RandBall: New Twins first baseman Ty France shows fragility of success

After an offseason spent either doing very little or laying foundational groundwork, depending on how you want to look at it, the Twins have made three low-leverage free agent transactions in the last week.

All of them have followed a generally familiar script: Adding a player at a relatively low cost and betting on their upside.

Relief pitcher Danny Coulombe, who broke the offseason drought last week, had two effective seasons with Baltimore in 2023 and 2024, but he missed a lot of time with an elbow problem last year. That made him expendable and affordable.

Harrison Bader, the outfielder who signed shortly after Coulombe, made $10.5 million on a free agent deal with the Mets in 2024 in large part because of what he had done between 2018 and 2021. He might make less than half of that this season with the Twins, depending on how much he plays.

And Ty France, the lowest-risk move of all (a nonguaranteed one-year, $1 million deal), signed on Tuesday.

All three represent the fragility of a big league career, but perhaps none more than France.

Is he the player he was in 2021 and 2022, when he had a combined 7.5 wins above replacement (per Baseball Reference) and was a mainstay for the Mariners? Or is he the guy who combined for a 0.1 WAR in 2023 and 2024?

The really tricky question, and the fine line in sports: What if he was essentially the same player all four years but with different outcomes — something I talked about on Wednesday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

France posted an .813 OPS in a whopping 650 plate appearances in 2021, doing so while playing half his games in a tough hitter’s ballpark (Seattle). He had a similarly productive year (.774 OPS), again with more than 600 PAs in 2022 and was rewarded with a trip to the All-Star game as an injury replacement for Mike Trout.

In 2023, he again got a ton of plate appearances (665), but his production dipped (.703 OPS), while in 2024 that number fell to .670.

That was bad timing for France, who earned $6.7 million in arbitration in 2024 but had to settle for a nonguaranteed $1 million this year even though a robust market for his services was reported in November.

Perhaps even more frustrating for France: Many of his underlying peripheral numbers were largely unchanged between 2021 and 2024, even though his production changed.

His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) was unusually high in 2021 at .327, accounting for some luck in his breakout season. It was around league average in both 2022 and 2023 (just below .300 in both cases), but in one of those years he was an All-Star and in the other he started to see his production dip. Last year he was unlucky (.277), particularly considering his hard hit rate remained constant, and it was the worst of the four.

So is France, 30, showing signs of decline or has he just been an unluckier version of the same hitter he was at his peak?

It sounds like the Twins don’t know the answer, but it’s not going to cost them much to find out.

“He’s just 30, and he’s an athletic guy who put up some good numbers in a tough ballpark,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’re just going to let him hit and see what happens.”