About That Unbelievable Diamondbacks Catching Situation

As I write this on the afternoon of February 1, the Diamondbacks catching depth chart looks like this:

#31 Diamondbacks

That’s a position for a major league baseball team! A not particularly good or even interesting team, but a major league team nonetheless. Look at it. Bask in it. If the concept of “replacement level” needed a human face, well, here’s a bunch of them. With barely more than two weeks before pitchers report to begin throwing to those catchers, that’s what the Diamondbacks look like they’re going to have. It’s been nearly two months since Miguel Montero was dealt to the Cubs, and everyone assumed that another move would be coming, some way to ensure that the team would have at least a single dependable catcher to make it through the season.

Despite some rumors, nothing’s happened. Dioner Navarro is still a Blue Jay, despite Russell Martin. Welington Castillo, seemingly made redundant by Montero and David Ross joining the Cubs, is still in Chicago, and if a deal was going to be there, it seems like it would have been there within the Montero deal. Carlos Corporan is a Ranger. Geovany Soto went to the White Sox. A ton of other catchers — Ryan Hanigan, Rene Rivera, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Hank Conger, etc. — found themselves on the move. The top remaining free agent catcher is probably 35-year-old Gerald Laird, which is to say, there’s no longer any remaining free agent catchers.Update: Of course they did.

Nor does anything seem likely to happen, at least if you believe these mid-January comments from GM Dave Stewart:

After saying last week the Diamondbacks would be comfortable going into the season with their current catchers if a better option didn’t present itself, General Manager Dave Stewart took it a step further Tuesday, saying the club will not make an addition, in large part because of the development of prospect Peter O’Brien.

“I’ve decided that I’m not going to pursue another catcher,” Stewart said. “I talked with my people and my coaching staff. They believe that O’Brien is going to be around sooner than later. If that does happen, there’s no need to go out and get another guy.

We should know by now that there’s no reason to take any baseball executive at their word. Stewart may have been truthful, or he may have been trying to pump up O’Brien, or make potential trade partners think he’s not desperate to make a move, or some combination of all of it. All we know for sure is that no move has happened. If no one else is coming, then this isn’t just the worst catching situation in baseball. It’s one of the worst situations of any position in the game, and it’s not at the bottom mainly (though not exclusively) because the Phillies exist at a few spots, and because we’re looking at tenths of a point of WAR that far down.

In case you don’t know these guys — and why would you — a quick (re)introduction:

• Gosewisch, a 31-year-old with 179 career plate appearances of 57 wRC+, signed as a minor league free agent prior to 2013, summed up by Patrick Dubuque in last year’s FG+ entirely with “Just kidding. There is no such thing as a Tuffy Gosewisch.”
• Hernandez, a 21-year-old Rule 5 pick who had a .301 OBP in Single-A last year
• Pagnozzi, a 32-year-old veteran on his sixth organization with a 78 wRC+ in 105 career big league plate appearances
• Pacheco, a 29-year-old multi-positional type who has accumulated more negative value than nearly anyone else in the 21st century and didn’t actually catch at all after joining Arizona on waivers from Colorado last summer
• O’Brien, a 24-year-old with big power and big contact issues who almost certainly doesn’t have the defensive skills to actually catch at the big league level

Only the first two are currently on the 40-man roster. Now, it should be noted that the playing time projections as listed above are basically the baseball version of the shrug emoji. What’s shown there is almost certainly not how the season will actually play out, and since I manage the NL West depth charts, you can feel free to come at me with your disagreements. There’s a lot of ways this could go, the thing is just that none of them are really good.

Perhaps Hernandez doesn’t stick and gets returned to the Rays, because it’s incredibly rare for a Rule 5 catcher to make it with his new team, particularly when there’s not a strong starter to hide behind. (So far as I’ve been able to find, only two catchers this century have done so, Jesus Flores and Adrian Nieto, and only two 21-year-old catchers have managed even 100 plate appearances in a season since 2008, Pablo Sandoval and Salvador Perez; Sandoval caught only 85 innings that year.) Could be that Blake Lalli is the over-30 Quad-A guy, rather than Pagnozzi. Maybe the team insists on giving O’Brien a chance to catch despite all evidence to the contrary, as well as only 300 plate appearances above Single-A.

