Entering the 2025 season, the Cardinals arguably have three candidates to play 2B next season. All three will presumably see some action, though who gets the lion’s share of starts is to be determined. The favorite is Brendan Donovan, except that he happens to be injury insurance at corner outfield. If it goes anything like last year, he’ll be the starting LF on Game 1. (Lars Nootbaar was hurt to begin the season).
The other two options are at different points of their career. Nolan Gorman’s strikeout problems went from a manageable problem to a very bad problem, but he still has 60 career homers in less than 1,200 plate appearances and that’s impossible to ignore. Thomas Saggese on the other hand seems primed for the next step – the Cardinals sent him to the AFL and signs seem to point to them wanting him on the MLB roster.
This is not about picking which is the best option. See, defense is still tricky to judge. Nolan Gorman is still relatively early in his 2B career, and while he took a step back last season, it’s not like he was unplayable defensively in 2023. Donovan doesn’t even have a full season at 2B over the course of his career. And obviously Thomas Saggese is a complete unknown defensively except for 80 innings of the eye test – which unfortunately don’t mean much.
I will do two things in this exercise – and it is an exercise – so don’t get mad when I put a player’s defensive number higher than you think is possible. I will set three defensive numbers for each player – their floor, their ceiling, and in between. Then I will determine, with that defense, what their offense needs to be in order to reach 2 WAR, 3 WAR, and 4 WAR. What I think this does is give us a better idea of what to hope for in some cases and what’s reachable in other cases. Basically, this is what I, reader of VEB, think of this player’s defense, so this is the offense I have to hope for in order of them to reach the WAR I think they can reach.
Brendan Donovan
-5 defender – This is unlikely, however, I will point out that he was worth -2 OAA in his rookie season in just 264 innings, which is much worse than a -5 defender over a full season. So I do think there is a world where he could be a -5 defender and just had a great stretch of 421 innings last year.
2 WAR Player – 105 wRC+
3 WAR Player – 120 wRC+
4 WAR Player – 134 wRC+
For frame of reference, Donovan is a career 119 wRC+ hitter, albeit one who has had a worse batting line in every season of his career. But even if he’s a -5 defender at 2B, if he hits to his career line, over 600 PAs, Donovan is a 3 WAR player. 4 WAR player seems more out of reach if he’s this bad defensively, although 2 WAR is a very good floor.
I should probably emphasize that these numbers are assuming a player reaches 600 PAs. Donovan managed higher than 3 WAR with less than a 120 wRC+ because he had 652 PAs last season. Donovan has in fact been worth 3 fWAR per 600 PAs for his career, last year was just the first time he reached 600 PAs.
0 defender – This is personally my best guess for how good a defender Donovan is. I know some people are higher on him than this. I guess I’ll put it this way: if I was projecting him, I would assume he was a dead neutral defender. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he was better. But he really didn’t look like a good defender in his first two seasons, and one good season doesn’t completely erase that for me.
2 WAR player – 98 wRC+
3 WAR player – 112 wRC+
4 WAR player – 126 wRC+
Interesting quirk. Due to the nature of Donovan playing all over the field, he seemingly has a higher baseline level of performance than his actual career if he stuck to 2B. It hurts Donovan’s WAR numbers that he doesn’t just play at 2B. Cause if you stuck him at 2B all year, and assumed he was an average defender, he would likely be better than a 3 WAR player. Cause his career wRC+ is 119. Again, assuming he got 600 PAs of course.
+5 defender – If there’s something about 2024 that made him an actually good fielder, this is within range. And like I said above, it wouldn’t actually surprise me. He was quite literally a +5 fielder in 421 innings at 2B last year after all. But he’s played 947 innings in his career and the rest of his innings were not as good. And you tend to listen to the whole body of work over a smaller sample of innings. If you took his whole body of work at face value, he wouldn’t quite be a +5 defender still, but he’d be better than average.
2 WAR player – 91 wRC+
3 WAR player – 105 wRC+
4 WAR player – 118 wRC+
This just in: Brendan Donovan is going to be good at baseball no matter what assumptions you make. We, as a fanbase, don’t actually care that Donovan maximizes his WAR number, so he will play wherever he’s needed, and one injury to a corner outfielder means he’s needed in LF. We need the following two players to get plate appearances more than – and I apologize ahead of time for fans clamoring for him – Matt Koperniak or something.
Nolan Gorman
So this is just my opinion, but Saggese is too much of an unknown for this exercise to be particularly useful or enlightening and Donovan is far too much of a known for it to be revelatory, so the real purpose of this post is honestly just me wanting to know how much Nolan Gorman has to hit. That’d be a short post and I do actually think it’s useful for comparison’s sake, but yeah I wrote this post for Nolan Gorman.
-8 defender – To me, Gorman’s floor is how he played last year. He played really badly in his rookie season and I’m kind of throwing that data out. That’s not exactly what you’re supposed to do, but he was very new to the position and the numbers are pretty out of whack with his past two seasons honestly. He was -12 OAA in 548 innings and he hasn’t even reached -12 in the past two seasons combined despite playing well over double those innings.
