Tim Beckham might be good
It's surprising to say, but the 1/1 pick from 2008 didn't receive his first opportunity to start full time in the MLB until 2017, and even that season saw him pushed off the position he'd been drafted for and off the team in spite of solid performance. The Rays traded Tim Beckham for a Low-A pitching prospect in large part because they acquired Adeiny Hechevaria and had a strong preference for Brad Miller as a starter at second base. Even in Seattle, Beckham is guaranteed to start for 8 weeks unless he can give Jerry Dipoto & co. reason to pause. So why did it take so long for Tim Beckham to find space on a major league roster?
In high school play Tim Beckham was perceived as lean and projectable, but that projectability didn't pan out and even in 2009 questions arose about his ability to stay at shortstop and early predictions of 60 stolen base seasons were quickly abandoned. A pedestrian batting line saw Beckham make slow movement through the Rays Farm system until 2012 when he was suspended 50 games when drug screening found evidence of marijuana use for a second time in his career. Afterward, the Rays would no longer view Tim Beckham as a primary shortstop, but instead as a future utility player.
This may give the perception of Tim Beckham as something of a slacker, but he's often been called mature and hard working by teammates and scouts. Regardless, reports have stuck to throughout his minor and major league career for occasionally air headed play (muffing easy grounders, missed base tags, jogging on hustle plays). Despite his struggles and suspension, Beckham would finally find a handful of major league plate appearances in September of 2013 after improving during his second year at AAA (a .276/.342/.387/.729 line with too many strikeouts was very representative of his Minor League career).
Finally close to making the Major League roster for Opening Day, 2014, Tim Beckham's career was derailed again when a fluke injury during off-day training resulted in a tear to his right ACL. ACL surgery would turn 2014 into another lost season, but Beckham would work his way back to find his way onto the Rays roster as a backup middle infielder to begin 2015. 105 scattered plate appearances later he would be sent back to AAA. The strikeouts that had always been a problem in the minors exploded in at the ML level, but the power that Beckham's bat had always promised finally showed with 5 home runs helping create a .213 ISO. When he returned the Majors a few months later, he would go on to post a HR/FB% over 20%, well beyond any rate he had reached in the minors, but his batting line would improve only slightly as he continued to strike out in over 30% of his plate appearances.
In 2016, Beckham would again make the major league roster out of camp, again as a reserve middle-infielder on a Rays team deluged with alternative options at Shortstop and Second Base (Nick Franklin, Brad Miller, and Taylor Motter). Once again Tim got off to a rough start, but that might be in part explained by his appearance in just 17 of the 43 games, typically sitting 4-5 days at a time. Once again Tim Beckham would be removed from the team to tour AAA at the end of May.
But this was a rough season for many Rays players, and in less than a week Tim Beckham was back and consistently in the lineup. After his return on June 4, Beckham batted .271/.323/.465 with a 28.0% K rate for 157 plate appearances from then until he was sent back to the minors on August 31. Is that weird? You find that weird, right? The guy you've always wanted to get better is getting better, and with a month left he is sent to the minor leagues where he appears in 1 game. :
"For the second time in less than a week, the Rays took action to part ways with a player who has been the subject of considerable consternation. Though, once again, your immediate reaction was what took them so long.Having released oft-injured and questionably motivated Desmond Jennings on Saturday, the Rays decided after Wednesday's 8-6 loss to the Red Sox they had seen enough, at least for now, of Tim Beckham, who after making yet another baserunning blunder was optioned to Triple-A Durham.If you are keeping track, which can be hard to do, that's three such mental mistakes just on this road trip by Beckham. And it's the latest of an ongoing series, on the bases and occasionally in the field, during a season in which any good he does seems to be washed away by bad."
Wow, that must have been bad, did he run into a triple play or what?
"Beckham had a co-conspirator Wednesday, when the Rays were looking to build on a 4-1 lead in the fourth. Kevin Kiermaier made an admittedly "really dumb, dumb play" in trying to stretch his two-out single to a double, especially with Evan Longoria, their top hitter, coming up.But that didn't absolve Beckham for not running hard from second to home, and it cost the Rays a run when Kiermaier was thrown out before Beckham made it across the plate, umpire Gary Cederstrom waving off the run."
