Austin Jackson turns 27 about two weeks before Spring Training begins in February and that’s significant because more players have their best season at 27 than at any other age. Austin Jackson has already turned in four solid to great big league seasons and macro level aging curves tell us that Jackson should be heading into his peak year. We might not see the best Jackson has to offer in 2014, but it’s worth considering exactly what kind of player he is two years ahead of free agency.

Jackson had a strong rookie campaign before crashing back to Earth in 2011, but bounced back extremely well in 2012 as he was one of the top centerfielders in baseball. 2013 was a solid year, even if it did look disappointing next to the season that came before. Let’s go beyond the basic numbers.

Jackson was always criticized as a guy who had a high BABIP that couldn’t be sustained, but we’ve seen enough to know that he’s always going to be a high BABIP guy. You won’t see .390 on any sort of consistent basis, but .330-.350 seems entirely reasonable going forward based on his batted ball profile. He’s a terrific baserunner even if he didn’t steal a ton of bases in 2013 and he’s somewhere just better than average in centerfield defensively overall. All told, he’s contributed 14.6 WAR in four big league seasons.

Jackson is, at worst, a solid MLB regular or, at best, a potential superstar. You’re happy with either of those outcomes, but which do we think is more likely? Let’s consider his game in three dimensions.

BATTING

The league average centerfielder hit .253/.324/.395 in 2013 with a 99 wRC+. Jackson hit .272/.337/.417 with a 107 wRC+. In his worst season, he hit 13% worse than league average and has been as good or better than league average in each of his other three seasons. Jackson probably isn’t the hitter he was in 2012, but even if we pull him toward his career averages, he grades out better than the average centerfielder at the plate.

Jackson has cut down on his strikeouts since his first two seasons and the power has picked up over the last two seasons as well. At his best, Jackson can be a dynamic force in the lineup, but also has a tendency to go through funks when his timing starts to drift at the plate. When he keeps his swing short, you start to dream about All-Star Games, when he doesn’t, you think he might need to head to the bottom third of the order.

Jackson clearly has the physical tools to succeed at the plate, but the key for him is to fine tune his approach and maintain consistent swing mechanics, which are two skills that shouldn’t decline as he ages. That means he should get better at the plate over the next couple of seasons, or at least not get worse too quickly.

Jackson probably figures as a player who will hit 10-15% better than league average in 2014, which makes him a valuable bat in center.

BASERUNNING

Jackson grades out as a tremendous baserunner. In two of his four big league seasons he’s been worth more than five runs on the bases with the other two seasons being close to average. He’s stolen fewer bases every year of his career, but even with only 8 steals in 2013 he added 5.8 runs with his legs.

He takes the extra base at an above average rate and seems to pick up steam as he rounds second on singles and doubles hit by his teammates. He doesn’t have the best basestealing instincts, but it’s also hard to judge simply because the Tigers have limited incentives to send runners given their impressive offense. Baserunning value peaks early, so we shouldn’t expect Jackson to get dramatically better, but it’s entirely reasonable to assume he’ll be worth 3-5 runs on the bases in 2014.

DEFENSE

You got a chance to see Jackson’s DRS and UZR in the table above, but I also like to look at RZR, which simply measures the percentage of balls in his zone he turns into outs. Jackson’s career mark in CF is .939 which is solidly above average for that position.

People rave about Jackson in center, but his skills are somewhat divergent. His range is excellent and he’s a pretty good route runner, but his arm is definitely below average. Additionally, Jackson never dives and occasionally gets caught in between as a result and turns easy outs into hits. That is both frustrating and promising. If you can get Jackson to learn to dive or at least make better late route decisions, you might be able to improve his already stellar range.

It’s probably safe to count on Jackson for 5 runs above average in centerfield over each of the next two years..

OVERALL

Back of the envelope calculations put a player like we’ve just described somewhere in the 3-4 WAR range depending on how much he stays on the field. I think 600 PA is safe even if you expect him to miss two to four weeks with an injury and he’s likely to bring in something like five runs above average in each of the three dimensions of the game. Factor in position and replacement level and you’re looking at a 3-4 win player.

Jackson has shown the ability to play better in each of those dimensions, but if we’re being conservative, he’s probably more like an above average player than a great player. If you filter centerfielders by ages 23-26, Jackson ranks 51st all time in WAR, two wins behind Matt Kemp and 3.4 wins behind Carlos Beltran. I wouldn’t compare Jackson to those players for several reasons, but I don’t think it’s out of the question to suggest Jackson’s going to pick up $15 million per season in free agency if he keeps his performance on par with his career averages.

