Reflections on The Bear

Ordinarily, a minor league free agent with a non-roster invite wouldn’t warrant a standalone article. But Jorge Alfaro, who signed with the Red Sox on Monday, is not your ordinary player.

First of all, the path to regular playing time is relatively straightforward for Alfaro. He’ll be competing for minutes with Connor Wong and Reese McGuire. Wong has hit well in the minors but struggled in a brief major league audition last year, and he has an option year left. McGuire has been solid defensively the past two seasons, but his bat is not of such quality that the Sox would move heaven and earth to keep him in the lineup. If Alfaro plays well in spring training, there’s every reason to believe he’ll head north with the Red Sox and play regularly.

Alfaro’s contract indicates as much. If he makes the team, he’ll be paid $2 million, which is more than either McGuire or Wong will earn this season. He’ll also have two chances to opt out — June 1 and July 1 — if he hasn’t been called up by then. Minor league free agent or not, Alfaro aims to play in the bigs this year.

The second reason Alfaro is worthy of discussion: Well, he’s Jorge Alfaro.

When I first came to work at FanGraphs, I promised you, the readers, that I would bring you the best empirically based stories I could tell. I’m going to break that promise now. To hell with empirics; Alfaro is best enjoyed through highlights.

Alfaro will turn 30 this coming June, which is fitting. He’s one of those players who seems like he’s perpetually 23 years old, but he’s been around so long he has to be 37 by now. Take the average of those two numbers, and there you go. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Alfaro has taken on mythological status as the first seven-time top 101 prospect, and it’s easy to see why. Grading on tools, he has plus-plus power and a plus-plus throwing arm. He also has one of baseball’s best nicknames — El Oso — not just because all nicknames sound cooler in Spanish than in English, but also because “The Bear” is so evocative of a large, hirsute man who looks capable of superhuman feats of strength, and then performs superhuman feats of strength on a baseball diamond. Also, we think of bears as being large and powerful but forget that an adult grizzly bear can run at speeds of up to 35 mph. Alfaro, despite being a catcher who looks like he could squat a city bus, ranked in the 85th percentile for sprint speed last season.

Alfaro was so highly thought of as a young player that he formed the core of trades for both prime Cole Hamels and prime J.T. Realmuto. Over time, he’s faded into backup duty, so he hasn’t played that much. But when he does come to the surface, the results tend to be viral moments, like this 449-foot walk-off bomb off Cole Sulser last season.

Or one of the first great highlights of his career, this game-tying World Baseball Classic home run off Fernando Rodney.

To watch Alfaro is to be tantalized by a man who abjures the oppressive strictures of modern baseball. Nowadays, ballplayers are instructed to play the percentages. Sometimes those percentages dictate taking risks: throwing as hard as possible, literally swinging for the fences. But the math underpins everything. Alfaro lives outside those norms. He charges boldly and gets his money’s worth, win or lose.

We know athletes like this in other sports — people possessed of special physical gifts or uncommon skill but little concern for tactical prudence. They thrill us by pushing the creative boundaries of their games and frustrate us by constantly chasing transcendence even when the mundane is good enough. Jason Williams. Ricardo Quaresma. Mario Balotelli. These players might not achieve as much as they could have, but they become cult heroes because deep down we all know that playing by the rules is boring.

The very structure that makes baseball so easy to follow pushes the game toward conformity. Even more so than football, which resets play by play but leaves the entire physical playing space open to manipulation. Alfaro is as close as baseball gets to a Nick Young-type weirdo. And his skills, his gifts, are undiminished. The power, the throwing arm, the speed and strength — all of that remains undiminished. This is a 29-year-old with unusual abilities, some of them bordering on literally unique for a catcher, that translate to both sides of the ball. Sure, he strikes out a lot and doesn’t walk much, but Mike Zunino is getting $6 million guaranteed this year. Austin Hedges is getting $5 million. Both of them play for teams that would tear down a section of grandstand and use it for nuclear waste disposal if they thought it would save them a few bucks.

Alfaro is not just a circus act; he’s been productive. He’s not that far removed from a 2018 season in which he graded out as a plus framer and was worth 3.2 WAR in just 377 plate appearances. How is he available for a non-roster invite with a maximum of $2 million attached? Not only that, how did this serial hitter of clutch home runs not manage to get off the bench in last year’s playoffs when Austin Nola (1-for-19 in the NLCS) was in a slump?

Unfortunately, the explanation lies in empirics. At his peak, Alfaro is faster than Cristian Pache and Cedric Mullins. His hardest-hit ball of 2022 came in (or, more accurately, went out) at 115.2 mph, harder than anything hit by Mike Trout, Kyle Schwarber, or Joey Gallo in 2022. And he can play the hardest defensive position in the sport.

How is this guy not a starter, let alone a star?

The more useful way to ask that question is: How does the hitter with the worst contact numbers and plate discipline in baseball turn out to be an above-replacement-level player? Now, “worst contact numbers and plate discipline in baseball” is a superlative, which usually indicates some kind of exaggeration. But if I’m exaggerating, it’s not by much.

Alfaro was the only player to hit 200 or more times in 2022 and post a walk rate of 4% or lower and a strikeout rate of 35% or higher. Baseball Savant registers 531 hitters who saw at least 50 pitches in the chase zone in 2022; of those, Alfaro ranks 529th in run production and is one of just 11 not to break even. He lives outside the heuristic most of us have for “bad plate discipline.” No matter how many borderline pitches he sees, he will continue to swing and miss every time.

Ordinarily, I can’t stand to watch this kind of player: the hacker who swings from his heels and refuses to work a count. But on the rare occasions when Alfaro connects, the results are astonishing. And he has so much else going for him that I can’t bring myself to write him off; if he could just cut down the strikeouts a little, or become just that bit more selective, there’s a superstar in the making here.

How then can we criticize Alfaro for eyeing up something just outside his reach and chasing it with all his might? To repeat the same flawed process over and over on the off chance that this time he’ll connect and reap the rewards? The Red Sox, like four other teams before, are only doing the same.