He didn't score prior to the runner being thrown out at second. OK, that's not great, but to the minors with you? Kiermaier didn't get sent anywhere and he's the one that got thrown out. But then Topkin noted that this had been happening to Beckham, would there have been any extenuating circumstances? I found a website called prosportstransactions.com that tracks every DL stint and Day-to-Day listing, it reports Tim Beckham as spending 3 days listed as Day-to-Day from 8/24 through 8/26 for a "left hamstring injury". The game Topkin mentions against Houston was Beckham's first game back on the 27th. Maybe it's me but it seems like he might have been protecting his hamstrings on a team that was 56-75 on August 31st, but Topkin makes no mention of the relative value of a 4-run lead to such a team compared to a prospect's hamstring, or the .885 OPS he'd put up over the last 6 weeks.
Regardless of the ignominious finish to 2016, 2017 finally saw the deck clear of alternative shortstops and Tim Beckham seized his first ever starting job out of spring training. He played well; through June 26 Beckham was batting .278/.327/.437 and playing a league average shortstop, but he still struck out too often and was riding a near .400 BABiP. So naturally, the Rays acquired Adeiny Hechevaria (batting a robust .277/.288/.385) and moved Beckham to play Second Base during Brad Miller's DL stint. This left Tim without a position on the team that drafted him and seemingly had tired of giving him opportunities. He was traded to division rival Baltimore for a Low-A pitcher; again, Marc Topkin had the story:
"The point of the deal was addition by subtraction.Basically, the Rays decided that Brad Miller was going to help them more playing second base than Beckham would, which Cash pretty much came out and said: "We've got to get Brad Miller going and wanted to give him a little bit of a clearer path to get going. He's going to be out there, and we all saw what he's capable of, saw what he did last year (30 homers) and we're banking on that for these next two months."Left unsaid was that the Rays must not have thought it would be a good idea to have an unhappy Beckham on the bench.He can have an attitude when things aren't going the way he thinks they should, finding perceived slights everywhere, even in being taken out of a game, a negative flip side of the competitiveness and chip-on-his-shoulder attitude that teammates admire. That's why there was justified concern when he was bumped to second after the late June acquisition of Adeiny Hechavarria. And it's nothing new, rooted in Beckham being the top overall pick of the 2008 draft — yes, over Buster Posey — and being set back by injury, a drug suspension and inconsistent play on a path to the majors he still felt was unfairly too slow.Charming when he wanted to be, there was chatter Beckham wasn't respectful of support staff and didn't take criticism well. He seemed to be available a lot more for interviews when he starred than when he failed."
The article goes on to suggest that Beckham's previous 6 weeks of poor play merited the trade, citing a .609 OPS over the period but ignoring an ankle injury that occurred in late June that he played through. Topkin would go on to write another scathing article about Beckham when the Orioles came to town two months later, I'll just link to DRays Bay's annoyed response for anybody interested.
It seems clear that the Rays had lost faith in Tim Beckham as an organization. For the Rays, he was an inconsistent fielder with high strike out rates and some level of difficulty with the manager and wider staff that was exacerbated by at least Tim Beckham's perception that he wasn't being given a fair chance to start every day. Still, it's easy to make the argument that the organization put road block after road block in Tim Beckham's way, acquiring several flawed candidates to start ahead of him and squandering his 3 pre-arbitration seasons on just 791 plate appearances.
After the trade, everyone is well aware of Beckham's torrid August, but it was largely a reproduction of what he had been doing for the Rays, only with a notably lower K%. Of course the .458 BABiP inflated Beckham's numbers, but it was really the 18.6% K rate that allowed for a 1.000+ OPS. Something changed for Beckham in Baltimore, and his strike out rate would be drastically lower in his time with the Orioles (24.8% vs. 31.1% with the Rays) owing largely to a reduced out of zone swing rate (mostly laying off bad breaking stuff) and improved contact within the strike zone (mostly against fastballs). Beckham cooled off after his first two weeks when his BABiP fell flatly to Earth, but continued to hit the ball hard and maintained under 25% until a toothache leading to an in-season root canal in late September.
2018 can be viewed as nothing less than a disaster for Beckham. Before the season began, Manny Machado would assert his authority as the Orioles most valuable asset to once again push Tim Beckham off his preferred position. This would prove fortuitous for the Orioles, as another seemingly minor injury during spring training would derail any opportunity for Beckham to have a successful season. He would play a painful month of games at third before something snapped, and he would require core surgery on his left groin, which lead doctors to find that Beckham had been playing with a tear in his right groin for the last 4 seasons. Tim Beckham was as hopeful as any player facing midseason surgery could be;
"It was something that had be done, man," Beckham said. "Come to find out I’ve been playing on my right one for four years now and didn’t know there was a slight tear in there. My left one was acting up in spring training and did the rehab that was necessary. But I made the play the other night (against Cleveland) and it triggered it again."Come to find out on the MRI I had a three-centimeter tear on my left one, too. Sucks right now, the timing of it. I want to play better baseball than I was playing and help my team win ballgames. But everything happens for a reason and I’m happy to get it taken care of now. Come back and play at least 90 percent, instead of playing 80 percent or so."If I didn’t do this, the doctor is pretty sure I would tear the right one off the bone. Want to stay positive and think of it as a blessing in disguise."