2 WAR player – 108 wRC+
3 WAR player – 122 wRC+
4 WAR player – 135 wRC+
So two ways to look at this. The first is the negative viewpoint. Gorman’s career wRC+ is actually lower than the 2 WAR player. And I can certainly see why you’d place Gorman’s baseline defense at his performance last year. Then there’s the more optimistic viewpoint which is that if Gorman hits, place him wherever the hell you want on the diamond. A 135 wRC+ plays anywhere clearly.
-6 defense – You’ll notice the “average” outcome defense for Gorman is a lot closer to his floor defensively. In normal cases, I would just go 5 above or 5 below whatever I think the average outcome is. But I cannot ignore the numbers on this one and I arrive at -6 basically because that’s what the numbers say he’s been in the past two years combined over 1,200 innings. Anything better than that is optimism. Which I personally have, but I’m trying to remain objective. I think it’s reasonable to think he won’t be worse than a -8 defender, but I also think it’s reasonable to say you can’t assume he’ll be better than a -6 defender.
2 WAR player – 105 wRC+
3 WAR player – 120 wRC+
4 WAR player – 134 wRC+
This saves me some time. You might be wondering why Donovan, as a -5 defender, has identical offensive outcomes, to Gorman, -6 defender. Simple: to date, Gorman has been a better baserunner. I didn’t mention it before, but I’m factoring baserunning into the WAR numbers. Gorman has been nearly a run better on the basepaths per 600 PAs, which isn’t much, but does allow Gorman to be ever so slightly worse as a defender and need the same offensive baseline.
-3 defense – I’m not going to go as far as to say his ceiling is an average defender. Until he proves otherwise, that ship has sailed. So it’s best to be realistic about Gorman’s defense and say that below average, but easily playable is his ceiling. We can hope on that and not be completely out of our minds.
2 WAR player – 102 wRC+
3 WAR player – 116 wRC+
4 WAR player – 130 wRC+
So, uh, bad news? I guess. Gorman has to be an above average hitter no matter how good his defense. But we already knew that. But if he is somehow just a -3 defender, he has very reasonable outcomes offensively that he should be able to reach. Also worth pointing out is that I’m not sure Gorman is ever going to reach 600 PAs due to being platooned. Although his splits are not super far apart believe it or not: 105 wRC+ against RHP, 98 wRC+ against LHP for career. Like if he’s really a 130 wRC+, you still play him against lefties with those splits, even with poor defense.
Thomas Saggese
I’m going to do Saggese a bit differently. For starters, I’d make the exact same ceiling, floor, and middle ground for Saggese as I did for Donovan, so no point in repeating that. Secondly, Saggese won’t have a good offensive projection. It was 87 OPS+ entering 2024, and it probably won’t be much different next year. He had a 93 wRC+ in AAA, a 57 wRC+ in the majors, and I really don’t think ZiPS is going to weigh AFL a ton given he’s effectively facing High A and AA pitchers.
Also Saggese simply has different expectations. He’s more of a role player, so I will appropriately adjust for that. Instead of 2-3-4 WAR, let’s instead do 1.5-2-2.5 WAR. That would be a great outcome. I’ll give him a 85 wRC+, 93 wRC+, and 100 wRC+ and see what kind of defense he needs to have to reach those WAR figures.
85 wRC+ – I would not be totally shocked if this is his ZiPS projection which is why I’m starting here. I expect it to be higher, but if you disregard AFL numbers and I really don’t think they are useful for where a player like Saggese is at given the level of pitching he’s facing – you can easily see how he’d have a worse projection after last season’s results.
1.5 WAR player – +3 defender
2 WAR player – +8 defender
3 WAR player – +13 defender
No shocking twist here. He has to be a good defender to be a good role player and an absolutely phenomenal defender to be average or better. I don’t know if it’s reasonable to assume he’ll be +3 defensively, but that feels more possible than it did before we saw him play, which is nice at least.
93 wRC+ – This is my middle ground for Saggese mainly because I think it’s an extremely reasonable expectation. Maybe not for a projection, but 93 certainly doesn’t seem to require a ton of rose-colored glasses.
1.5 WAR player: -3 defender
2 WAR player – +2 defender
2.5 WAR player – +7 defender
If he’s a 93 wRC+ hitter, he can effectively be completely dead average in the field, which seems like the most likely outcome, both offensively and defensively? To me anyway.
100 wRC+ – Anything better than this and somebody’s getting traded so he can play more. Which may happen anyway, but he’ll really force the issue.
1.5 WAR player: -3 defender
2 WAR player: -8 defender
2.5 WAR player: -13 defender
Important context to know. I just assumed Saggese would be an average baserunner, but that would change the equation for better or worse if he was not. Either way, you can totally see why Saggese needs to get MLB plate appearances for the team when he has extremely reasonable ways to get to at least 1.5 WAR in his rookie season.