Tampa Bay Rays Make A Shrewd Investment In Jeffrey Springs

You’ve got to hand it to the Tampa Bay Rays. Tasked with competing in the American League East, arguably the richest and most competitive division in baseball (the NL East might disagree), the Rays hang right in there and scrap with their richer opponents on an ongoing basis. They’re clearly in a better place than the Boston Red Sox right now, and they’re pretty much on even ground with the New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays despite having a payroll that is only a fraction of theirs.

The Tampa Bay Rays have never had an Opening Day payroll over last year’s figure of $83.9M. By comparison, the Yankees ($246.0M), Red Sox ($206.6M) and Jays ($171.0M) all checked at over double that figure last season, with the Yanks at almost triple.

Very quietly, however, the Rays have begun to spend a least a little bit to protect their clearest competitive advantage – their pitching staff. Earlier this offseason, they signed free agent Zach Eflin away from the NL Champion Phillies to a three-year $40M deal. Eflin, very quietly, is one of the best contact managers in the game, and is a good bet to overperform his contract.

While Eflin himself was a bit of a hidden gem, at least he was a former 1st round pick with a lengthy professional track record. This week, the Rays stepped up and extended one of their own, lefty starter Jeffrey Springs, to a four-year, $31M deal that buys out his last two years of arbitration and his first two years of free agency. The deal also includes a $15M club option for the 2027 season.

Who is Jeffrey Springs? Well, last year he was remarkably successful for the Rays, posting a 9-5, 2.46, record with a sterling 144/31 K/BB record in 135 1/3 innings. Before 2022, he had started all of two major league games among his 102 MLB appearances. His record shows a sharp demarcation in performance on February 17, 2021, the day he was acquired by the Rays.

With the Rangers and Red Sox in 2018-20, he posted a 5.42 ERA, allowing 13 homers in 84 2/3 innings. As a Ray in 2021-22, he has a 2.70 ERA, with a 207/45 K/BB and 23 homers allowed in 180 innings. And he wasn’t a fallen stud prospect who hadn’t delivered on his considerable potential – Springs was a 30th round senior sign 2015 draft pick out of Appalachian State who started just 28 games among his 120 minor league appearances. He was just a guy.

But he was a guy with a changeup. The Rays do a very good job of building pitchers from the ground up, and thought they could build a legitimate major league starting pitcher’s arsenal around that changeup.

Springs threw that changeup 35.0% of the time in 2022. Among all MLB pitchers in either league who threw 135 or more innings last season (Springs threw 135 1/3), only recent Blue Jay trade acquisition Pablo Lopez (35.3%) threw his changeup a higher percentage of the time.

Let’s put it in absolute terms – Springs threw 756 changeups last season. Only six pitchers in baseball, regardless of their innings total, threw more. They were Lopez (1027), the Giants’ Logan Webb (937), Marlins’ Sandy Alcantara (899). Mariners’ Marco Gonzales (865), Rangers’ Martin Perez (823) and Dodgers’ (now Angels’) Tyler Anderson (815). Springs’ changeup swing-and-miss rate (at 21.5%) was the highest of the group, with Anderson (20.0%), Alcantara (18.4%), Perez (17.3%), Lopez (17.2%), Webb (14.1%) and Gonzales (13.6%) following in that order.

While I believe (and have the numbers to back it up that will soon be shown in my annual Best Pitches series) that the changeup is the best pitch in the game, it needs to be paired with at least a passable fastball to reach its maximum effectiveness.

Springs does not throw particularly hard. His four-seam fastball averaged a mere 91.7 mph last season, down 2 full mph from the previous season. What it lacks in pure velocity, it makes up for in other ways, like deception. Springs posted a better than MLB average 9.6% swing-and-miss rate on his four-seamer last season. That’s behind only Webb (12.4%) and reigning NL Cy Young Alcantara winner (10.8%) among our group of changeup volume guys, ahead of Lopez (9.5%), Gonzalez (6.1%) and Perez (2.1%).

So that’s a viable one-two fastball-changeup combo at the top of Springs’ repertoire, one that should prove more than worthy of the Rays’ investment, barring material injury, of course. Springs’ slider is a viable third offering, a borderline average pitch, but when your top two offerings are doing work, average is just fine.

So, the Rays strike again. They take a throwaway minor league arm, build a strong MLB arsenal around his changeup, and voila, have at least a #3 MLB starter for the short-to-intermediate term at an affordable cost. My batted ball-based metrics (”Tru” ERA- of 85) don’t like his 2022 quite as much as ERA- (67) and FIP- (80), but they like it just fine.

Springs throws tons of strikes, misses plenty of bats, and is an average range contact manager, all from the left side. The only AL starters with less than 162 innings pitched who were more valuable than Springs in 2022 were Cristian Javier, Nestor Cortes, Luis Severino, Luis Garcia and Lance Lynn. Not a bad peer group.