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National League

PITTSBURGH PIRATES
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Signed C-R Chris Stewart to a two-year deal with a team option for 2018. [1/14]

In 326 plate appearances over two seasons in Pittsburgh, Chris Stewart has 13 extra-base hits, and they’re all doubles. He’s made contact at a decent rate and walked enough to keep a little bit of OBP on him, but in general, Stewart fits the profile of a light-hitting backup backstop. A decade ago, it’s unlikely he’d have warranted a multi-year commitment from anyone. But the times, they’re a-changing. Stewart (like David Ross, Ryan Hanigan, and Jose Molina, all of them light-hitting backups) is a strong framer, and this is the new standard package for his skill set. The Pirates hope they’ll never be reliant upon Stewart, because no player with that offensive profile advances his team toward a championship in an everyday role, but as long as he’s a backup catcher, he’s a Hell of an asset, and one worth sewing up for an extra year or two.

SAN DIEGO PADRES
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Agreed to sign SS-R Alexei Ramirez to a one-year deal worth $4 million-$5 million. [1/14]

It was a modest surprise that the White Sox declined their option on Ramirez, even as he heads into his mid-30s, and even despite the fact that Ramirez had the worst season of his eight-year big-league career in 2015. Given the direction of the market for free-agent position players, though, it’s little surprise that the Sox’s choice turned out to be the right one.

The Padres undertook a long flirtation with fellow free-agent shortstop Ian Desmond. There’s little doubt, even coming off the rough season Desmond had, that he would have improved the San Diego infield by more than Ramirez will, and given the report (from San Diego Union-Tribune beat guy Dennis Lin) that the Padres might continue to add via free agency after signing Ramirez, it’s hard to figure what drew them into this digression.

It’s certainly nothing Ramirez did in 2015, unless making contact is a huge priority for the Padres. On that front, of course, Ramirez is a consistent asset. He’s never fanned more than 13.1 percent of the time in a season, and even that was several years ago. Given his low walk rate and power baseline, though, Ramirez still only hits at the level of an average shortstop when he collects hits on balls in play. For years, that wasn’t a problem. In fact, Ramirez was a BABIP metronome, posting seven straight seasons with BABIPs between .288 and .309. If you strike out as rarely as he always has and hit for that kind of average on contact, you’ll meet or clear the offensive standard at short more often than not.

Alas, in 2015, Ramirez’s metronome lost its steady way. His BABIP cratered to .264, dragging all three slash lines to career lows. His groundball rate reached a career high. He hit a higher percentage of his batted balls up the middle of the diamond than anyone else who qualified for the batting title, which might sound like a good thing, but actually indicates a lack of authoritative contact of either kind, to either side of the field. He had the 11th-lowest average exit velocity of the 221 batters who had at least 190 batted balls tracked by Statcast, according to Baseball Savant. His legs also showed his age, as he turned in -4.4 runs of baserunning value.

All of that is the bad news. The good news is, as old and slow as Ramirez and his bat looked in 2015, he might just bounce back. It’s unlikely, but it’s far from impossible. It’s even possible, unlikely though it appears, that those bad indicators all over his profile were just blips. We are talking about BABIP, after all. In the meantime, if he’s a zero at the plate and on the bases, there remain at least a few signs of life in his glove—and he did sign with a team who started Will Middlebrooks a few times at short in 2015.

That team, by the way, remains painfully hard to read. They’re so middling, so much on the fault line between the clear contenders and the rebuilders that make up the rest of the senior circuit, that it’s hard to see which they even intend to be—let alone what will actually happen. If they’re saving the bulk of their free-agent expenditure for an outfield boost, that’s great. If they’re settling for Ramirez because they don’t feel ready to swing with the big punchers and don’t want to spend the money it would take to land Desmond, that’s fine, too. If last winter is any guide, though, what we might be looking at is another in a series of moves that make little sense in isolation, and even less in the big picture.

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