The San Francisco Giants sign LF/DH Jorge Soler to a three-year, $42 million contract.
Soler is the big name in this selection of moves but not a big WAR-accumulator. By all three calculations, he only has two seasons worth at least one win. That’s the same number of negative WAR seasons that fWAR, rWAR, and WARP give him, too. But it is difficult to conceive of Soler as overly compensated for his talents, not that I was ever likely to appeal to Charles Johnson’s right to save the money for his legal battles with local clam shacks.

Soler is unlike other sluggers in that his approach is not merely passable but excellent. In 2023, he ranked fifth-highest in SEAGER, 14th the year prior, and second (KC) and 16th (ATL) in 2021. His contact rates are not as strong, but they were at or near a career-best last year, and only slightly worse than the league standard—72.4% to his peers’ 74.2%, or 80.5% to 81.9% for in-zone pitches. I don’t even know what a clam shack is.

While most warning signs on this deal are injury or performance related, the greatest may lie in the Giants ability to get power out of their players. Wilmer Flores and Thairo Estrada ranked among the best in baseball at the percentage of their fly balls that were pulled, but the team’s two new corner outfielders lost significant ground in this regard. This was particularly true of Mitch Haniger, who lost nearly half of his previously strong pulled fly ball share in his one year in San Francisco. Soler is already somewhat pull-agnostic in his fly balls, elevating more than most but pulling that subset at an average rate. He hits for plenty of power anyways, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on the first righty splash hit to change something that isn’t broken. But you wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Giants have already broken one Jorge Soler.