Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports
When does 30-homer upside become undesirable?
Well, when that upside comes with all the baggage that Chris Carter does, I suppose. Just ask the Houston Astros, who’d traded Jed Lowrie in the offseason for a package that included the slugging first baseman/outfielder with the plan to give him his first full season and seeing just what his bat can do. After all, he did hit 16 homers in a mere 260 PA last season, and that kind of offensive boost can only help, right?
As it turns out … not so much. At least, not while you consider that he’s a -0.1 fWAR player for the team at the moment after appearing in 102 games.
That’s not quite as bad as the recently-released Carlos Pena (-0.4 fWAR) was, but you know, it takes a special kind of player to translate 19 home runs and a 12.3 walk rate to below-replacement value production.
Unfortunately for the Astros, Carter happens to be one of those players. Although he’s more than made good on the power side of his game (.213 ISO, .426 slugging — when this guy gets hold of one, the results are often eye-catching), it’s been … well, everything else that’s been lacking for Houston.
Now, the low .213 season average he owns might be bearable because he does have a good walk rate, but his 36.4 percent strikeout rate means that his game rests of shaky pillars; and lately, those pillars are not doing a very good job of holding things up. Since finishing June with promising .241/.357/.518 OPS for the month, Carter’s numbers have all but collapsed, as his seven hits in 55 post-break at-bats means he’s hitting .127/.250/.200 since.
That .450 OPS just isn’t going to play even if the forward-looking Astros, and the fact that he’s only recorded one home run since the Midsummer Classic doesn’t help things either.
Yes, he’s still doing a relatively good job at drawing walks, but he is also continuing to strike out at an alarming rate (36.4 percent on the season) to minimize the pluses of his on-base skills. But the kicker? It’s Carter’s defense, which current sits at -6.4 fielding runs above average with a -2.6 UZR/150 at first … and a whopping -28.9 in the outfield.
So yeah, I think you could say that things aren’t working out too well for him in his new home right now.
All hope of him being a contributor is not lost, however.
In an effort to maximize what his skill set offers, Bo Porter and the Astros have taken to using Carter exclusively as the DH in recent games. Though it hasn’t exactly helped his slump (he has two hits in his last 25 PA), it does look to be perhaps the only way that the team may be able to get some positive value out of the 26-year old.
After all, if he’s not able to hurt the team on the field, 30-home run upside can’t be a bad thing … right?