I suggested the Tigers could probably pick up five years of Jackson for $55 million last offseason and that number has likely stayed reasonably consistent because he’s added another year of service but also come down from his 2012 peak. The Tigers have more pressing contract needs, but now would be a good time to lock up their centerfield.

Jackson looks like he has a few more 3+ WAR seasons in him and a five year deal right now would buy out two arbitration years and three on the free agent market. Something like 5/$60M would be a good place to start before he has a chance to have another great year or salaries start to inflate.

In general, we’ve seen enough of Jackson to recognize that he’s one of those players who is above average everywhere and probably not a superstar anywhere. Those are vital pieces of a championship core and if fans have the right expectations, he’s should be a joy to watch roam center.

One of the knocks on the recent versions of the Tigers was that they were terrible at infield defense. It’s hard to argue with that very stringently. Cabrera was bad. Fielder was bad. Peralta and Infante were somewhere around average for their position. Together, that isn’t a great group and the estimated cost of that group compared to a perfectly average bunch is in the neighborhood of 30 runs or three wins per season. Those estimates aren’t perfect, but they are a reasonable starting point.

This is an exercise, not anything definitive, so take the precision with a grain of salt. In 2013, Cabrera was about 17 runs worse than average at third, Fielder was something like 5-10 runs below average, and Infante and Peralta were both within four or five runs of average depending on the stat you prefer. The defensive metrics I’m referencing are Defensive Runs Saved or Ultimate Zone Rating, which each assign run values to defensive plays relative to the performance of a league average player at that position. Zero is average for the position and every ten runs above or below average is roughly equal to a win.

What we’re after here is how the Tigers defense will look in 2014 with a new player at every position. Cabrera will be back at first, Kinsler will play second, Iglesias at short, and someone at third – potentially Castellanos and potentially Mr. Outside Hire. Let’s develop a range of estimates for each player and then combine them to get a sense of what we might be dealing with. These ranges are my estimates based on UZR/DRS data from the last three years and additional information gathered using defensive efficiency numbers and visual scouting.

Miguel Cabrera – First Base

Cabrera is an interesting case because of the injury, but I’ll assume that he’ll be healthy by the time the season starts. During his career at first base, Cabrera rated out as a slightly below average fielder with fluctuations on both sides of zero. His ability to turn batted balls into outs was below average, but he became reasonably good at turning double plays from the position and brings a pretty good set of hands to the position. We have to factor in that he’s two years older, but also that he has been working to get better at a tougher position.

Run Estimate: -8 to +5

Ian Kinsler – Second Base

Kinsler’s story is interesting because UZR and DRS can’t seem to agree if he’s an average defender or a pretty good one. Kinsler has solid range but probably misplays balls a little bit too often. Thirty is in his rear view mirror, but he remains a solid athlete who shouldn’t be in for a rapid decline.

Run Estimate: -2 to +8

Jose Iglesias – Shortstop

Iglesias is a wizard with the glove, but we have very little major league data with which to judge him. UZR loves him at short with DRS thinking he’s around average. Neither loved him at third, but again, we’re dealing with 1,000 sporadic innings at multiple positions. The scouting reports on Iglesias are sparkling giving him plus marks for range and elite grades on his arm and hands. I’ve heard plenty give him 80 grades (the highest possible) for his defense and my personal observations concur. He’s one of the best in the game right now. I asked Mark Anderson of BP and TigsTown  if he thought he was better than Andrelton Simmons, and his answer was an emphatic, “Absolutely.”

Run Estimate: +5 to +15

Nick Castellanos/Someone Else – Third Base

We don’t really know who will man third base, but the leader right now is Castellanos. The most recent evaluations of his defense at the corner weren’t great, but enough people said they thought he could stay there that I’m not going to estimate a crazy, disaster number. He has some raw skills, but his footwork needs improvement and he hasn’t played there in over a year. With some effort, I can easily see him getting himself to Cabrera or better levels in 2013. It’s hard to judge an unknown, so I’ll simply tack on a few positive runs to account for the possibility they sign a good defender at the position.

Run Estimate: -15 to +3

Results

Totaling those estimates up, we find a range of -20 to +31 runs. That’s a wide range, but these are the outer bounds of the estimates. The Tigers infield was something close to -30 last season (-20 if we’re being generous), so this looks to be a ten run upgrade even if things don’t go terribly well. At the outside, it could be a sixty run improvement, which is about six wins in the standings, but even at the lowest estimate, they’re most likely getting better.

