It’s hard to call J.T. Realmuto under the radar when he appeared here on FanGraphs’ Top 200 preseason, Baseball America’s Top-100 and Keith Law’s Top-100 (Insider required), yet here we are. Realmuto finished as the ninth best catcher among according to our End of Season Rankings despite ranking a modest 21st in our Mid Season Update. His .259/.290/.406 line translates to an 86 wRC+, though he still managed to be fantasy relevant in a fair amount of leagues. Realmuto smacked 10 home runs and even stole eight bags in his 467 plate appearances, with the steals leading all catchers with at least 300 PAs. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Vogt was a nice sleeper coming into 2015, especially since the Athletics stated they were going to use him as a regular catcher. He quickly got catcher eligibility in mid-April and his value jump some. His value skyrocketed in early May when he hit 5 home runs in nine days and was producing at a league leading level. This production didn’t continue and he saw quite a bit of drop off over the season’s second half. Going into 2016, Vogt’s projected production should probably be about the same as his overall 2015 production.

The 30-year-olf Vogt came into the season as a catcher play in deeper leagues without much major league experience. He seemed to perform decently in 287 PA in 2014 with 9 HR and a .279 AVG. He was mainly a platoon option but was looking at more playing time between catching and playing first base. Here are David Wiers preseason thoughts on Vogt.

Best used as a platoon player against right-handed pitchers, Vogt does offer value in that role. Don’t make the mistake of simply extrapolating and nearly doubling his 2014 counting production, but Vogt could be a sneaky pickup late in the draft or off of the waiver wire.

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Even though I owned Nick Hundley in a league this year, I was still surprised to see that he finished 2015 as fantasy’s No. 7 catcher. Despite receiving far fewer plate appearances than any of the other top-ten backstops, Hundley’s robust .301/.339/.467 slash line was enough to place him comfortably within those ranks. In his age-31 year, Hundley had the second double-digit homer season of his career, and his .301 AVG was well above his career average of .249.

Hundley got 389 PA this year, and that was actually just 19 shy of his career high (408 in 2013). There are two reasons he’s only surpassed the 400-PA mark once. For one, he has some significant injuries in his past, losing parts of three previous seasons to various maladies (wrist [2009], elbow/oblique [2011], knee [2012]). This year, a cervical neck strain ended his season in early September, but should be a non-issue for 2016. The bright side of his injury history is that none of his ailments have been related to one another.

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For the next few weeks, the RotoGraphs staff will devote entire weeks to each defensive position, including spotlights on particular players as well as trends throughout the 2015 season. This week, we’re highlighting catchers.

I don’t claim to be a Tableau (or data visualization) whiz by any means, but I thought it would be cool to visually represent the landscape of all catchers in 2015 — with some analysis sprinkled in.

Steamer and ZiPS represent premier player projection systems; FanGraphs’ Depth Charts combines the two, and the writing staff allocate playing time accordingly. The playing time part is less important relative to the combined projections, as aggregated projections tend to perform better than standalones.

I compared projected WAR (wins above replacement) from the preseason to actual WAR (1) by team and (2) by player within team. I scaled the expected WAR by playing time to correct for injuries, trades, call-ups, etc. Ideally, it’ll be a little more accurate and, perhaps, fairer than comparing actual results to projections straight-up.

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With few exceptions, this has been a very poor year for fantasy production from the catcher spot. As always, injuries had a major role to play as Devin Mesoraco, Matt Wieters, Travis d’Arnaud, and Jonathan Lucroy fell victim to injury and experienced what amounted to lost seasons.  But other catching stalwarts or expected rising stars also disappointed. Let’s take a look at this epidemic of missing stats.

* Only 222 PA this season

While Miguel Montero was close, Buster Posey was the only catcher projected to be in the top 10 in 2015 that met or exceeded all of their pre-season stats projections.

Below are the current overall CBS Player rankings for the top 10 catchers compared to their pre-season expected rankings.

Evan Gattis, Carlos Santana, and Wiln Rosario were 3 players who qualified at Catcher, were ranked in the Pre-Season top 10 at the position, and actually played their games in 2015 at other positions. They all have disappointed this season.  This performance hurts fantasy owners even more because they were probably drafted higher than they normally would because of the expected advantage in counting stats over catchers who normally miss a game or two a week.

Wiln Rosario continued to demonstrate very troubling splits in 2015 that resulted in the significant loss of PAs and he has only logged 222 PAs this season. Here’s more on the other two….

Evan Gattis:

After a 2014 season with the Braves where Gattis batted .263 and produced 22 HRs and drove in 52 in just 108 games, great things were expected with a move to the AL and the more friendly confines of the Astro’s Ballpark. Many had predicted that with increased PAs and forgoing the wear and tear of catching duties Gattis would easily top the 30 HR mark this season.  While his PAs increased significantly to 565, his ISO receded from .230 to .209 and he has clubbed 26 HR to date. What has stayed consistent is his BA which at .243 is closer to his career .249 mark. His .249/.281/.452 slash line is well off the .257/.296/.507 numbers that were projected by CBS Sports.

