Tzu-Wei Lin is a 23 year-old glove-first infielder, who has also played some outfield. The Red Sox gave him the largest bonus ever to a Taiwanese position player, ~$2m.
After years of offensive futility, he has adjusted his swing to get more fly balls. His minor league GO/FB ratios are pretty amazing reading: 1.52, 1.58, 1.94, 1.42, 1.82, 1.96, 0.76. Something has changed, and it seems to have helped him add almost 300 points of OPS between his 2016 and 2017 stints at AA. This got him a couple of writeups in Carson Cistulli's Fringe Five feature at Fangraphs.
As I'm writing this, he is sporting a pretty attractive .949 OPS in the majors. 9/25, 2 triples, 7 strikeouts against 3 walks, one stolen base. That's a .360/.429/.520 slash line.
Lin only has 29 MLB plate appearances, so this is thread is admittedly premature. I thought we should have a place to collect our observations of and thoughts about this dark horse candidate at third.
I won't shock anyone if I suggest that this level of production might be unsustainable. The question is: how unsustainable? If Lin can post a .750 OPS, and Todd Frazier (or whoever) can post a .770 OPS, then I don't want to trade Sam Travis (or whoever) for such a small benefit: I'd rather let Lin, Marrero, and — health permitting — Holt try to stabilize the third base position and the bottom of the order until Devers is ready.
A few notes to get us started:
After years of offensive futility, he has adjusted his swing to get more fly balls. His minor league GO/FB ratios are pretty amazing reading: 1.52, 1.58, 1.94, 1.42, 1.82, 1.96, 0.76. Something has changed, and it seems to have helped him add almost 300 points of OPS between his 2016 and 2017 stints at AA. This got him a couple of writeups in Carson Cistulli's Fringe Five feature at Fangraphs.
As I'm writing this, he is sporting a pretty attractive .949 OPS in the majors. 9/25, 2 triples, 7 strikeouts against 3 walks, one stolen base. That's a .360/.429/.520 slash line.
Lin only has 29 MLB plate appearances, so this is thread is admittedly premature. I thought we should have a place to collect our observations of and thoughts about this dark horse candidate at third.
I won't shock anyone if I suggest that this level of production might be unsustainable. The question is: how unsustainable? If Lin can post a .750 OPS, and Todd Frazier (or whoever) can post a .770 OPS, then I don't want to trade Sam Travis (or whoever) for such a small benefit: I'd rather let Lin, Marrero, and — health permitting — Holt try to stabilize the third base position and the bottom of the order until Devers is ready.
A few notes to get us started:
- Lin has a .500 BABIP, 9 hits (including a bunt single) on 18 BIP. That's obviously extremely high. If we were just to assume a .300ish BABIP we could try to dock him three singles, which would yield either a .240/.321/.400 line on a .333 BABIP. Also known as a better line than anything Sandoval has done in Boston. (Docking him four singles would yield a more Marreroish .200/.285/.360 line on a .277 BABIP.)
- However, Lin has a very high LD rate: 29.4%! 5 line drives out of 17 non-bunted balls in play. He may be earning most of that batting average.
- Interestingly, Lin has held his excellent AA walk, 10.9% to 10.3%, while his strikeout rate has ballooned up to 24.1% from 14.7% in Portland. His eye has held up, but he's lost something in contact.
- Farrell has been using Lin mostly against righties (7/21, 1 3B, 3 BB, 6 K), but he's held his own against lefties (2/4, 1 3B, 0 BB, 1 K, 1 sacrifice).
- He's seen a lot of fastballs, 72%.
- His spray chart suggests an up-the-middle approach.