The Nationals’ Catching Quandary

In a World Series that has been notable for its lack of drama — one lead change in five games, and the largest average margin of victory in at least a decade, as Tony Wolfe discoveredKurt Suzuki owns the biggest swing of the bat. The 36-year-old backstop’s seventh-inning home run off Justin Verlander in Game 2, which broke a 2-2 tie, produced the highest WPA of any single play thus far, at least by our measures. Suzuki has been sidelined since the middle of Game 3 due to a right hip flexor strain, and at this writing, it’s not clear yet whether he will be able to help Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals in their quest to stave off elimination.

On Monday, Suzuki participated in on-field workouts and told reporters that he had been potentially available in an emergency during the two games that he missed, and that his condition was improving: “It feels better, obviously. I got some treatment and stuff like that, and it’s progressing… Going to do some stuff today and we’ll figure out more tonight after we get into Houston about tomorrow. Everything is looking good so far.”

Though he was behind the plate for just 17 of Strasburg’s 33 starts during the regular season — a situation that owed something to a bout of right elbow inflammation that limited the catcher to five September starts, only one of which was paired with Strasburg — Suzuki has caught all four of the 31-year-old righty’s postseason turns. The results have been stellar, as Strasburg has delivered a 2.16 ERA with 36 strikeouts and two walks in 25 innings. Suzuki’s contributions with the bat during that run have been few and far between; he went hitless in 16 plate appearances during the Division Series, was 0-for-17 in 21 PA for the postseason by the time he collected a single off Jack Flaherty in NLCS Game 3, and is batting just .100/.229/.200 in 35 PA this October.

Other aches and pains may be contributing to his struggles; he needed x-rays on his left hand as well as concussion tests after being hit on the wrist and then on the noggin by a single Walker Buehler pitch in Game 5 of the Division Series. Nonetheless, he’s done the heavy lifting behind the plate for the Nationals, starting 10 the team’s 15 postseason games and eight of their 10 wins.

As for that homer, it got somewhat buried under the nine-run, late-inning barrage that followed and sent the Nationals to a 12-3 victory, but the hit indeed produced the highest WPA of any single play in this World Series thus far:

Largest Win Probability Added, 2019 World Series
Gm Inn Batter Pitcher Outs Bases Score Play LI WPA
2 t7 Kurt Suzuki Justin Verlander 0 ___ 2-2 Solo HR 1.54 0.192
1 t5 Juan Soto Gerrit Cole 2 1_3 3-2 2-run 2B 1.93 0.190
2 b1 Alex Bregman Stephen Strasburg 2 1__ 0-2 2-run HR 0.81 0.185
5 t2 Yordan Alvarez Joe Ross 1 1__ 0-0 2-run HR 1.22 0.170
1 b8 George Springer Daniel Hudson 1 _2_ 3-5 1-run 2B 2.40 0.168
3 b4 Victor Robles Zack Greinke 1 1__ 0-2 1-run 3B 1.51 0.168
1 b1 Yuli Gurriel Max Scherzer 2 _23 0-0 2-run 2B 1.93 0.164
5 t4 Carlos Correa Joe Ross 2 _2_ 2-0 2-run HR 0.98 0.144
2 t1 Anthony Rendon Justin Verlander 0 12_ 0-0 2-run 2B 1.84 0.142
1 t4 Juan Soto Gerrit Cole 0 ___ 1-2 Solo HR 1.14 0.123
4 t4 Robinson Chirinos Patrick Corbin 0 1__ 2-0 2-run HR 1.13 0.119
2 t7 Howie Kendrick Ryan Pressly 2 123 3-2 1-run 1B 3.06 0.115
4 t1 Alex Bregman Patrick Corbin 1 12_ 0-0 1-run 1B 1.87 0.113
2 t7 Asdrubal Cabrera Ryan Pressly 2 123 4-2 2-run 1B 1.90 0.111
3 t2 Josh Reddick Aníbal Sánchez 1 _2_ 0-0 1-run 1B 1.25 0.098

By our version of WPA, Suzuki’s homer just edges Soto’s Game 1 blast for top honors, though Baseball-Reference puts the latter blow slightly ahead (.19 to .18, with no third decimal published), and The Baseball Gauge (home of the related but separate Championship WPA) has the two plays dead even at .190. The point stands: the hit was a game-changer.

(As an aside that connects to Tony’s point, since the Gauge has a very usable play-by-play search, we can see that by their measures, one has to go back to the earthquake-interrupted 1989 World Series to find a Fall Classic with a lower-impact top play; in that one, A’s catcher Terry Steinbach’s three-run homer off Giants’ pitcher Rick Reuschel in Game 2, which came in the top of the fourth inning and turned a 2-1 lead into a 5-1 one, produced a series-high .187 WPA.)

