Ellsbury's a Leap of Faith for Yanks

By now we are all digesting the Yanks signing of Jacoby Ellsbury for 7/153.  It's unusual on a couple of fronts.  First, Jacoby has only had one HoF type year through his 20s and that was his age 27, 2011 season, when his OPS+ was 146 and he finished second in the AL MVP race.   Hall of Fame type CF's usually have an OPS+ of over 120 for their career's.  Jacoby has one of those and one in the teens. He's been below 100 at times.  Those kind of guys don't make the Hall of Fame and also don't get 20 per.  But he is and that's weird.  What else is there?

Well, he's a good defender.  Not as good as Brett Gardner, but good, and that's worth something.  Also, according to Fangraphs, he is the BEST baserunner in baseball.  And that's probably worth something.  We all remember Rickey Henderson taking over a playoff series with his steals and threats to steal, but it's unclear how valuable that is in and of itself.   Stealing home is sort of rare, and so, without help all of your great base running will often be halted by third.  Anyway the big caveat to the base running, which the Yanks are paying a premium for, is that he only gets on base 35% of the time. Now, that's not awful.  But it's also not good.   He's a pretty high average hitter so his problem is that he only walks about 50 times a year.

The Yanks have gotten away from their OBP model, and that's not a good thing, and God knows Girardi has never valued it.  So it's unclear how Jacoby will get on base more as a Yankee and become more of what they're paying him to be, unless the park really helps him, and his old player skills kick in (he turned 30 in September) and he just starts walking more.  I don't think there are any OBP machines on the team anymore, with Swish long gone and Tex having given up on walks around the time he became a Yankee.

So the Yanks are paying Hall of Fame type money, for a guy who would have to be a different player to get into the Hall of Fame.  That's a leap of faith and I don't know if the park can do that for him, though he's traditionally hit well, but not great in YS.