Major League Baseball

Under the radar and all over the field, Dodgers' Chris Taylor proving his value

Published Aug. 25, 2021 9:57 a.m. ET

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By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Max Muncy has been the Dodgers’ best hitter this season. Corey Seager was their best hitter last season. Justin Turner is their most consistent hitter. Mookie Betts is their most valuable position player. Trea Turner has been just as valuable as Betts since last season began. Cody Bellinger won an MVP not long ago. 

But utilityman Chris Taylor is the Dodger who plays the most, all over the diamond, all across the lineup. He still doesn’t have a single position, but he again leads the team in games played and plate appearances this season, and if the Dodgers can chase down the upstart Giants in September, he will be a significant reason they do.

Since calling Taylor up for good on April 19, 2017, the Dodgers have played 657 games. He has appeared in 595 of those games, more than 90%, and started 505, or 77%. Taylor has never spent the majority of a season playing one position. He has played four positions regularly — shortstop, center field, left field and second base — and two sparingly — third base and right field.

Since 2017, he has hit .271, with an on-base percentage of .349 and a slugging mark of .471. He has improved in each of those categories this season. After adjusting for the league and ballpark in which he plays, Taylor’s OPS+ since 2017 rates him 19% better than the average MLB hitter, his wRC+ 21% better. That latter number is equal to Manny Machado’s and superior to, among many others, Francisco Lindor’s.

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Taylor will not cash in like those two when he becomes a free agent at season’s end. For one thing, he will reach the milestone amid an offseason of uncertainty, with the CBA due to expire Dec. 1. For another, he turns 31 next week. Machado signed his $300 million deal at 26 and Lindor his $341 million extension at 27. 

Also, those two present as stars. No one in Major League Baseball acts less like a star than Chris Taylor. He no longer mumbles through interviews like he did during his breakout 2017, but he isn't exactly an emotive or revealing speaker.

When Dodgers manager Dave Roberts lobbied for Taylor to make the All-Star Game earlier this season, he said, "People need to promote him because he doesn’t promote himself." Roberts is right; Taylor has always preferred to remain in the background.

"He’s been the same exact way since I’ve been around him," said Phil Gosselin, the Angels' utilityman, a teammate of Taylor’s at the University of Virginia. "It’s hard to describe. The last thing he wants to do is talk about himself, and L.A. is kind of not the place for that."

Taylor has a good explanation for his behavior. He once told reporters, before he even got to Los Angeles, that he had to be a serious player in order to be successful. "It’s very easy for me to get distracted," he said, "so I have to focus as much as I can." Those who know him well say he approaches all of his pursuits with that same seriousness.

"I think he’d be the same person whether he was a big leaguer or an accountant," Gosselin said. "It’s probably magnified more here in L.A. and being a good player and all that."

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When he successfully pitched him for the All-Star Game, Roberts also argued that Taylor’s skillset is unlike anyone else’s in MLB. Roberts might be right about that, too.

Taylor has hit right-handed pitching and left-handed pitching almost evenly throughout his career. He is about interchangeably as good at any of his four primary positions. He hits for some power, steals some bases, draws some walks, strikes out a good bit but not quite too much. He’s competent at everything. 

More and more players are playing multiple positions as teams copy the Dodgers, but Taylor is the league’s only true utilityman who hits like an everyday player. The evidence is in the data.

In his five seasons, Taylor has supplied the Dodgers between 15 and 16 Wins Above Replacement, depending on the calculation. By season’s end, the Dodgers will have paid him less than $15 million. He has been one of baseball’s best bargains, almost on par with another utilityman Andrew Friedman once employed, Ben Zobrist. When Zobrist finally reached free agency, at age 34, he signed a four-year, $56 million contract with the Cubs.

That’s often the first peg thrown out when discussing Taylor’s impending free agency, but his is harder to predict than most, even for executives within the sport. Will some team consider him a shortstop? A second baseman? A center fielder? Or, still, a utilityman? At any individual position, he could compare favorably to many of the other likely options, such as Javier Báez or Michael Conforto.

But as a utilityman, Taylor's earning potential will be limited. The most recent Dodgers utilityman to reach the open market, Kiké Hernández, found there the everyday role he craved but not the riches. The Red Sox paid him about what the Dodgers had agreed to pay in his final arbitration year.

Surely, Taylor will make more than $7.8 million next season. But how much more?

Since 2017, he has been almost as valuable as Kris Bryant, a fellow free-agent-to-be who has started to play all over the field, too. No one expects Taylor to match Bryant’s market. Taylor has never been a superstar or an MVP. But maybe it wouldn’t be so incredible for him to approach it.

Maybe the next two months will give us a better idea of what realm Taylor will be entering. Because as much as he has played during the regular season and will play down the stretch, come the Dodgers’ playoff opener, whether in the wild-card game or the division series, he might not even be in the lineup.

Such is the nature of the Dodgers’ depth, enabled over the past five years in large part by Taylor.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.

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Pedro Moura