Top free agent lists produced by different writers around the game are always fun. You can probably take your own mix of the top fifty players available, mix them up and it’ll probably match something somebody has already written. We know who the top free agents are going to be weeks before they actually become free agents, so the discourse that surrounds them once they are free is mostly just rehashed commentary from before.
Scrolling around about the Phillies, though, there starts to form something
of a pattern. One of the names that is sometimes linked to them in free agency is Alex Bregman. He’s a third baseman, an area where the team is looking to upgrade, and he probably won’t command the always en vogue 7, 8, 9 year deals that seem to be the standard for premium free agents. When we posed this question a few weeks ago about whether or not the team should be signing him, the online responses were a complete mix of positive and negative reactions.
Going to the comments from this as a question a few weeks ago, the response from you, the readers, was mostly not in favor of bringing him in. The main negative takeaway is that the team should not be handing out contracts to players that are already in their thirties, preferring to shy away from those kinds of deals.
Understandable, from that point of view. The history of contracts for players that are on that wrong side of the aging curve is littered with failures. For every success story of a player of that age, there are probably three or four players that struggled.
Yet, if the team is intent on changing something this offseason, creating some new mixture of players on the roster that will help create a World Series winning formula, why would they shy away from Bregman?
If we leave aside the fact that Bregman would cost the team a larger and longer contract that simply playing it out with Alec Bohm for 2026, you can see that the comparison between the two players isn’t really much of a comparison at all. Bregman is a better offensive player than Bohm in almost every category that ends up on the back of a baseball card outside of Bohm owning a better batting average last year.
Where things start to get a little wonky is when you pull up the Baseball Savant pages of both players. While Bregman did have some nice things going his way last year as far as traits like chase rate, walk rate and strikeout rate, Bohm arguably did hit the ball harder than Bregman, things that teams are probably more interested in in these days of micro level baseball analysis. It makes for a compelling argument for the team to simply keep Bohm for now over Bregman rather than dole out yet another long term deal.
There is also the notion of having a top prospect that is near MLB ready that can step in at third base. Aidan Miller had himself something of a split season across two levels of the minor league year. He started out ice cold while playing in Double-A Reading to start the season, then saw a light switch go off, posting an OPS near 1.000 for the final two months of the season. It reaffirmed his status as a top prospect in the game and offered something the team hasn’t seen in quite some time: a hitting prospect from their very own developmental machine that looks ready to not only make it to the major leagues, but also make an impact at that major league level. Why block that, right?
Yet if Bregman is the free agent the team decides they want to go after, it shouldn’t be thought of as a waste. As those numbers above show, Bregman is still a very good player. He might be just short of elite when talking about players in the game today, but he should be thought of as a desirable player to want to add to a roster. Besides the offense he would bring to the team, his glove is still one of the best at the hot corner. By Outs Above Average (OAA), Bregman’s +3 mark would be a pretty big improvement over Bohm’s -2 OAA, giving them a solid left side of the infield (if one is to believe the gains Trea Turner made will hold). If we count their baserunning as a push (they’re both considered below average baserunners), then we can probably confidently say that Bregman would be an upgrade over Bohm at third base if the Phillies were to pursue him.
The arguments for signing Bregman (good bat, well above average glove, impact clubhouse guy) are just as reasonable as the arguments for not signing him. I’m not convinced that completely shying away from him during free agency is the wisest course of action, particularly if the team is committed to stirring things up a bit. While not wanting to block Aidan Miller is an admirable desire, counting on him to impact the big league team whenever he finally does arrive is fool’s errand. There is likely to be growing pains along the way. Keeping Bohm around and simply riding out his final year of team control is not the worst course of action either. It would allow Miller that extra time to develop at the minor league level and production Bohm should be able to provide, though maybe a bit below Bregman, wouldn’t cripple the chances the team has to advance to the World Series.
It’s an interesting decision they have. What they ultimately decide to do probably isn’t going to be a big needle mover since, as we see, both Bregman and Bohm are closer in ability than maybe initially thought. It also may indicate that more drastic moves are in order as well. We’ll have to wait and see.
