Yandy Díaz Remains MLB’s Most Underrated Bat
It's time Yandy Díaz gets the credit he deserves for being one of the most consistent bats in Major League Baseball.
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What do they say the definition of insanity is, repeating the same thing over again and expecting a different result?
Well, it is utter insanity at this point for baseball fans to continue to dismiss Yandy Díaz as if he isn’t one of the best hitters in all of baseball.
Yes, I said one of the best.
Year after year, the right-handed hitting first baseman continues to put up above-league-average numbers with ease, and he still doesn’t get the appreciation he deserves. As of May 4, Díaz is hitting .333/.422/.504 with five home runs, 21 RBIs, and a 158 wRC+.
The Guardians moved on from Díaz after just under 300 plate appearances across two seasons, trading him to the Tampa Bay Rays in a three-team deal, and the Rays can do nothing but send them a holiday basket every year for the present they gifted them back in the winter of 2018.
Except, it seems as if every week there is a new rumor emerging about how Díaz is on the trade block, with mock trades of him being sent to multiple teams across the league begin to flood the internet.
Let it be known, the Rays are not going to move on from Yandy. There just is not a viable reason to trade their most consistent — and arguably one of the most important — piece of their roster. Especially after a 21-12 start to the season.
Just recently, as of April 24, Díaz became just the fourth hitter in Rays history to surpass the 910 hit mark, passing former Ray, B.J. Upton. He will also soon become the third hitter on the list.
As it currently stands, he is only 95 hits shy of Ben Zobrist’s career hits in a Rays uniform (1,016). While it is likely he stays in the third spot as he approaches the end of his career, being listed behind Carl Crawford (1,480) and Evan Longoria (1,471) is nothing to scoff at. Especially considering he does not get nearly the same notoriety that those two players got during their time in Tampa.
It does not stop there.
He sits second in on-base percentage (.375) only behind Fred McGriff and his .380 career mark with the team. He has the third-best OPS (.825), fifth in doubles (174), and seventh in home runs (104). Oh, and he is also number one in adjusted OPS+ (132).
So, what makes Yandy Díaz as good as he is?
Simply stated: his entire approach.
To break it down more, let’s first start with his eye at the plate. His career chase percentage is nearly eight percent lower than the MLB average. His selective approach and demeanor at the plate are big reasons why he can replicate his success each season. If you dig deeper into his stats, he almost becomes an outlier in some sense.
He has never been one to truly barrel up the baseball. Per Baseball Savant, he only sat above the 50th percentile barrel rate twice in his career. Aside from that, he has been well-below average across the board.
Where it becomes even more of an anomaly is when you look right next to that column on the chart and see all of the red indicating his hard-hit percentage throughout the years, and where exactly that ranks amongst other hitters in the league.
I think we can all agree that the exclusion of 2020 across the board is fair.
In 2021, Díaz suffered a foot injury that placed him on the injured list, and he seemingly was never able to regain momentum from that moment on.
It was his first full season in the major leagues, having played 139 games that year, and he was still able to manage a .256/.353/.387 line with 13 home runs, and a career-worst 110 wRC+ (yes, you read that correctly — a career-worst wRC+ that was still 10 points above league average).
That deserves more appreciation.
Yandy has also managed an average exit velocity of over 90 mph each of the last four seasons.
As it currently stands today, Yandy has accumulated a total of 19.0 fWAR as he plays into his 10th season in the majors. His best season came in 2023, his age-31 season, where he ended the season as the league leader in batting average and generated 5.0 fWAR.
That number is being dragged down heavily by his well-below-average defense. If you were to poke one hole in his game, that would be the glaring one.
Yandy also isn’t someone who is going to give up at-bats at any point, which is supported by a punchout rate that sits below 15% for his career. He pairs that well with the 10.8% walk rate in his career.
With a profile like this, he was always going to age very well, no matter how the game of baseball changed each year.
Final Thouhts
This is a player who has been well worth every dollar that has been spent on him. With career earnings sitting just shy of $40 million, the career fWAR total of 19.0 means he was worth just over $2.1 million per Wins Above Replacement.
Based on recent calculations made across multiple publications, the value of one WAR currently sits around $9 million.
After this season, the Rays have a conditional club option of $10 million they are going to have to decide on whether they want to exercise or not. But let’s be honest, they should go ahead and take care of that right now. Why wait?
Undervalued does not begin to describe what Yandy Díaz is to the game of baseball. It’s time he gets the appreciation that he deserves.
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Written by
Cristian has been at Just Baseball since 2021, when he first started writing about prospects. He spent eight years working in Major League Baseball with the…