Rays Add New Pulled-Homer Champion in Danny Jansen

For a month or so every year it seems, Danny Jansen looks like Babe Ruth. The only season out of the past four in which he hasn’t put up a 20-game stretch with a wRC+ over 200 was 2023, and he was pretty awesome in 2023 anyway; he posted a 115 wRC+ overall that year, while playing the most offensively-challenged position in the sport, no less. So in some ways, the Rays might have just signed the best offensive catcher in baseball:

@JeffPassan tweetedCatcher Danny Jansen and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $8.5 million contract that includes a mutual option for a second season, sources tell ESPN. Jansen, who has played in Toronto and Boston, remains in the AL East. On it: @ByRobertMurray and @TBTimes_Rays.

— Passanthallich (@passanthalbot.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T18:18:18.487825+00:00

Of course, when it comes to overall production, they absolutely didn’t. Jansen was white hot to start the year in 2024 – and then ended the season with an 89 wRC+, going from target deadline acquisition to backup in the process. And while he has indeed hit well when healthy, he gets hurt a lot. Across those aforementioned four seasons, he’s accumulated only 1,078 plate appearances. He hit the IL twice in 2021, twice again in ’22, twice yet again in ’23, and then missed the start of the ’24 season rehabbing from the last ’23 injury.

So maybe Jansen is secretly an amazing hitter – or maybe it’s a miracle that he can even still play baseball. Either of those could be true, and of course the truth is likely somewhere in between. The Rays are famously good at discerning where in the “somewhere in the middle” players lie, and as such, they feel like a natural home for Jansen.

Finding catchers who can both hit and field is nearly impossible. The Rays haven’t particularly prioritized them in the draft, and they certainly haven’t gone out of their way to trade for or sign marquee catchers. That’s how they ended up with Ben Rortvedt (career wRC+: 70) as their primary catcher in 2024. In 2023, that role went to Christian Bethancourt (career wRC+: 71). In 2022, Bethancourt backed up Francisco Mejía (career wRC+: a scintillating 86, though with poor defense).

The point of this list isn’t to shame the Rays. OK, it’s a little bit to shame the Rays; over the last three years, they’re eighth in the majors in winning percentage but 24th in WAR produced by catchers. Mostly, though, I’m just trying to point out that their method in recent years has mostly involved completely ignoring catcher and hoping things work out anyway.

It’s hard to argue with that plan in the big sense, because how in the world are you going to get a star catcher? They don’t hit free agency. You can’t easily trade for them, because the teams who have them want to keep them. Given the wear and tear that comes with playing the position, the stars don’t even last long most of the time. Throwing your hands up and moving on feels like a justifiable decision given that context.

I think I like this new strategy from Tampa Bay more, though. Is Jansen going to be an All-Star? It’s certainly much less than a 50/50 proposition. But he’ll probably be an average hitter, or at least in that neighborhood. Even better, at least from the Rays’ perspective: He won’t break the bank. Early this winter, pitchers have commanded luxury-good salaries. The Rays are budget-conscious at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times. After Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off of Tropicana Field, the Rays were forced to relocate to a minor league stadium for 2025, and their future home is still very much up in the air.

In my eyes, that eliminated them from the market for free agent pitchers. The Rays excel at finding types of players that the league as a whole undervalues, and well, that’s certainly not the case for starting pitchers right now. You can quibble over whether they’re properly valued or overvalued relative to other players, but no one’s looking at two years and $34 million (plus an opt out) for Frankie Montas and saying “how did he accept such a low deal.”

Jansen, on the other hand? He’s getting only $8.5 million, and I think there’s a good chance he’ll rack up as much value as Montas next year. That wouldn’t be the case for every team; the teams with established catching options wouldn’t get that much use out of him, and if I were running a team that signed Jansen, I’d want either to platoon him or at least give him plenty of rest. Given that Rortvedt is a lefty, something like a timeshare where Jansen plays two-thirds of the time, with Rortvedt mostly playing against righty opposition seems great.

Of course, there’s an easy way this signing might not work, and arguably it’s the reason that Jansen was available for only a one-year deal. Like I already mentioned, catchers have a short shelf life. Jansen just put up his worst year as a major leaguer, and that lengthy injury history means he’s never eclipsed 400 plate appearances in a season. His barrel rate, hard-hit rate, and average exit velocity all declined to scary levels in 2024.

If there were no risk to signing Jansen, the Rays likely wouldn’t have come calling. But I think the risk is overblown, particularly at catcher. Even a much-diminished Jansen would be a big upgrade from what they’ve been getting out of their catchers in recent years. Even if they could sign a comparable player at another position to the same deal, they’d receive less of an upgrade; Jansen is improving their weakest position.

Another way of thinking about it: Excluding relievers, I can’t think of a player likely to sign for less than Jansen who could be All-Star in 2025. Jansen fits that bill for me, though. I’m not saying it’s likely, but the offensive outbursts he produces every season are certainly All-Star caliber. The question is how frequently he can access that form, and Tampa Bay seems like an ideal landing spot for him in that sense; the Rays excellent at putting their players in the best position to succeed.

Jansen’s offensive game, even when he’s hot, is extremely polarized. He’s not a well-rounded hitter; he’s a lift-and-pull masher who’s trying to tuck every ball over the left field wall. Only Adam Duvall and noted Rays overachiever Isaac Paredes have pulled their fly balls more frequently in recent years. There’s a ton of Paredes in his game, in fact: He rarely swings and misses, shows patience at the plate, and gets cheap homers and low BABIPs as a result of his approach.

Obviously, the Paredes playbook has already worked once in Tampa Bay. It might get even better this year; Baltimore just made its left field fence a bit less ridiculous, and the AL East was already a good place for righty power thanks to Fenway Park. Steinbrenner Field, the Rays’ temporary home, is a wild card in the mix. It replicates Yankee Stadium’s dimensions exactly, and while it has played like a pitcher’s park in the minors, I think it’s reasonable to expect a neutral or even slightly pro-hitter marks in the bigs. The only wrinkle here is that the left field corner is slightly farther away than the Trop’s foul pole.

My prediction, given all that: Jansen is going to hit for power consistently when he plays, and the Rays will find him stadium and pitching matchups that emphasize his best traits. I’m also expecting an IL stint – sometimes past performance is indicative of future results – and acceptable-but-not-great defense. It’ll be a much different look from Rays catchers of recent years, that’s for sure.

I’m not certain that the Jansen signing will work out. How could I be? But I do think it’s a classically Rays-y move, the kind that has served them so well for more than a decade now. The rest of the league is scouring free agency for pitching, but the Rays already have a good pitching staff, and so they’re shopping elsewhere. They’re getting a player who resembles a former Tampa Bay star, at a reasonable rate, at their weakest position. Make a ton of bets like this, and you’ll do well in the long run. That’s more or less the franchise motto at this point.