Phenomenal, Cosmic Power… Itty-Bitty Contact Rate: Orioles Sign Tyler O’Neill and Gary Sánchez

… And this is why you move the left field wall back in. On Saturday, the Orioles jumped into the free agent market looking for upside, inking two veterans who, when they’re at their best, have the ability to rival the most fearsome sluggers in the game.

Outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who bashed 32 home runs over just 113 games with the Red Sox, signed a three-year, $49.5 million deal that will make him an Oriole through his age-32 season. Catcher Gary Sánchez, who turned 32 just last week, signed a one-year, $8.5 million deal. Both players are right-handed batters with multiple 30-homer seasons under their belts, which is to say that until the Orioles announced a few weeks ago that their left field wall would no longer be located way the hell out in Towson, both might have seriously considered passing on an offer to play in Baltimore and watch all their would-be home runs die in the left fielder’s glove. (Honestly, I’m mostly joking here. O’Neill and Sánchez have enough power that they’re among the small cohort of players who didn’t really have to worry about Walltimore.)

Ben Clemens predicted that O’Neill would sign for three years and $45 million, while our crowdsourced estimate was $50 million. Congratulations readers, you’re collectively smarter than Ben! Another way to view the situation is that Ben’s number had baked into it some very legitimate concerns about O’Neill going forward, but given the season he just had, one team was bound to take a gamble on his upside. The Orioles have Cedric Mullins locked in as their center fielder for one more year and Colton Cowser, fresh off a second-place finish in the Rookie of the Year voting, in left. With Anthony Santander a free agent and Austin Hays gone, that leaves the left-handed Heston Kjerstad and the right-handed O’Neill. O’Neill ran a huge 215 wRC+ against lefties in 2024, and he’s got a career wRC+ of 152 against them. Against righties, those numbers are 91 in 2024 and 104 over his career. The team will likely hope to keep him fresh by letting him rest against the occasional righty.

O’Neill is pretty much tailor-made to take over the slugging corner outfielder role recently vacated by Santander. The two players are so similar, in fact, that they share the exact same career .246 batting average, .223 ISO, and .469 slugging percentage! However, there are some key differences between the two. For starters, Santander is an equal-opportunity masher who features small platoon splits. Perhaps the most important area in which O’Neill can’t match Santander is availability. Over the past three seasons, Santander has played in 460 games, while O’Neill has appeared in just 281 thanks to a litany of injuries to another litany of body parts. He’s gone on the IL six times over the past four years.

Even when he’s on the field, O’Neill has a long way to go if he hopes to match Santander in terms of consistency. Santander mashed 44 home runs last season and hasn’t hit fewer than 28 since 2021. The Orioles are now counting on O’Neill to keep a hot bat for the second year running, and so far in his career that’s been a tall order. He broke out in a major way in 2021, running a 143 wRC+ with 34 homers while playing in 138 games. However, in injury truncated 2022 and 2023 seasons, he was slightly below average at the plate, and then the Cardinals traded him to Boston last offseason. With the Green Monster to aim at, O’Neill bounced all the way back to a 131 wRC+ despite missing time with knee inflammation, a concussion, and a leg infection. If he manages to put up even a league-average season at the plate, it will be the first time he’s ever done so for two seasons in a row.

All those injuries have also slowed O’Neill down in the field. Once considered an excellent defender who could manage all three corner spots, he’s been closer to average than good over the past three seasons. In 2024, for the first time, Statcast’s fielding run values saw him as costing his team multiple runs. His sprint speed now makes him slightly below average for an outfielder; it may rebound if he’s able to avoid leg injuries in 2025, but it’s doubtful that the Orioles expect O’Neill to contribute much on defense. He’ll likely get his fair share of at-bats as a DH.

I’m not painting too complicated a picture here: O’Neill is a prototypical three true outcomes slugger. All the same, you might be surprised to see just how close he lives to the edge. His stat line is a study in extremes. In 2024, he ran an unsightly 33.6% strikeout rate. Among batters with at least 450 plate appearances, that was the second-highest rate in baseball. If you’re wondering why he strikes out so often, it’s not because he chases everything he sees. He runs a below-average chase rate, and his 11.2% walk rate ranked 21st among that cohort. It’s just that he whiffs a lot, ranking in the bottom eight in terms of zone contact rate, overall contact rate, and squared-up rate. He’s an extreme example of the swing-hard-in-case-you-make-contact player, and the Orioles are putting some real money behind the belief that he will both stay healthy and continue to make enough contact.

As a backup catcher, Sánchez may not be expected to play as big an everyday role as O’Neill, but if you consider part of his responsibilities to be to help to keep Adley Rutschman healthy and performing at 100%, then it’s hard to imagine a more important assignment. Rutschman started the 2024 season looking, well, like Adley Rutschman. But he suffered a thumb injury in late June, and ran a wRC+ of just 61 from June 30 onward. (For what it’s worth, the Orioles have said publicly that Rutschman’s poor play wasn’t due to any specific injury.) It wasn’t by any means a lost season for the young superstar, as he’d banked a 138 wRC+ up until the injury. Still, he finished with a 104 wRC+ and 2.8 WAR, the worst marks of his career. Moreover, Rutschman ran a 138 wRC+ as a DH last season, compared to just 88 as a catcher. Despite his excellence behind the dish, the Orioles will almost certainly be looking to let him spend a bit less time in a squat. In other words, they absolutely need a reliable backup to take over the role that James McCann filled over the last two seasons.

The Orioles were reportedly interested in bringing back McCann, but McCann wanted more years than they were willing to give. With shiny prospect Samuel Basallo waiting in the wings, the team only wanted a backup on a one-year deal. Sánchez is a perfectly solid choice for that role. He’s played in at least 75 games in each of the past eight seasons (aside from 2020, when he caught 49 of the Yankees’ 60 games). His framing numbers ticked down a bit during the 2024 season, but he’s grown into a solid defensive catcher. “I can’t say enough about him,” Blake Snell told reporters in July. “I love throwing to him. I love the connection that we have. I love everything. We’re always on the same page. He understands me, I understand him. It’s been a lot of fun.”

Sánchez is no longer the hitter he was when he first broke onto the scene, but he’s run a 98 wRC+ over the past four seasons, which puts him in the top 20 of all catchers over that period (minimum 800 PAs). And it’s not as if that fearsome slugger is gone completely. The light-tower power is still there, and when Sánchez is going well, it’s a sight to behold. In 2024, he snapped off two 25-game streaks in which he ran a wRC+ of 150 or better. It’s just that in between were a couple streaks in which his wRC+ was 57 or worse.

When you take these two moves together, it certainly looks like the Orioles think there’s something they can unlock in a couple of righties with huge whiff rates and exit velocities. However, it’s possible that this is just a coincidence, and they don’t have a specific plan to pull off an upside move. O’Neill fills a recently vacated role, and the Orioles have the talent to cover for him should injury or underperformance strike. Likewise, Sánchez is a dependable catcher who was willing to take a stopgap deal. The two players certainly make sense in Baltimore, and maybe it’s just that simple.

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