The Brewers Shop in the (Backup Catcher) Luxury Aisle

Few positions on the Brewers depth chart are more set than catcher. William Contreras, whom they acquired before last season, was their best player in 2023. He led Milwaukee in hitting and finished third on the team in plate appearances despite shouldering a full-time catching load, which normally limits playing time. Most impressively, he delivered a sensational defensive performance a year after he was one of the worst receivers in baseball. On a team that struggled to generate offense, Contreras was a rare and brightly shining exception.

Naturally, the Brewers just signed the best free agent catcher on the market, give or take DH Mitch Garver. That’d be Gary Sánchez, who is joining the team on a one-year, $7 million contract, as Jon Heyman reported. It sounds bizarre – and it may well be bizarre. But there’s a method to Milwaukee’s madness, so let’s try to figure it out together.

There’s one obvious thing going for the Brewers: They really needed a second catcher. Before they signed Sánchez, the plan was to use Eric Haase, he of the 42 wRC+ in 2023, as their second backstop. That plan was not great, to put it succinctly. Haase probably isn’t that bad offensively, but he’s also not particularly good behind the plate. In his best years in Detroit – he hit a career-high 22 home runs in 2021 and topped out at 1.3 WAR in 351 plate appearances the following season – he wasn’t used as a pure catcher, dabbling in the outfield and at DH and racking up meaningfully negative framing numbers when he did don the tools of ignorance.

If you didn’t like that plan, the next line of defense was… well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the next line of defense was. Replacement level backup catchers – or, well, often sub-replacement level by the numbers – are a fungible commodity, but that’s not a great way to get ahead in a competitive NL Central. Contreras is so good offensively that he’ll end up DH’ing quite a bit to get the most out of his bat, which means Milwaukee’s backups will end up with plenty of time behind the plate.

This is a standard move for good offensive catchers, even those who are great defensively. Adley Rutschman does the same thing in Baltimore, which is part of why they traded for James McCann after the 2022 season. J.T. Realmuto and Will Smith have gotten this treatment at various points in the past. So has Alejandro Kirk, though to be fair he doesn’t appear to be a masterful defensive catcher either. It just makes sense, though: If your catcher can rake, you’ll want to manage his innings behind the plate catcher, because playing catcher is hard!

Sánchez projects to be a lot better than Haase. A few years ago, that outcome didn’t feel particularly likely; he fell out of favor with the Yankees thanks to his shoddy performance behind the plate and then got shipped to Minnesota, where he did a lot of DH’ing and didn’t hit or defend particularly well. He ended up in the wilderness, as it were, signing a prove-it deal with the Giants before bouncing through the Mets on waivers and ending up in San Diego. In the best weather in America, he found himself again, posting his best offensive numbers in a half decade while catching more or less full-time.

Receiving has never been Sánchez’s forte, but he’s not without merits as a defensive catcher. He boasts a thunderous throwing arm, annually ranking among the top 10 in the majors in pop time and arm strength, skills that took on increased importance in go-go 2023. Can he do it all? Absolutely not. He’s an indifferent blocker at best, and downright disastrous at worst. Baseball Savant makes a nice little graphic of blocking value for the 2018-2023 seasons, and yeah, this is ugly:

Put those three skills together, and Sánchez has undoubtedly been a below-average defensive catcher. The book on him is that he makes up for it with his bat, which is otherworldly for a backstop. He socked 19 dingers in only 267 plate appearances in 2023, and since debuting in 2016, his rate of homers per plate appearance is 11th in all of baseball, in a virtual dead heat with Shohei Ohtani. He’s not hitting cheapies, either; there’s some Joey Gallo in Sánchez’s game, and Gallo coincidentally has a nearly identical wRC+ in that time span.

Joey Gallo as a so-so defensive catcher sounds awesome, and if that’s all the Brewers are getting, I think they’d still be reasonably happy. Our projections think he’ll be a little worse than that, but I’m skeptical; I think his form in San Diego is fairly repeatable, and he didn’t benefit from incredible luck or anything like that. The point is, if he ends up more or less hitting projections, he’ll be a meaningful upgrade over Haase at a reasonable rate. That’s the kind of deal that a lot of teams would be happy to make, particularly given how hard offense has been to come by in the free agency market this year.

It could be more exciting than that, though, because these are the Brewers we’re talking about. They turn indifferent receivers into defensive stalwarts on a yearly basis. “Run prevention coordinator” Walker McKinven is noted for how well he teaches receiving. Manager Pat Murphy was a good defensive catcher and knows a thing or two about the job. Here’s a look at some of their handiwork:

That’s an average gain of nearly 10 runs of receiving value, just from going to the Brewers. And it really is going to the Brewers that seems to do it; Grandal was already an excellent receiver, but Narváez, Contreras, and Caratini all got much better immediately after joining the team. Piña got much better as time wore on, too.

If Sánchez’s receiving improves, he’s going to be a plus defensively as well as an average bat. Catchers like that are all but impossible to find – again, Sánchez himself was the best catcher on the market this year. It’s tough going out there for teams looking for a do-it-all backstop. They mostly don’t hit free agency, because teams who have a chance to retain them trip all over themselves to do so.

If you looked at the Brewers’ roster before the Sánchez signing, you wouldn’t find a lot of offense, but you also wouldn’t find a lot of easy upgrades. They’ve mostly gotten the people they want; any infielder they added would be displacing either a returning contributor (Brice Turang and Willy Adames) or someone they traded for this offseason. The outfield is crowded already. There weren’t a lot of places to improve the team offensively.

On the pitching side, there’s plenty of room for improvement, but pitching is expensive. The Brewers are all about scrimping and saving. Their big pitching signing of the offseason was Wade Miley – unless it was Joe Ross – unless it was Jakob Junis. It’s tough to get good pitching for cheap, because everyone needs it. In other words, the Brewers were in an awkward spot of needing to improve in 2024 without any obvious way of doing so.

By signing Sánchez, I think they’ve solved that puzzle. I think they’ll get more than a win’s worth of improvement out of him between improved backup catcher production and the extra time it lets them spend with all their best hitters in the lineup thanks to the DH slot. It’s not so much that he’s a slam dunk All Star – you heard it here first, I don’t think Sánchez will be an All Star this year – but the Brewers had painted themselves into a corner by trading Corbin Burnes. Now they’re out of the corner, and in a division with four so-so teams slugging it out for the crown, these little edges matter. This feels like a good deal for Milwaukee, and if Sánchez does indeed get coated with some Brewers catching magic dust, it’ll be a great deal for him too: Just imagine the demand for him in free agency a year from now if he repeats his offensive season and also learns a bit of defense.