slugging percentage allowed him to finish as a slightly above-average hitter.

Rasmus also struggled on defense last season. According to FanGraphs, Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating both put him close to 10 runs below average in center field.

Player	Team	WAR
Jackie Bradley Jr.	BOS	-0.1
Michael Bourn	CLE	0.4
B.J. Upton	ATL	0.4
Colby Rasmus	TOR	0.6

Add it all up, and FanGraphs says Rasmus was worth 0.6 Wins Above Replacement. He was barely better than B.J. Upton. A good look, that is not.

And yet, Rasmus' appeal is obvious to some extents.

At the least, Rasmus is a power-hitting center fielder. Being a power hitter alone is appealing enough at a time when power is scarce. And among center fielders last year, only Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen hit for more power than Rasmus on a rate basis. So in a sense, Rasmus is a rarity.

One thing he shouldn't be is expensive. He's as obvious a candidate for a one-year contract as there's ever been. Whoever signs him presumably won't be betting the farm.

As such, it is indeed possible to make a case for signing Rasmus even without characterizing him as an obvious upside play. To do that, though, there's a question that needs to be answered:

Maybe he's not as hopeless as his 2014 season makes him look?

One thing to remember is that Rasmus is only heading into his age-28 season. Whereas most free agents are past their primes, Rasmus is still in his.

And Rasmus' prime has been better than you probably think. Before 2014, he was one of the better players around for much of 2012 and 2013.

It doesn't look like it based on what's on the surface. Rasmus' 2013 numbers are strong, but he hit just .223 with a .689 OPS in 2012. Nothing special about that.

But if we break Rasmus' 2012 and 2013 seasons into halves...

Split	G	PA	HR	AVG	OBP	SLUG	OPS
1st Half, 2012	85	355	17	.259	.328	.494	.821
2nd Half, 2012	66	270	6	.176	.238	.278	.515
1st Half, 2013	89	346	16	.263	.332	.484	.816
2nd Half, 2013	29	112	6	.314	.357	.552	.910

Rasmus had a brutal second half in 2012, but that only accounted for 25 percent of the games he played across 2012 and 2013. Otherwise, he was an easily above-average hitter in 75 percent of his games.

He was also pretty good in center field. Among center fielders who played at least 1,000 innings between 2012 and 2013, Rasmus was 10th in Ultimate Zone Rating and sixth in Defensive Runs Saved. He was thus among the elites at a premium defensive position.

That alone raises skepticism of how the metrics rated Rasmus' defense in 2014. They're generally good at what they do, but sometimes they mischaracterize players. Maybe that's what happened to Rasmus.

And this was possibly thanks to the Blue Jays.

When FanGraphs' Mike Petriello went digging, he found a pattern of missed plays that suggested Rasmus was playing too shallow in center field in 2014. He then found instances of both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Blue Jays pressuring Rasmus to do so, pushing notions of coincidence out the door.

Couple that with how the Blue Jays suddenly started shifting a ton in 2014, and it's apparent Rasmus spent much of the season out of his comfort zone on defense. Cue Petriello: "There are many reasons why Rasmus may have looked so poor in the outfield, and not all of them may have had to do with him."

If you're worried the hamstring injury Rasmus dealt with is the real reason he struggled on defense, don't be. Rasmus' speed component in 2014 was right in line with his career norm, a strong indication that he wasn't limited athletically for the most part. 

So in all, Rasmus looks like a strong candidate for a defensive rebound in 2015. If he does rebound, he at least projects as a power hitter who also plays good defense in the outfield. That's not a great player, but it's a pretty good player.

What's going to boost Rasmus into "great player" territory is getting his bat back on track. On that front, there's room for enough optimism to counter any pessimism.

The big reason for pessimism with Rasmus' offensive outlook is his strikeout problem. It's something I want to say can be fixed, but can't.

Rasmus has had a strikeout problem his whole career, and he can thank his swing mechanics for that. Between a high leg kick and exaggerated hand movement, his swing has a lot of moving parts. As Brooks Baseball can show, this leaves him vulnerable to fastballs up and away and back-foot breaking balls.

However, a bad strikeout problem need not be a hitter's demise. A hitter can overcome as many whiffs as he wants if he routinely crushes the ball when he does make contact.

And in 2014, Rasmus did more of that than his surface numbers let on.

Mark Simon of ESPN Stats & Information keeps track of which hitters hit the ball hard most often. By the end of the season, his leaderboard looked like this:

You can spot Rasmus at No. 40. Just behind him are Justin Morneau and Chris Carter, meaning Rasmus made more hard contact than a batting champion and a guy who slugged 37 home runs.

We can use FanGraphs and BaseballHeatMaps.com to dig deeper into the kind of contact Rasmus made in 2014 to find that he hit fewer pop-ups (IFFB%), more line drives (LD%) and longer deep drives (HR and FB Distance) than he did in 2012 and 2013:

Year	IFFB%	LD%	HR and FB Distance
2012	14.4	20.1	273.5
2013	12.6	22.0	286.6
2014	11.8	23.3	290.1

Rasmus benefited from his long drives to the tune of a career-best 19.4 home-run-per-fly-ball rate. But that's the only way he benefited from all his hard contact. Though it should have been higher, his .294 average on balls in play was right in line with his career norm.

These figures indicate Rasmus hit into a whole bunch of bad luck in 2014. So does his testimonial, as he told this to Sportsnet.ca's Shi Davidi at the end of the year: "I’ve been crushing balls, but I haven’t had the luck, the balls just haven’t been finding holes. They’re standing right where I hit it, you know what I’m saying? Bullets. Like if it would have been to the left or right five feet ain’t no way they catch it. It’s tough man."

Where things get tricky is in how Rasmus touched on the elephant in the room: shifts. 

In a shift-crazy age, it's not surprising that Rasmus found himself being killed by shifts so much in 2014. He's always been a pull-heavy hitter, and he clearly lost some hits to shifts on his pull side. His struggles were half bad luck, and half smart defense.

It's not all bad, though. Rasmus may have lost some hits to shifts to his pull side, but not enough to stop him from posting a 1.293 OPS when he pulled the ball. That's an excuse not to worry about teams trying to beat him on his pull side. If anything, he should be trying to pull the ball even more.

And to that end, all he has to do is take what pitchers give him. 

Rasmus observed that pitchers were pitching him inside more often, and the numbers reveal that's true. According to BaseballSavant.com, the percentage of pitches he saw on the inner third of the zone and beyond was by far the highest of his career. Not surprisingly, he showed a pull pattern on these pitches.

So while prospective buyers should be worried about Rasmus' strikeouts, they should also be mindful of what he can do when he connects.

He's coming off a year when he hit the ball hard more regularly than he ever had before. And though he's clearly a shift-able hitter, he has the goods to regularly beat shifts. And as long as pitchers keep pounding him in, he'll keep getting plenty of opportunities to do so.

Just as Rasmus looks like a rebound candidate from a defensive perspective, there's enough that says he's a rebound candidate from an offensive perspective as well. This is to say he has decent odds of getting back to being the solid-hitting, slick-fielding player he was for much of 2012 and 2013.

Whoever signs Rasmus will be taking a chance on him. But as a cheap chance that comes with favorable odds of becoming a bargain, it's one worth making.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.  

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