On the wisdom of the Whit Merrifield signing, and a familiar philosophical struggle for the Phillies

It’s amazing how easily bright baseball men can be pushed to the conclusion that what their team really needs is less of the thing that their team is best at. It’s especially confounding when the thing that their team is best at is the thing that produces the most runs. Namely, reaching base and hitting for power.

Think back to 2010 and 2011. How many times did you hear the phrase, “small ball?” How many times did you hear somebody ask for more of it? From 2007 to 2009, the Phillies had more home runs and extra-base hits than any team in the National League. The whole reason those teams won a World Series and went to another was their unique ability to hit baseballs hard enough that cattle herds winced. But whenever the Phillies came up just short of another title, the conclusion was that the things that had positioned them to win one were actually the things that had prevented them from winning one.

Call it the Placido Polanco paradox.

When the Phillies signed Polanco in December 2009, the veteran third baseman was supposed to bring an element that they had been lacking. He put the bat on the ball. He hit for average. He moved baserunners. He did all of the things that good baseball players do when they aren’t hitting home runs.

The Phillies hadn’t exactly gotten Ruthian production out of third base the previous two seasons. Pedro Feliz had hit only 26 home runs with a .393 slugging percentage to go with a .259 average. Polanco, who had previously been with the Phillies from 2002-05, hit 11 home runs with a .365 slugging percentage in his first two years back with the Phillies. But he hit .288.

Thing is, the Phillies scored 48 fewer runs from 2009 to 2010. After they let Jayson Werth walk, their offense plummeted to seventh in the NL. They still haven’t won that elusive title.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that Whit Merrifield makes perfect sense for the Phillies. At least, the idea of him does. What’s far less clear is how close that actual version of Merrifield aligns with the player that Dave Dombrowski and Rob Thomson think they are getting. That, and the validity of the theory itself.

Merrifield, a veteran utility man whom the Phillies signed to a one-year, $8 million deal over the weekend, profiles as everything the Phillies weren’t in their NLCS loss to the Diamondbacks. He doesn’t hit for much power, but he puts the bat on the ball and moves baserunners and makes productive outs. He also steals plenty of bases: He led the AL in that category three times from 2017-21. Even in 2023, at the age of 34, his 26 steals for the Blue Jays would have ranked third on the Phillies. In short, he is the kind of baseball player that baseball people think about when they say that he is a good ballplayer.

Merrifield’s top-line metrics have declined significantly since his peak. From 2017-20, he posted a solid, even ideal .297/.345/.452 batting line while averaging 14 home runs a season for the Royals. Since then, he has hit just .268/.312/.385 with 11 home runs per season.

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That might be production worth $8 million at second base, but Merrifield is much more likely to earn his money in the outfield, where Brandon Marsh is a question mark for opening day after knee surgery and Johan Rojas is a question mark in general. You know what they call a team with a sub-.700 OPS and 11 home runs in one of its corner outfield spots? They call it a team that is in the market for a corner outfielder.

Clearly, the Phillies valued Merrifield as something greater than Rojas insurance. His underlying metrics tell the tale. Even in 2023, his contact rate (80.5%) was well above where the Phillies finished as a team (72.7%). Only Bryson Stott and Alec Bohm put the bat on the ball more often than Merrifield did in 2023. His 21 infield hits would have ranked third behind Stott and Trea Turner. More than a third of his outs were productive outs; i.e., they advanced a runner with nobody out or scored a runner with the second out of an inning. That’s well above MLB average.

All of those are good things. And if Merrifield can couple them with his overall production during the first 4½ months of last season, he will look like a shrewd signing. Through Aug. 15 last season, Merrifield hit .304 with a .349 on-base percentage, .432 slugging percentage, 11 home runs, and 22 stolen bases for a Blue Jays team that went 63-49 in games that he played. The problem arises if he turns out to be the player he was over the last month-and-a-half of the season, when he hit .167/.213/.214 with no home runs and four steals. The Blue Jays went 16-17 in Merrifield’s 33 games. He was not in the starting lineup in either of their wild-card losses to the Twins.

To be clear, the Phillies weren’t going to find a no-doubt-about-it masher for $8 million. But the price tag is only $2 million less than what the Dodgers paid last offseason for J.D. Martinez, who posted an .893 OPS and 33 home runs. It is $1 million more than the Red Sox paid for Adam Duvall, who hit 21 home runs with an .834 OPS in 353 plate appearances. It is four times as much as the Diamondbacks just paid for Randal Grichuk, who has averaged 19 home runs with a .733 OPS over the last three seasons.

At the end of the day, the wisdom of the Merrifield signing will be judged based on whatever else the Phillies could have gotten out of that money. I’m not necessarily skeptical. I’m more intrigued. It is a proof-in-the-pudding kind of move. The Phillies will be right or they will be wrong, and it may not make a difference either way.

The bigger-picture point is more theoretical. I keep going back to something Dombrowski said in his end-of-season press conference following that NLCS collapse.

“What you want to do is score runs, right?” the Phillies’ president of baseball operations said. “That’s what your goal is, however you end up doing it. I don’t think it necessitates [saying], ‘Well, we need to trade this guy who’s not as disciplined and maybe hits home runs for a guy that’s much more disciplined and an on-base guy.’ I’ll take the run production, in that case.”

It’s a wise point. In Merrifield, the Phillies signed a guy who, at his best, offers the skills they lacked against the Diamondbacks. In doing so, they prioritized those skills over the ones that got them to the NLCS in the first place. Balance is a good thing. So is run production. Strategically, philosophically, the Phillies can’t afford to let the former come at the expense of the latter.