Granted, we’re dealing with estimates based on imperfect measures, so you have to look at this skeptically. It’s possible that the Tigers have added somewhere between one and six wins of value by improving their defense. They will certainly be giving some of that away on the offensive side as they drop from Peralta to Iglesias and Fielder to Castellanos, but it’s hard to imagine a world in which the defense doesn’t get better.

The Tigers starters are strikeout pitchers so infield defense isn’t as valuable to them as it is to others, but Fister and Porcello put the ball on the ground a lot, which means better defense should bring their RA9 or ERA numbers closer to their true talent FIP numbers in 2014.

League average BABIP on ground balls in 2013 was .241. For the Tigers it was .266. For Fister it was .295. For Scherzer it was .280. Defense isn’t something we can break down into tiny samples with great success, but the Tigers allowed way more hits on ground balls than average last year and that number is probably going to go down in 2014. There are a lot of moving parts, but the Tigers defense should be better off having made the big trade.

Over the last few days we’ve had many discussions about the merits of the big trade, and the view from the first inning is that the Tigers made a good move for the long run with the short run value left a bit up in the air based on how they spend their financial savings. We think Prince is likely to bounce back a little bit and Kinsler will continue on his current path which places him somewhere around 3 wins if he plays most of the 2014 season. It’s kind of hard to say anymore about the deal as a whole without knowing what Dombrowski is up to next, but we can start to think about Ian Kinsler in a Tigers uniform because there’s a pretty high probability that’s actually going to happen. I mean, unless those Robinson Cano private jet to Willow Run rumors are true…

Kinsler is entering his age 32 season and has eight years of big league experience almost exclusively at second base for the Texas Rangers.

Those numbers can give you a basic sense of his career path, but we’re obviously going to dig a little deeper to understand the type of player he is.

AT THE PLATE

Kinsler’s declining walk rate is a concern, but he also doesn’t strike out very often. His power has really been up and down throughout his career as has his BABIP. You’ll notice with a more complete number like wRC+, he’s been a league average hitter or better in every season of his career with a couple of big years in which he hit for more power. If we’re thinking about Kinsler heading into his Tigers years, there is really no way we can expect that pop to return. Looking at an average to slightly above average bat with a wRC+ somewhere between 100-110 probably makes sense heading into 2014.

Kinsler has always been known for his home/road split. Texas is one of the best parks in which to hit, but it’s important to note that Comerica Park is becoming for hitter friendly over time.

For his career, the split is pretty significant and in 2013 there’s still plenty about which to be worried.

You’ll notice Kinsler slugged better on the road in 2013 despite getting on base much less frequently. Generally speaking, we should expect Kinsler to hit worse at Comerica than he did in Arlington, but everyone hits worse in Comerica than they do in Arlington. The adjustments he makes will be important.

There’s also some concern that he doesn’t use the right side of the field very effectively, but that’s always been part of his game so it’s not like our view of him going forward should change very dramatically. He has three career homeruns to the right-side of second base, though, which is crazy.

All in all, Kinsler is a solid major league hitter. In 2013, the average second baseman hit 9% worse than league average. Kinsler hit 5% better. For reference, Infante was 17% better but that was also Infante’s best season ever.

BASERUNNING

Kinsler has been a very strong baserunner in his career both with respect to taking extra bases and stealing bases efficiently. Here are his overall baserunning runs above average:

His 2013 didn’t look great and that was mostly a function of getting caught stealing much more than normal.

Until last year, Kinsler was one of the most successful basestealers in the game. The rule of thumb is that you need to have a success rate of 70% or better for it to be worth it and Kinsler had some seasons in the high 80s and 90s. It’s unclear if 2013 is a blip or a trend, but given how rough the Tigers are on the bases, he can only be an upgrade. That is especially true when it comes to his extra bases taken percentages as league average is 39% and he has been above 50% in each of his last four seasons.

It’s important to realize that Kinsler is only going to get worse on the bases as he ages, but he’s coming down from a very high peak.  There’s no question he makes the Tigers a better baserunning team and should be able to provide at least a couple of runs above average in that department in 2014.

FIELDING

The report on Kinsler’s defense is a little bit mixed, but it tells a pretty clear story if you know what to look for. DRS likes Kinsler more than UZR over the course of his career, but both have him as something better than average. The question isn’t if Kinsler is good, it’s if he’s a little better than par for the course or if he’s great. RZR tells you the percentage of balls in his zone he’s turned into outs and his career mark of 82.9% puts him solidly above average at second base. Kinsler has great range, but occasionally boots a few to many balls. That’s nice to see in the data, because that’s exactly what I thought about him based on my own observation.

Kinsler isn’t going to be another Iglesias, but he’s going to be a solid defensive player who can stay at second base at least for a couple more seasons.