During the regular season, Suzuki hit .264/.324/.486 with 17 homers in just 309 PA, good for a 105 wRC+. It was his third straight season providing above-average offense, no small feat for a player who owns a career wRC+ of 90 and who managed just one such season out of his first 10 in the majors with the A’s (2007-12, ’13), Nationals (’12-’13), and Twins (’14-16); he spent 2017-18 with the Braves. Suzuki’s defense, however, has been nothing to write home about, to say the least. He threw out just 10% of stolen base attempts (five out of 50), the lowest success rate of anybody with at least 350 innings behind the plate, and by our metrics, he was 5.3 runs below average in pitch framing, long a sore spot on his resumé; his career total of 98.9 runs below average in that department is the fourth-worst for the 12 years that we have data. His -14 Defensive Runs Saved (the framing-inclusive version) tied for the majors’ third-worst among backstops.

For Washington, the alternative behind the plate is Yan Gomes, who during the regular season hit a modest .223/.316/.389 with 12 homers and a 79 wRC+ in 358 PA. He made 90 starts to Suzuki’s 70, fared much better defensively (-0.3 framing runs, 29% caught stealing rate, 5 DRS), and edged Suzuki in overall value, 0.8 WAR to 0.6. In his limited postseason duty, he’s hit .250/.250/.333 (3-for-12 with a double, no walks, and three strikeouts); his highlight reel at the plate consists of a two-run single amid the Nationals’ seven-run first inning in Game 4 of the NLCS, plus a double off Jose Urquidy in Game 4 of the World Series, one of just two hits the rookie allowed and the only National who reached scoring position on his watch.

Based upon Gomes’ regular season body of work and his presumed better health, there’s an argument to be made that the Nationals are better off with him behind the plate for Game 6, though there’s no quantifying any pitcher’s comfort level with a given backstop, and there are other metrics that suggest Suzuki is preferable. Both catchers swing from the right side, but Suzuki was the much more productive hitter against righties (93 to 64 in wRC+), which seems relevant given Houston’s all-righty staff. Likewise, he had a .399 to .309 edge in wOBA against fastballs of at least 95 mph, noteworthy given that Verlander will be starting Game 6; likewise, he had a .299 to .232 edge when it came to sliders (curves were a wash, .234 to .238).

Less persuasive but still in Suzuki’s favor are both Strasburg’s numbers with each catcher behind the plate (2.74 FIP with Suzuki, 3.51 with Gomes) and the two hitters’ histories against Verlander (.356/.370/.467 for Suzuki, with the aforementioned homer and just four strikeouts in 46 PA, compared to .279/.340/.349 with 10 strikeouts in 47 PA for Gomes).

I wouldn’t fill out my lineup card based upon that last sentence given the small samples in play. But taking all of the above together, I think it’s reasonable to start Suzuki if he’s able-bodied and if his presence is favored by Strasburg, and the guess here is that manager Davey Martinez thinks so as well.

[Update: So much for that…]

On the subject of catching, it is perhaps trivial but nonetheless interesting to note that we’ve now gotten home runs from three different catchers in this World Series, with Chirinos (whose Game 4 home run was that contest’s biggest blow, as you can see from the table above) hitting two (the other was off Sanchez in Game 3) and Martín Maldonado one (off Javy Guerra in Game 2). In this homer-saturated year, it might rate an asterisk, but this is the first World Series out of 115 in which more than two catchers have homered, and just the second time that two from the same team have done so, with the Giants’ Tom Haller and Ed Bailey, who both homered against the Yankees in 1962, the only other tandem.

The combined four homers from catchers are the most in a World Series since 1972, when the A’s Gene Tenace hit four en route to MVP honors and the Reds’ Johnny Bench added one. The combined slugging percentage of .667 from Chirinos, Gomes, Maldonado, and Suzuki is the third-highest, trailing only 1976, where the MVP-winning Bench and the Yankees’ Thurman Munson combined to slug .813 (they went 17-for-32 with two homers, a double and a triple), and 1914, when the Miracle Braves’ Hank Gowdy and the A’s Wally Schang slugged .708 (8-for-24 with four doubles, a triple, and a homer).





Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jay_jaffe... and BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.

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MadMonkmember
4 years ago

an interesting dilemma for the Nats. just a note: the Strasburg stats is swapped between walks and strikeouts.