Well, it wouldn’t be much fun if the ball just rolled to the wall every time the pitcher threw it, so obviously the game needs a catcher, even if robot umps take over. But my impression of trying to draft stud catchers from year to year is that it’s folly.

Maybe because the position is so demanding defensively, my impression of their ability to hit is somewhere between ‘American League pitcher’ and ‘Defensive Replacement’. The numbers say that catchers debut later, but even that finding is muddied by late-career backup catcher debuts. Aging for catchers seems about the same, and finding value in a catcher is easy even if they hit 13% worse than league average as a group this year, worse than any other position players — you still need to fill the position, so even an okay batter should be valuable.

Still… am I crazy? It seems that catchers are more volatile, year to year, and I just want to shop in the bargain bin for the most part. Let’s jump in and see if I am loony tunes.

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Gary Sanchez wasn’t the most valuable catcher in 2016. He earned his owners just $8.60 per the FanGraphs Auction Calculator. He also posted a ludicrous .299/.379/.657 line with 20 home runs 34 runs and 42 RBI in just 229 plate appearances. Obviously, the late start limited his earning potential. If we extrapolate over 600 plate appearances, a fair expectation for a healthy Sanchez, he was on pace for 52 home runs, 89 runs, and 110 RBI. That’s comparable to a more powerful Nelson Cruz, and he was on the fringes of the top 10 fantasy hitters this year.

Sanchez wasn’t just magnificent among catchers, he was comparable to a top 10 talent for one-third of a season. Now what do we do?

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2016 was an odd year for catchers in fantasy baseball. Something that caught my eye was the ownership rates of the top-ranked catchers. Only two catcher-eligible players — Jonathan Lucroy and Buster Posey — ended the season above 90% ownership in Yahoo leagues. Gary Sanchez got close (87%, with those other 13% likely being dead leagues), as did Salvador Perez (also 87%), and Wilson Ramos was in the 80+% range for a while as well, before he was widely dropped following his late-season injury.

Regardless of the reasoning, the fact that only the top two catchers were owned in >90% of leagues is significant, seeing as shortstop was the position with the second-fewest >90% owned players, with seven. The weirdest aspect of this is that 2016 was a good year for catchers in fantasy; so good, perhaps, that it was too deep for some smaller one-catcher leagues.

While it’s worth noting that Rotographs is using an updated auction calculator this year, it’s plainly clear how much more productive the position was this year compared to 2015. Last year, just one player earned his fantasy owners more than $20 worth of production, and that was Buster Posey. This year, Posey was joined by Lucroy and Ramos above the $20 threshold. Furthermore, the value of this year’s No. 10 catcher — Brian McCann at $10.20 — makes it even wackier that A.J. Pierzynski was the No. 10 fantasy catcher last year, with a whopping $3.42 value.

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So as I do annually, I compared my personal dollar values and resulting rankings to the RotoGraphs consensus rankings (excluding my own of course) at each position before the season began and identified those I was most bullish on as my picks and those I was bearish on as my pans. Last week, Brad Johnson published the catcher end of season values and rankings, so we’ll begin by reviewing my 2016 Pod’s Picks and Pans at catcher.

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Twice during the course of the season I highlighted Cameron Rupp for his offensive performance.  In May I brought up a concern about Rupp over performing his talent level, since he had a massive and unsustainable leap in exit velocity, but I questioned exactly how much he would regress.  In 2015 he had a relatively low 89mph average EV, and by the end of May he was hitting north of 96mph.  A month later, in late June, I wrote about him again, by this point his EV had setting to around 92mph, and by mid to late June we had seen enough of Rupp to know the changes were real. He had a different spray chart, heat map, higher exit velocities, much more high quality batted balls, and a huge leap in offensive production.

Lets take a step back, though. Upon the conclusion of the 2015 season, the Phillies management told Rupp he needed to dramatically improve his offensive performance during the 2016 season or he could end up losing his job with the team.  Rupp spent the offseason with a batting instructor he has worked with since childhood, Chris Edelstein, and together they refined his swing and approach.  Their work seemed to pay off noticeably from day one this season, with his April production significantly exceeding his 2015 numbers.  After a weak month of May, he went on a tear in June, July, and August where he put up the best numbers of his career.  His season ended on a low note, with a September so underwhelming that it threatens to wash out the success he had during the heart of the season.Rupp had three scorching hot months, one pretty decent month, and two exceedingly weak months.  He finished the season batting .252/.303/.447, with .321 wOBA, 16 HR, 36 R, and 54 RBI.  Among catchers, he ranked 20th in HR, 18th in R, 13th in RBI, 17th in AVG, 27th in OBP, 8th in SLG, and 36th in strike outs.  This may not be especially exciting, but there are some good signs here. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a very strange year at catcher. The top of the end of season catcher rankings don’t look too unusual with Jonathan Lucroy and Buster Posey at the top, but those full-season numbers do not capture the amazing impact three catchers who become starters midseason had. Gary Sanchez’s prospect star had faded a bit in recent seasons, but that reflected defensive doubts. Most scouts agreed that Sanchez would hit if he could field his position. Willson Contreras had become the top catching prospect, and he immediately delivered on that promise with the Cubs.

Sandy Leon was completely different. Leon made his debut with the Nationals all the way back in 2012, and Wilson Ramos was not the only reason Leon never played regularly before this season. In his 235 plate appearances from 2012-15, Leon slashed an abysmal .187/.258/.225. His .223 wOBA over that period made him roughly equivalent at the plate to Mike Leake. This season, Leon was tied with Lucroy for the third-highest wOBA of .362. He was nearly identical to Contreras in both plate appearances and production.

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With the regular season over and the postseason rumbling along, it’s time to look back at the top performers of 2016. As is usually the case, we’re starting at the catcher position. For those of you who are familiar with this series from previous offseasons, we have a major change to the way we’re calculating values. Let’s talk about that first before diving into the numbers.

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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The 2016 season was a banner year for the longball and not just in relation to the recent downturn in offense. The 5610 hit this year are the second-most ever. Ever. Per plate appearance, it was even more than the 2000 season that saw 5692 homers hit. Within that surge, we saw an all-time high in 20+ home run hitters with 111. The previous high was set in 1999 at 103. Prior to this year, the top 14 seasons for 20+ HR hitters were all set between 1996 and 2009. Adding the 20+ HR hitters from 2014 and 2015 barely eclipses this year’s total (121 to 111) and this year’s output is nearly 2x higher than last year’s (64 to 111).

Let’s take a look at how this year’s home run surge broke down by position, with catcher and first base, second base and shortstop Friday (forgot I had my chat on Thursday), and then third base and outfield early next week. We’ll focus on the 20+ HR hitters at each position and identify some players who could enter those ranks next year.

CATCHER

Backstop saw one of the bigger surges in 20+ HR hitters compared to recent years with eight this year after just 10 in 2014-15 combined, including a whopping four last year (all who did it again this year).

Evan Gattis (32), Yasmani Grandal (27), Jonathan Lucroy (24), Wilson Ramos (22), Salvador Perez (22), Gary Sanchez (20), Russell Martin (20), and Brian McCann (20).

Gattis, Martin, McCann, and Perez were the four who also achieved the feat in 2015 as well. Notice the consensus #1 catcher, Buster Posey, didn’t make the list as he hit just 14 homers this year. He could find his way back in there next year, but it’s no sure bet with just one 20+ HR season over his last four (22 in ’14).

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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