By Max Carlin, from Cardsblog.com
After a thoroughly disappointing 2016 season, marred by injury and on-field struggles, the hope for Tommy Pham in 2017 was a mild resurgence.
In 2015, Pham’s rookie year, he provided an infusion of energy, coming up from the minors in July, hitting and defending well, racking up an impressive 1.6 fWAR in just 173 plate appearances across 52 games.
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After Giancarlo Stanton turned them down, the Cardinals wasted no time in rebounding. They acquired Marcell Ozuna for an absurdly low price.
Entering 2017, Pham was what he was. He was a fourth outfielder, a mildly intriguing hitter, an up-and-down defender, an impressive athlete, yet troublingly injury-prone. A resurgence seemed like a fair ask, but anything more would have been unreasonable.
Of course, Pham did not struggle to burst through that erroneously-imposed ceiling.
Last season, Pham elevated his bat from good to elite. His strikeout rate fell all the way from 38.8 percent in 2016 to 22.1 percent, perfectly in-line with his pre-2016 production in both the big leagues and the minors. He continued to hit well on balls in play, ratcheted up his base-stealing, and had some good luck on fly balls. His defense also rebounded from 2016. He became a full-fledged superstar.
What’s more, Pham was a full-fledged superstar making pennies, and he will be again in 2018, his contract having been renewed by the Cardinals for the minimum. After this year, the Cardinals will have Pham for at least three more years, as he’ll be eligible for arbitration.
In other words, Pham will likely spend his entire prime playing for the Cardinals at well-below-market-value salaries. You have to feel for Pham, but for the Cardinals, that surplus value is a godsend, and it makes Pham one of the best bargains in the MLB—something surely meriting excitement.
With that said, Cardinals fans would be wise to temper expectations slightly, because there are some not quite red, but certainly yellow flags in Pham’s 2017 hitting profile.
Pham is a pretty extreme ground ball hitter. Among qualified players in 2017, Pham had the MLB’s 12th-highest ground ball percentage at 51.7 percent. To that end, he was heavily reliant on balls in play to reach base, posting the MLB’s fourth-highest batting average on balls in play among qualified hitters at .368.
Pham’s always been unusually successful on balls in play, tracing back to his days in the minors, and consistent even through his nightmarish 2016. It makes sense, Pham’s success on balls in play. He’s a speedster, much like other notables atop the BABIP leaderboard, Charlie Blackmon and reigning AL MVP and World Series champion Jose Altuve. Pham’s base-running excellence is borne out in Fangraphs’ Base Running metric, in which he rated 10th-best last year.
Pham generates a ton of value through his speed, and for a guy who’s already 30, that’s a bit of a concern. Pham may have just reached superstardom, but he’s also about to begin his athletic decline. For a player who relies so heavily on speed and athleticism to generate offensive value, that has to be a major concern.
Of course, Pham’s defensive production will also fall off measurably when his athleticism starts to go, and as we’ve seen in recent years with former NL MVP Andrew McCutchen, when an outfielder’s athleticism wanes, his defensive ability regresses, and his value plummets.
I’m not saying that, having reached the wrong side of 30, Pham is destined to sharply decline. Rajai Davis, for example, has made himself a career through elite athleticism that has lasted well into his late-30s. However, Pham’s age is worth noting, the potential for his athletic decline worth acknowledging.
Causes for cynicism acknowledged, Pham is one of the strongest reasons to be excited for Cardinals baseball in 2018.
The Cardinals' best hitter from 2017 is electric, one of the most exciting all-around players in baseball, and capable of imposing his will on the game at the plate, on the base paths, in the field. Furthermore, he’s arguably the best value in baseball, a superstar being paid like the fourth outfielder he was in another life. Even if athletic decline sets in, Pham will still be among the league’s best values.
Pham is also a curiosity, an endlessly compelling storyline for the coming season. He was a superstar for one season, and Cardinals fans are surely eager to know the answer to the question on everyone’s mind: “can he do it again?”
The process will begin to answer that in just nine days. So get excited, Cardinals fans, because baseball and Tommy Pham are almost back.
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