Since the Diamondbacks aren’t likely to contend this year — they’re apparently considering Josh Collmenter as their No. 1 starter, and Steamer sees them as an 88-loss team, the third-worst in baseball — maybe it seems like this doesn’t matter. Why give up assets for Navarro, especially when he makes $5 million, when Stewart has already indicated the team needs to cut payroll after signing Yoan Lopez, and when the Jays have plenty of use for Navarro as a part-time catcher and DH, lest they need to turn to Josh Thole?

Maybe it won’t, in terms of win/loss record. But then, as with everything catching-related, it’s not just about offense, and we know this group won’t hit. Even Gosewisch’s .259 expected wOBA, which is awful, might be generous, because it requires a step up from the .226 he’s actually put up in his limited playing time. Since Jackie Robinson‘s 1947 debut, there have been 1,253 catcher seasons of at least 350 plate appearances. (That’s not 300 plate appearances as a catcher, but overall from players who were primarily catchers.) .259 would be tied for 27th-worst. .226 would be second-worst, behind only Jerry Grote’s 1967 age-24 disaster.

Montero didn’t hit much either over the last few years, but he was 2014’s top framing catcher. He was top-7 in 2011, and above-average in 2012, making a 2013 downturn — in a season marred by back pain — seem like an outlier. As the Diamondbacks try to overhaul one of 2014’s worst starting rotations, they’re now doing so without their veteran framer. That’s not to say that Gosewisch can’t be competent there; he has, over his career, been viewed as about average in limited sample sizes, and comes with a decent enough reputation. We have absolutely no data on Hernandez, Pacheco might not be a catcher any longer, and Pagnozzi’s metrics look awful, though again in limited playing time.

But remember, now, the pitchers the team has imported. Allen Webster had trouble finding the plate in Boston, and he spent most of his time pitching to the well-regarded Christian Vazquez. So did Rubby de la Rosa. Jeremy Hellickson is notorious for performances that don’t align with his peripherals, and he’s coming from Tampa Bay, where the Rays put tremendous import on framing by employing Hanigan and Jose Molina. In September, Beyond the Boxscore noted that Hellickson & Molina rated as one of the top pitcher/catcher duos in baseball, so far as expected strikes go.

As you can see over the last two years, while there’d been some leakage in the upper right corner, Hellickson wasn’t being cheated out of anything down and in (to righties, or down and away to lefties) and in fact was getting some generous calls outside the zone:

That might be lost, and considering that Chase Field seems an odd fit for a pitcher like Hellickson anyway, it could be the tipping point Hellickson doesn’t need. Gosewich could be fine, of course, it’s just that even if he’s perfectly acceptable, by all indications he’ll be a step down for several of these pitchers. And even that is assuming that he’s the regular starter, because the rumblings keep coming about how highly the Diamondbacks value O’Brien, seemingly standing alone in the baseball world in terms of considering him a catcher. In November, Kiley referred to O’Brien as a first baseman and said he “still can’t catch.” Just last week, Keith Law named O’Brien his No. 17 Arizona prospect, referring to his “well-below-average receiving.” With reports like that, it’s difficult to comprehend what impact O’Brien as a catcher with real playing time would have on the tenuous Arizona starters.

Maybe, over the next few weeks, attitudes change. There’s plenty of teams who wouldn’t be satisfied with this group competing for their backup job, much less their starting role, and Stewart decides to pony up for Navarro or Castillo or Jason Castro or Wilin Rosario. But with each passing day, it seems more likely that this is the group we’ll see, and there’s not much help coming internally, not with Stryker Trahan, 2012’s first round pick, regressing badly last year. This won’t be a good collection no matter what happens, really. But we can at least hope it gets interesting. For now, it’s just terrifying.