THE ENTIRE GAME

So Kinsler has an above average bat for the position and adds positive value on the bases and in the field. He’s a little bit injury prone, but he’s been a solid major league regular or better in every year of his career regardless:

Kinsler is leaving his prime years, but there’s no reason he can’t produce a could more 2-3.5 win seasons if he stays reasonably healthy. Kinsler is one of those players who is above average everywhere but great nowhere. Those are very useful players, especially when the Tigers already have plenty of players who are really good at certain things and not so good at others. Kinsler adds nice balance to the team and should earn a good portion of the salary he has coming his way.

The Tigers likely aren’t doing wheeling and dealing this offseason, but the first big move netted them some financial savings and pretty nice player to boot.

If you didn’t get a chance to see it, I joined Brian Kenny on Clubhouse Confidential to talk about the Fielder-Kinsler deal on Friday. Here’s a link to the conversation. If you’re looking for my initial take from the night of the deal, you can find that here, along with some thoughts about what this might mean about big contracts going forward.

We should also have some follow up analysis on Kinsler coming this afternoon or this evening.

That escalated quickly. Heading into the offseason the Tigers were expected to look to move Prince Fielder’s 7/$168M contract, but it didn’t look like there were going to be any takers. Fielder, even if he aged extremely well and bounced back to his pre-2013 levels, was barely going to be worth the contract. If he ages at a pretty normal clip and never goes back to his 5 win ways, we were looking at something like $70M in dead money. Maybe not anymore.

News broke on Wednesday night that the Tigers and Rangers agreed to a one for one swap of Prince Fielder and Ian Kinsler that gives the Rangers their power bat and frees up a spot for Jurickson Profar while the Tigers get salary flexibility and a new second baseman. The deal is amazing because if you squint really hard, it looks really good and really bad for both sides. It’s a challenge trade, but it’s also about position.

The Tigers had three guys who should be playing 1B and DH and now they have two. The Rangers had three middle infielders and now they have two. Kinsler will cost 4/$57M with a $10M/$5M buyout for year number five, plus something like $30M in cash. The Tigers are saving some cash in this deal that could prove to be extremely valuable when it comes time to extend Max Scherzer or Miguel Cabrera, but they’re also probably straightening out their defensive situation. Cabrera can go back to first where he belongs and Nick Castellanos can get into the lineup a little easier. Maybe Peralta gets back on the radar. It’s too soon to tell.

Kinsler had an insane 7 win peak in 2011, but looks a lot more like a 2-3 win player going forward. He’s a league average or slightly better bat with a history of running the bases well. The defense is a bit unclear because DRS loves him and UZR thinks he’s meh. Either way, you’re looking at solid player who is probably just a bit overpaid at $16M per season, plus however you want to allocate the $30 million

This trade has moving parts. If Kinsler is a 2 win player at 2B, Cabrera moves to first and is league average at the position defensively, and then the Tigers use Castellanos at 3B for about 2 wins, you’re looking at something like 11 wins for something like $40-44M. Re-signing Infante for $10M would put them somewhere around 12-13 wins for $54M. That’s a small improvement financially especially if it softens the risk later on in the deal.

I think this trade makes the Tigers worse in 2014, but it also gives them more financial resources to get better. They’ll save a few extra million that they can spend on a LF/RP/3B and they’re much better off in later years of the deal. Kinsler doesn’t look like a great player, but he’s good enough to probably make this work.

What we don’t know is how much of this momentum towards a deal came from the comments Fielder made after the season and his performance in the postseason. If the Tigers traded him because there were hard feelings, this is silly. If they traded him to save a little extra money that could be better allocated, it looks a lot better.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t have a strong opinion about this move. I think it makes a lot of sense for Texas and it’s a giant freaking question mark for the Tigers. Fielder probably bounces back in 2014 and beyond, but the trade saves them more money than it is likely to cost them in overall on field value. It’s a smart long term deal that might bite them in short run. Which means we really can’t judge this deal until we know how Dombrowski is going to spend the savings. That’s the key. Saving money is good, but you save that money so that you can spend it elsewhere.

I enjoyed rooting for Fielder and watching him slide, and had absolutely zero problem to his comments after the postseason ended. I’m sorry to see him go, but happy to welcome Kinsler. It’s hard to tell if this is an overreaction or a smart calculation, which is what makes it so interesting. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I don’t know what this one’s going to end. This won’t be the last thing I write about it, but my initial take is that this is probably going to work out for the best.

