He’s been a spark for the team, but is it enough to keep a roster spot?
Before we even get started, let’s establish a fact. We’re going to be talking about the 13th position player on the roster, the 38th or 39th player on the 40-man roster as a whole. In the grand scheme of things as related to Phillies roster building, this is not an important piece of the puzzle.
However.
If we’re talking about actual depth, actual roster optimization and actual production, the team really should be keeping Otto Kemp around once Bryce Harper is able to return from his current wrist malady. If the decision comes down to which right handed hitting bench option the team should continue to employ at the major league level, it’s kind of a no contest at this point right? Weston Wilson has not done enough that he should get the nod over Kemp.
It needs to be Kemp at this point.
“A lot of energy,” manager Rob Thomson said of what Kemp has brought to the Phillies’ clubhouse following Sunday’s 11-4 win over the Blue Jays. “He’s had great at-bats, really has, and I’ve talked about it before, whenever a guy comes up for the first time, it just creates some energy in the clubhouse because guys are excited for him.”
Clearly the team likes having Kemp in the clubhouse, but this kind of scenario – the team being excited for an undrafted minor league free agent making his way to the top – would probably happen at any point.
So what about baseball reasons? Are the baseball reasons enough to keep Kemp in the majors as opposed to Wilson (what this choice likely comes down to)? That answer might be a bit more convoluted.
Offensively, Kemp is getting some benefit of the doubt from recency bias. His nine game, 35 plate appearance sample size has been better than expected from a counting stats point of view. Ten hits and four RBI will do that to a guy. The success has helped confirm the idea that he should have been called up much earlier in the eyes of his most ardent supporters. But the underlying stuff suggests that he’s been a bit lucky and that the scouting report hasn’t fully gone around the league. The barrel rate, the chase rate, the whiff rate – it’s all actually quite poor. Regression comes for us all and it could be around the corner.
Compare it to Wilson and it looks better stats wise, but again, the underlying stuff looks a bit similar. Neither have a sample size of plate appearances to draw any real conclusions about how they could produce later on in the season, but if we had to guess, the regression monster is coming for Wilson as well. And it could bite worse.
That means we have to continue looking elsewhere, which is where the scales might tip more in Wilson’s favor. We know that Wilson can play the four corners – third base, first base, right field and left field – but we don’t know that about Kemp. We do know he can learn on the fly at first base, yet so far the results are iffy, at best. He clearly would never take at bats away from Harper, which would mean he’d have to shift to third base. There, we see that Alec Bohm has improved dramatically at the plate as the season has progressed and, judging strictly by eye test, has at least played average defense. That’s not enough to be supplanted by a player who has a really nice backstory. So if Wilson can play defense well enough to get by in more positions than Kemp (a generous statement, that I will grant), that would give Wilson the presumable edge in the battle.
Baserunning, you say? That’s not all that close as Kemp’s sprint speed is one of the higher ones on the team.
So what can we determine about the two of them? That’s pretty easy: the team needs to upgrade at that particular position.
The planned intention, at least as far as we can tell, is that the team will continue to employ platoons in left and center fields. Lately, there has been a lot more Brandon Marsh/Max Kepler than Johan Rojas/Weston Wilson, a consequence of the schedule. They’ve faced for right handed pitchers, which means more left handed hitters. Eventually, they will face left handers on the mound and Rojas and Wilson will have to play. That duo simply has not hit well enough to get benefit of the doubt, but there has to be some slack given due to lack of playing time. We are not major league baseball players, so it’s easy to say that they should be ready at any time, but they are humans. Creatures of habit. If they aren’t getting that regular time, we’d have to assume that they will not perform as well. But even as we’ve seen, they’re not hitting when they do get the chance. So, if the team is looking for ways to get better at the trade deadline, but doesn’t want to spend too much money/trade capital, getting a better right handed bench option would seem to be the play.
That means, the decision between Kemp and Wilson comes down to time. How much time do they really have to make an impact, to force the organization to make the choice in their favor? We have to assume that Harper will return in the next few weeks, slowing the need to make an immediate decision between the two, so this argument is more horizon looking than anything. If we’re being honest with ourselves, the team needs to get a better option than either of them.
For now, it would seem like keeping Kemp and the energy his promotion has brought the team would be wiser than doing the same with Wilson. Once Harper returns, then it likely becomes a coin flip between them. Kemp has his supporters, but Wilson has the “experience” from last year as well. In the end, it’ll probably be a simple matter of preference.
Or they could just trade for Austin Hays.