Year-in-Review: Clint Frazier

New York Yankees outfielder (OF) Clint Frazier took major steps forward in 2020 and became a fantasy baseball asset. Matt Wallach dives into the stats to project his value for 2021.

With the 2020 MLB season in the books, the focus now shifts to the 2021 season. Coming off such a strange and unusual 2020 season, the biggest questions will revolve around just how much should fantasy players buy into small-sample-sized performances.

That question will very much be surrounding Clint Frazier, the former top prospect who finally saw everyday playing time in the abbreviated 2020 season and did quite well. After being selected around pick 400 in 2020 drafts, his stock is very much so on the up, but can we buy it?

Let's take a look back at Frazier's 2020 season.

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Starting Out Strong

Frazier once again came into the season on the outside looking in for playing time, with the Yankees outfield being fully healthy at the start of Summer Camp in July. He did make the Opening Day roster, but was quickly sent down to the Alternate Site for pitching help after just two games. He wasn't down for very long though, as the injury bug struck the Yankees yet again, and Frazier was recalled on August 12th. He quickly made a strong impression, going 7-13 in his first three games and hit .295/.415/.591 in 44 plate appearances in August, becoming one of the biggest forces in a depleted Yankees lineup. Frazier was finally getting the everyday playing time that he hadn't gotten to that point and wasn't looking likely to relinquish that playing time anytime soon.

Helping matters even more, Frazier looked like a completely different player in the field. With defense being his biggest weakness in past seasons, Frazier made significant improvements that saw him become a Gold Glove finalist in the outfield which, while not all that important for fantasy purposes, does ultimately matter a lot for playing time purposes. With defensive improvements, the Yankees should have felt more confident penciling him into the lineup nearly every day, which is what happened, even as the team got healthier down the stretch.

How Did He Get There?

While Frazier has been a part of four Major League seasons already, 2020 was by far his most productive. He finished with an overall .267/.394/.511 triple slash, and he improved upon his biggest strengths at the plate while also adding a few new tools to his toolbox. Frazier had shown good pop in his bat prior to 2020, with an isolated power mark of .216 in his first season in 2017, and .222 in 2019. In 2020, he got that figure up to .244, a much stronger position to be in and inside the top-40 of all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances.

Driving that increase in isolated power are new career-highs in several Statcast metrics. Most notable are his 43.2% hard-hit rate which placed him in the 72nd percentile of all hitters this season, as well as his 12.5% barrel rate, essentially double the league-average rate and puts him in the 82nd percentile. Frazier's improvements here and in his overall triple slash appear to have less to do with any true shifts in his batted-ball profile, but rather mechanical improvements with his swing, and with his pre-swing movement and motion, ultimately leading to a compact swing and helping him with his approach, timing and forcing him to wait longer on pitches.

The pre-swing differences are obvious when comparing 2019 (top) to 2020 (bottom), see for yourself:

Frazier also credits his improved plate discipline to these adjustments. While Frazier was never considered poor in the plate discipline department as a prospect, it was never really his calling card. In his previous most-extended run in the Majors back in 2019, he walked just 6.5% of the time. He improved greatly on that rate in 2020, walking at a 15.6% clip, a rate that was among the best in baseball. It appears that Frazier was waiting for his pitch a lot more in 2020, as his zone-swing rate was just 59.4%.

Perhaps more encouraging is that his chase rate was just 14.1%, a rate that was the second-lowest among all hitters with at least 100 plate appearances in 2020. While an elevated chase rate was never really an issue for Frazier in season's past, as he was still better-than-average in this department in 2019 with a 21.2% chase rate, this is an entirely different level. This seems to suggest that Frazier is becoming more mature at the plate, and that as he sees more playing time in the Majors, the more comfortable he becomes. He continued to show good power, even improving on it, and added a new dimension to his game with improved plate discipline.

Of course, this was all just in only 160 plate appearances. It's a downside of the 2020 season, as it is going to be super difficult to buy fully in on any player based on such small samples. While the improvements look really good, Frazier is still a player with some red flags.

First and foremost, Frazier will strike out a lot. In 2020, Frazier struck out 27.5% of the time, and has a Major League strikeout rate of 26.6%. While sometimes a higher strikeout rate can be a side effect of a hitter's excellent plate discipline, for Frazier it looks like his strikeout issues are mostly due to his high rate of whiffs. This has been Frazier's major offensive defect since making his debut, and in 2020, Frazier had the highest whiff-rate of his short career, at 31.8%, in the 18th percentile of all hitters. Additionally, Frazier had a higher zone-whiff rate of 22.6% in 2020 compared to 2019's 20.9% mark, and higher than the 17.6% league-average, which is concerning.

While Frazier is showing more patience at the plate and swinging less frequently on pitches inside the strike zone, he is whiffing more on those pitches that he does to swing at inside the zone. Also concerning is that his strikeout rate seemed to spike towards the end of the season, matching up to a season-ending slump:

Indeed, in his final 39 plate appearances of the season, Frazier slashed just .156/.308/.250. While we shouldn't make too much about his overall 2020 season based on a small sample, we shouldn't do it here with his slump to end the season, either. This was a bad way to end the season, to say the least, and he began to lose playing time to Brett Gardner down the stretch and in the postseason as well.

2021 Expectations

So, what does this mean for Frazier going forward? Despite the end-of-season slump, he should still be penciled into an everyday spot in the Yankees lineup in 2021. His other competition for a starting spot currently on the roster is Mike Tauchman, who didn't do himself many favors with his down 2020. Frazier's defensive improvements should relieve the team of most of their hesitation to play him every day.

While the Yankees did decline their team option on Gardner earlier in the offseason, there is a lot of interest still to bring him back, and with that, the possibility will continue to exist that Frazier could lose playing time again to Gardner, especially if Frazier goes on another skid like the one that ended his season. That assumes though that Gardner is back, which we don't know yet, so he should be expected to be in the lineup every day for the Yankees as of now.

In terms of projecting Frazier, his 2020 slash line is probably the best-case scenario for 2021. He should be expected to hit somewhere in the 20s in terms of home runs with a full season and everyday playing time. He'll have plenty of opportunities to score and drive in runs in a potent Yankees lineup. However, not knowing whether the plate discipline gains he showed in 2020 ar real and the elevated strikeout rate that is likely real may limit how much of an overall five-category contributor he can be.

Frazier has had an average draft position of 176 thus far in the NFBC, around the same pick as fellow outfielders Joey Gallo, Max Kepler, and Kyle Schwarber. This looks like a pretty good starting point as to where Frazier should be targeted in drafts. His solid 2020 performance is being taken into consideration, but there is plenty of room for upside still with a draft position in the back-half of the 100s.

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