Extension season is here: Royals, Dozier discuss long-term contract
It looks like the Royals are on the verge of another deal.
It appears the Royals and Dayton Moore kicked off the long-awaited extension season over the weekend with the revelation the club is working on signing Hunter Dozier to a four-year, $25 million deal.
Nothing has officially been announced as of this writing, but when it’s tweeted out the two sides are in advanced negotiations…
And that’s followed by reports of actual numbers…
The official announcement is probably imminent.
With two years of club control remaining after 2021, is Dozier a good candidate for a long-term contract? Let’s investigate!
What went right in 2019
The short answer: everything.
I’m not sure that in retrospect we’ve properly appreciated Dozier’s 2019 campaign. Heck, we probably didn’t give it enough run when it was actually happening. Not to say it was ignored because it wasn’t, but it tended to get lost amid Jorge Soler’s assault on the Royals’ home run record and Whit Merrifield’s consistency. And there was that whole 103 loss season for good measure.
In 2019, Dozier was the second-best hitter on the Royals with a 125 OPS+ and 123 wRC+. He clubbed 29 doubles, 26 dingers and led the majors with 10 triples. He finished with a .243 ISO and trimmed around three percent off his strikeout rate while adding three percent to his walk rate. That is an awesome all around offensive season.
Dig this sweet spray chart.
Eight of his 26 home runs were hit to dead center or to the right of center. That opposite-field pop is sexy as it’s a nice indicator that the power is the real deal.
In fact, everything about Dozier’s 2019 season was legit. He ranked 40th among all qualified hitters in average exit velocity. He was 57th in barrels. And in the 73rd percentile in Hard Hit %. The chart from Baseball Savant communicates a player who didn’t necessarily dominate, but one who was rock steady.
Just looking at those percentile rankings, it’s easy to understand how Dozier finished with a 125 OPS+ and 123 wRC+. Just a quietly spectacular year across the board.
What went wrong in 2020
The short answer: everything.
After the club signed Makiel Franco to play third, the plan was for Dozier to get most of the innings in right field. Then, the season was delayed and Dozier himself came down with Covid-19. He missed the first 16 games of the season but did play most of his August contests in right, as expected. It was when the Royals moved him to first on a full-time basis the real struggles began.
Dozier was hitting .243/.398/.457 on September 3 when he started at first base that night against the White Sox. He did go 2-5 in that game with a dinger, but it was the beginning of a horrible month of offense. Through the final 23 games of the season—all of which Dozier started at first—he hit .216/.296/.341.
His Statcast numbers took a beating. His average exit velocity was down about 5 mph from the previous year. His Hard Hit % was off by a whopping 12 percent. And his Sweet Spot % was down from 2019 by almost 10 percent.
The only positive rate-wise from 2020 was his walk rate—overall it was 14.5 percent on the year, a career-best mark by five percent. (For real…it was the only positive. Check out his year-to-year changes on his Savant page. So many down arrows where you want ups. And so many up arrows where you want downs. It’s brutal.) But I don’t think the improved walk rate will stick going forward.
For starters, Dozier’s walk rate in August when he was coming back from Covid-19 was 21 percent. In instances like this, I partially subscribe to a Bill James theory that a sharp uptick in walks for a period of time is indicative of a larger decline. James, in his Baseball Abstract from 1986, saw Toby Harrah’s increasing walk rate and hypothesized that in this case, he was more patient because had to. He couldn’t rake the way he used to and the patience at the plate was to compensate for declining offensive skills. In Dozier’s case, it’s not about declining skills. He’s not at that point in his career. Rather, could it be likely that he was more patient simply because he was trying to get his timing back joining an already-interrupted season about three weeks in?
I pose that question because once the calendar flipped to September, his walk rate dipped to around 9.5 percent. Stated another way, his September walk rate was right in line with his career averages. Perhaps once he got his timing back and was more comfortable at the plate, he reverted to his normal approach. It’s just as you can see from Savant, the results weren’t there.
(I’ll just throw this out there…long-time readers know I don’t like to use splits to make an argument. It’s simply too small of a sample. But in this case, it’s valid to identify a trend in approach. Forget about the raw numbers and focus on the outcomes. Dozier was more patient early in the season, but abandoned that approach as the season drew to a close.)
Dozier’s 2020 was like his new teammate Carlos Santana’s in many ways. I’ve written that Santana deserves the benefit of the doubt and given the circumstances surrounding his season, so does Dozier.
What to expect in 2021
This upcoming season will be pivotal for the 29-year-old. Not just because he’s been awarded some long-term security. But it just feels like his offensive trajectory could go either way. Can he build upon his 2019 season and come close to matching that output? Or will he once again struggle to make solid contact? As I alluded to above, I’m inclined to think that 2020 was an aberration…a Covid-fueled nightmare.
The projections are…a bit of a mixed bag while generally being a downer.
THE BAT - .247/.324/.446, 106 wRC+
PECOTA - .235/.318/.414, 104 DRC+
Steamer - .240/.321/.421, 93 wRC+
ZiPS - .244/.325/.446, 101 wRC+
While it would be nice to dream on a plus-.500 slugging percentage like he posted in 2019, the projections universally believe Dozier’s power is somewhere between that season and what we’ve seen in the 574 plate appearances from the 2018 and 2020 seasons.
I would nudge these projections higher across the board. Something in the neighborhood of .260/.335/.470 with a wRC+ around 110.
About that extension
The full details are still fuzzy at the moment—particularly how the contract breaks down per year. There’s also some escalators and bonuses according to Passan, that could push the overall contract to close to $49 million over five years.
According to my old-fashioned WAR calculator I still break out from time to time, given Dozier’s age and recent production, he represents a decent value if he only makes the $25 million over the four years. That’s estimating a 1.5 WAR for him in 2021, above what the projection consensus provides. It’s the escalators and bonus money where the value gets a little murky. Not factored in to the old-fashioned WAR calculator is Dozier’s defensive versatility. He’s the true “Jack of all positions, master of none” kind of guy with the glove, but that’s just fine. His ability to play the four corners gives the Royals and manager Mike Matheny plenty of lineup options. It allows them to sign someone like a Makiel Franco to make the lineup stronger and then basically replace him a year later with an even stronger option across the diamond in Santana.
I’ve speculated plenty in this space that the Royals are likely discussing extensions on Brad Keller and Adalberto Mondesi, but I largely ignored Dozier given his age and track record. My mistake. The Royals clearly see Dozier as a part of their future. Still, this feels like a bit of a reach for a player entering his age 29 season with just one excellent year on his resumé and with two more years of control available to the club after 2021. The team obviously feels strongly the player Dozier will be the next few season will resemble the 2019 version and not the one we saw in 2020. While I tend to agree with that assessment, it still feels like 2019 is a positive outlier as much as 2020 was a negative one…the truth lies somewhere in between. And I’m not sure that merits a long-term extension. However, the Royals do love to take care of their players, and as I noted above, this upcoming season is a crucial one.
There’s always risk in deals like this; this particular extension has more risk for the Royals than it does for Dozier. But it’s clearly a risk the team is willing to take.
Where will Dozier play when Witt makes it to the show?