Stay with me here. This is going to be short and to the point. Brad Ausmus is pulling an Abraham Lincoln move right now and it’s worth noting. I’m not comparing the two, I’m saying Ausmus is borrowing a leadership tactic at which Lincoln was very skilled. This week, after hiring Matt Martin to be his defensive coordinator, Brad Ausmus told the Free Press that Martin is “a baseball guy” and “not a number cruncher” and “not a sabermetrician.” The manager doth protest too much.

There are two obvious points here, ones that Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller argued on today’s Effectively Wild Podcast. First,  Ausmus is going out of his way to sell Martin as “one of the guys.” This is Ausmus wrapping serious changes in a conservative cloth. This is Ausmus channeling Lincoln.

The key is that Martin’s job is weird and new and baseball players as a group tend to be slow to adapt. Columnists and writers tend to be slow to adapt. The Detroit media environment as a whole has been slow to adapt. If you start seeing the Tigers shake up defensive positioning – as Martin is likely to do – then Ausmus has already set the table to answer the questions. Martin isn’t some nerd who looks at spreadsheets, he’s a baseball guy with lots of “real” credibility. Lincoln was a master at this. Instituting massive change and convincing people it wasn’t massive change. That’s what this is. This position didn’t exist as a coaching position until three weeks ago when the Nationals created it. Now the Tigers and Angels have one too. More are likely coming.

What’s so great about the sales job is that it’s so obviously a deke. I doubt that Martin is programming is own algorithms, but he’s obviously going to be looking at the sabermetric data we’ve all been talking about for a while now. There simply isn’t another way to do that job. You can’t watch the last 100 at bats of every player on the opposing team and eye-ball the shift you need to employ. This requires batted ball data – the kind of data that sabermetricians use all the time.

I don’t know if Martin knows how to run and interpret regression analysis, but I’m fairly confident he knows how to employ the information readily available to all major league front offices. You don’t have to crunch the numbers to use the numbers, but you do have to get the players and local media to go along with it. That’s Ausmus’ job. Ausmus is selling the idea and Martin is implementing it.

They’re wrapping a newfangled position with fancy numbers in the cloth of an old set “of baseball eyes,” as Ausmus put it. The Tigers didn’t have this position a few days ago and no one had one in 2013. To suggest this isn’t a analytic innovation is silly, but that’s exactly how you have to sell it to get most people to buy in. That’s how you effectively institute change – by convincing people it isn’t really change at all. The hiring of Brad Ausmus looks better and better every day.

It was pretty exciting to hear that the Tigers hired Omar Vizquel to be their first base coach and infield instructor given his reputation for strong defense and good instructional ability. With all due respect to Vizquel, his hiring was completely overshadowed when we learned today that the Tigers also hired Matt Martin to be their, I’m not making this title up, “defensive coordinator.” Oh boy.

The idea behind the position is pretty simple. Martin will be in charge of shifting and positioning the infield against specific hitters and will work with the advanced scouting group to prepare for this kind of decision-making. He’ll be joining with Vizquel to form a super-infield-defense-academy. In other words, the Tigers are about to get shifty.

This is big news for a couple of reasons. First, it’s one of the biggest leaps into the future that the Tigers have taken, at least in public, in many years. This is a big jump forward into analytics for the Tigers who have leaned much less on their statistical analysis team than many others in the industry. It also tells us that Ausmus is a believer as well because they wouldn’t bring someone like this in if the manager wasn’t on board. Leyland didn’t have a DC on staff, Ausmus does. This supports the idea I floated when Ausmus was hired that he’s going to be very receptive to analytic information when it comes to macrolevel decisions about his team.

But this hiring also tells us something else; it tells us the Tigers are going to get better. Well, it doesn’t really guarantee that, but if the Tigers are really going to go all-in here they stand to benefit more than almost any other club in the league. They have serious range issues in the infield and shifting is going to tighten up some of those holes. There’s no perfect answer, but if you look at the massive shifting integration the Pirates employed in 2013, it’s hard not to get excited. The Tigers probably won’t move that far, but we’ve seen the potential for BABIP payoff if a team is willing to make the move.

Finally, the specific hire looks extremely promising. I love the position in general, but Gabe Kapler, former Tiger and friend of the movement, speaks extremely highly of Martin.

Kapler also followed up with a link to something he wrote for Baseball Prospectus in August about Martin and coaching in general which lays the praise on pretty thick.

A couple of coaching hires doesn’t change a whole lot about the Tigers chances in 2014, but they send very positive signals about the future of the organization that seems to be growing more comfortable with modern thinking by the day. It’s too soon to tell what kind of impact these moves will have on the team, but they’re moves in the right direction. The Tigers have clearly had success without a lot of love for sabermetrics; imagine what they could do with even better information.

We’re about to find out.