And 2 brief months later the Orioles, who are famously stringent on incoming player physicals, rushed Beckham back to the Majors.
"Beckham, 28, is excited to get back on the field and to get into game shape ahead of the June 23 date when he is eligible to be activated from the 60-day disabled list."I definitely feel a lot better," Beckham said Friday. "I feel a lot better as far as squatting down, my mobility going left to right. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm going to feel great, like 1,000 percent better and play. I'm going to do what I can when I'm on the baseball field, just like everyone else, and I'm going to go hard when I'm out there."
My Doctor Google research suggests that full recovery from core surgery requires something closer to 90-100 days. It's easy to conceive the Orioles might have hoped to have Beckham could create trade value in the 6 remaining weeks prior to July 31. He didn't. A .583 OPS leading up to the All Star Break would largely disintegrate any opportunity to move the shortstop.
Things were different after the break, when Beckham was closer to 90 days recovered from his surgery and Manny Machado had politely left town. He would bat .250/.313/.441 with a 7.1% walk rate and a 22.7% K rate while starting every game at shortstop until September when new player acquisitions would again eat away at his playing time. Sadly, Beckham's glove was well behind his bat in recovery; his range was reduced from previous seasons and he was plagued by the same simple gaffs that followed him throughout his career; easy ground balls dropped, missed base tags, and errant throws accounted for virtually every one of his errors. Regardless, the rebuilding Orioles couldn't seem to find space for Tim Beckham's projected $3.4 million salary and chose to release him.
So Jerry used the same market that limited his return on Jean Segura to one JP Crawford to restrain Tim Beckham's salary to the point that it will require 120 games played to earn $2 million. Beckham can be injury and error prone, but it seems like he's an excellent teammate and a hard worker that still has power, speed, improving plate discipline, and the ability to play any infield position.
Tim Beckham has the potential to be worth considerably more than his meager contract; his a 16.0% HR/FB rate since 2016 is higher than Mitch Haniger (15.7%) and Kyle Seager (12.2%) and his Fly Ball Hard Contact rate of 42.0% over the same period is equal to Haniger. That high quality air contact might lead one to hope that Tim Laker will convert Beckham to the swing change crowd, but he's said before that he's committed to the backspin philosophy (Comments begin after 1:19). That backspin seems to create powerful flyball contact (205 wRC+ vs. Haniger's 195) as high line drives turn into long fly balls, but it kills his line drive contact (a .160 ISO and .643 BABiP are among the lowest on the team) probably because the backspin he generates holds his line drives up long enough to be caught more often. But Tim Beckham's ground ball contact is makes up for the poor line drives, his hard groundball contact has a 1.250 OPS, good for 19th best in the Majors since 2016 (Ben Gamel is 8th). What's more, Beckham has what appears to have an extreme talent for reaching on infield singles; his 9.3% infield hit rate since 2016 has been 11th best in the majors. As a result, his BABiP on ground balls has been above .300 since 2016, with an infield hit percentage of 8.7% or better in 8 out of 12 months with 10+ ground balls. The 4 down months include a July 2017 (.232 BABiP, 0% IFH) that began with a sprained ankle, and the April (.222 BABiP, 3.7% IFH) he played with a tear in both groin muscles.
So his contact is actually pretty good (Mitch Haniger produces a 1.010 OPS on contact since 2016, Tim Beckham's contact has a .976 OPS), the trick is mostly that Tim Beckham needs to put the bat on the ball more often. As mentioned above, his plate discipline took a big step forward with Baltimore in 2017. It improved again in 2018, though that's a bit obscured by his April and June stats. After the All Star break, Beckham reduced his O-Swing Rate to 29.1% and improved his Zone Contact Rate to 76.7%, both are career bests that suggest his 7.1% walk rate and 22.7% K rate were earned rather than lucky.
Not for the first time, Tim Beckham finds himself with a job starting for a team that already has his replacement selected. He seems like a good guy, I'm sure there will eventually be spring training stories of him working with JP Crawford and Shed Long and teaching them the things veterans teach young players, but Tim Beckham wears the #1 in part as a reminder of what he expects from himself. I think he might just be on the verge of realizing that talent, and if he does it just might be someone else's turn to lose playing time...as long as his legs are healthy.