The biggest culprit seems to be a change in approach at the plate where he is pulling the ball far less and making less authoritative contact. He also seems to have developed some issues driving the fastball and the cutter now completely confounds him. His batted ball distance on HRs is down 20 feet and he has lost 3 mph on his bat speed. Even though 26 HRs in a catcher eligible position is nothing to sneeze at, according to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, almost 50% of those HRs have been of the JE or “Just Enough” variety which does not portend well for his power numbers next season. Considerng the fact that he has also lost 100 points of average against lefty pitching this season and you have more than enough reasons for missing projections.  New league, new batting approach, and new ballpark are three very impactful changes, so hopefully Gattis will recapture his mojo next season but his catching eligibility is gone.

Carlos Santana:

Carlos Santana erupted for 27 HRs in 2014 which tied for his career high. Since he played 11 games at catcher in 2014, he came into the 2015 season eligible at that positions in many leagues. Last season he appeared in 152 games and had 660 PA’s so the expectations for his counting stats was very high. He was projected to be the kind of player who would yield a significant advantage to those who could slot him in at catcher. Right now, he is projected to reach the 660 PA plateau again this season but he most likely will fall short of hitting even 20 HRs. Santana’s 11 SBs this season is an unexpected gift, but his .236/.362/.380 slash line is below expectations. Santana’s .153 ISO is the lowest of his career.

While he has maintained his excellent plate discipline, his hard hit % is down 6% to a career-low 29.5% and he is undercutting the ball to the tune of a 20.3% IFFB rate. Last season only 7 of his 27 HR’s were of the ESPN Home Run Tracker JE or “Just Enough” designation while 6 of his 16 are this season. Santana is just not hitting the ball with the same authority as he did last year and his power stats have suffered. Like Gattis, his eligibility at catcher will be gone in 2016.

Brian McCann, Russell Martin, Stephen Vogt, Derek Norris, Rick Hundley, Welington Castillo, Yasmani Grandal, and Kyle Schwarber provided some solace for fantasy owners who invested wisely and did not overpay for catcher production. But even among this group, only one of these catchers, Stephen Vogt, is batting over .249.

There is some hope for 2016. If the injured contingent of Mesoraco, Lucroy, and Wieters are able to return to health, and quality youngsters like D’Arnaud,  Schwarber, Swihart, and Realmuto continue to develop, led by the super talented Buster Posey and some of the performers above, we could have an altogether different picture next season. And Baseball Prospectus lauds the catching depth in the Minors as “potentially historic”, so the future could be very bright at the catcher position for years to come and help erase the stench of the 2015 season.

This is the worst time of the sports calendar year. With baseball off enjoying its All-Star break, there are no major professional sports being played right now. Worse yet is that the intriguing new Home Run Derby might not even get done because of weather. Thankfully, we here at Fangraphs have got you covered. Over on the front page, Dave Cameron is unveiling his Trade Value List which began with the honorable mentions so-to-speak and then numbers 50-41. Over here at Rotographs, we are rolling out our midseason rankings by position.

Today, we start behind the dish.

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The catcher position has been an interesting position all season long. The depth at the position was hurt earlier this year when Jonathan Lucroy and Travis d’Arnaud went on the disabled list, and Matt Wieters still recovering from his elbow injury, but there have been some big surprises at the top of the catcher ranks this year in Steven Vogt and Russell Martin. Most people know Martin is a solid player, but not many expected him to have 44 runs, 10 homers, and a .365 OBP before the end of June. There has been good deal of power at the position with seven players hitting double digit home runs.
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The older we get, the more awed we are by catchers and the more literally unthinkable we find what they do. Our imaginary lives are as richly textured as the next stat geek’s, and now and then, in the kingdoms of our own minds, you might find us pretending that we’re thirty or forty years younger, and far better baseball players than we ever were. But though we might imagine ourselves hitting Stargellesque home runs, throwing Koufaxian pitches, or making Robinsonable plays in the field, we just can’t conceive of getting into and out of a crouch as often as catchers must and do. Our geriatric knees just won’t let us get our geriatric minds around the possibility.

But being able to crouch that much and that often is of course merely one part of a catcher’s job. As you know, he’s also got to call pitches, block the bad ones, frame the good ones, throw out base stealers, pounce on bunts, and, so it’s said, serve as the on-field team’s prefrontal cortex. So it’s unreasonable to expect catchers to hit very much, and in fact, many of them don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re not quite a quarter of the way into the season – which isn’t the quarter pole, by the way, that comes around 122 games though that won’t stop anyone – but it is a perfect time to update the consensus rankings here at Rotographs. First off, we’re about to have Memorial Day weekend and what better way to spend the extra time off than by retooling your fantasy team? To do that, you’ll need to know how we value players going forward so you don’t get ripped off at the trading table. Secondly, even though we’re only about 39 games through the season (some teams are as high as 41 played while three others are down at 36), a lot has changed.

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There was a time in fantasy baseball when prospect call-ups barely registered on the radar. I know that sounds crazy given how much we as a community overreact to them now, but when I first started playing there were maybe a handful of call-ups we were waiting for in-season and even then, expectations were tempered. Today, we often have outsized expectations attached to prospects which lead to a lot of disappointment. The newest names almost sure to disappoint the fantasy community are catchers Blake Swihart and Austin Hedges.

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