Woe Be to the Catcherless

You’ve already heard it from me. You’ve already heard it from a lot of people. You’re going to keep hearing it all offseason. This is a tough year for teams that want to add offensive firepower in free agency. Unless you’re really into Cody Bellinger or Matt Chapman, it’s Shohei Ohtani or bust, and according to my math, there are 30 teams and only one Ohtani.

That’s a bleak reality, but it paints with too broad of a brush. That description makes it sound like every team who needs a hitter to play anywhere is in equally dire straits. That’s not true, though. If you’re looking for a third baseman or a righty power bat with questionable defensive value, you have options. If you want to sign an intriguing young corner outfielder who might pay dividends a few years down the road, Jung-hoo Lee is a solid choice. But if you’re looking for a catcher – sorry, pal, nothing to see here.

Every year is a bad year for free agent catchers. In the last five years, three catchers have hit the open market after a 3-plus WAR season or its 2020 equivalent: J.T. Realmuto, James McCann, and Willson Contreras. Realmuto was a perennial All-Star when he re-upped with the Phillies, and Contreras has been a valuable offensive contributor for quite some time, but McCann only barely qualifies; he put together a nice season over 111 plate appearances in 2020. If you’re looking for a star catcher, free agency is the wrong place to set your sights.

This year is much worse than that, though. Forget three-win catchers; there are no two-win catchers available. Mitch Garver racked up 2.1 WAR, but he’s a DH/catcher hybrid who will likely catch less than half the time. Gary Sánchez got DFA’ed by seemingly half the teams in baseball last year, and he’s comfortably the best full-time option behind the plate. Victor Caratini is the next-best option, and he’s a career backup who has crossed the 300 plate appearance threshold exactly once in his career – he was half a win below replacement level that year, for what it’s worth.

Just so we’re clear, those are the good options. Things get grim after that. Austin Hedges? A 33-year-old Tom Murphy, who has played 60 games in the past two seasons combined? Mike Zunino, who got DFA’ed by the notoriously spendthrift Guardians last year? There’s nothing approaching a solid regular in that group.

Who’s most affected by this shortfall? The contenders and would-be contenders that didn’t get much out of their catchers this year. The Rays, for example, are relying on a combination of René Pinto and Alex Jackson. They’re no strangers to short-term catcher upgrades, but this offseason doesn’t give them any options. The Marlins would no doubt like to back up their 2023 playoff run by contending in 2024, but their duo of Nick Fortes and Jacob Stallings doesn’t inspire confidence. They’re stuck with it, though, because swapping in Sánchez for Fortes doesn’t change much of anything.

I count seven teams with playoff aspirations who have questionable catching plans for next year. There are the aforementioned Rays and Marlins, but the party doesn’t stop there. The Tigers are relying pretty heavily on Jake Rogers, and particularly on his newfound receiving skills, but I’m skeptical that he’ll repeat his career year, and projection systems are skeptical about his offense. The Red Sox are in a similar situation; Connor Wong did a great job controlling the running game, but his offense and receiving lagged. You’d have to have rose colored glasses to think he’s the primary catcher of the future there.

The Reds theoretically have Tyler Stephenson as an entrenched starter, but he struggled both offensively and defensively in 2023. He played a lot of DH to mitigate his defensive shortcomings, but that just means some other catcher will have to cover more plate appearances. The Cubs are a bit better off than that – Yan Gomes and Miguel Amaya are each as good as any of the options available in free agency – but Steamer projects them for the 23rd-most catching WAR.

That leaves perhaps the team that could most use some juice from catcher: the Padres. Sánchez gave them a lift last year, but they non-tendered Austin Nola on Friday and Luis Campusano might be more DH than backstop. That’s fine, because they could use a DH who catches three games a week, but it’s no surprise that the team that can’t stop signing shortstops could really use a playmaker behind the plate to round out their offense. We already know they’re set to trade players to reduce salary, so removing a star from the mix will only exacerbate their need for contributions elsewhere.

Those seven teams could all choose to focus elsewhere on their roster for offseason improvements. But it’s generally easiest to improve where you’re already weak, and that simply isn’t an option this year. The tried and true plan of maximizing the talent you have in your farm system and then supplementing it in free agency doesn’t work when there aren’t any free agents to cover your blind spots.

In theory, at least, another way out of this is via trade. Markets are efficient; teams with too many catchers can always make trades with catcher-needy teams. You could imagine a team with money to burn and a desire to fix the catching position signing an extra starter in free agency, then trading an existing cost-controlled starter for catching help. But “teams with too many catchers” are about as common as hippogriffs; it’s just not a real phenomenon.

The Blue Jays traded their way out of a catching surplus. The Dodgers have Diego Cartaya waiting in Triple-A, but they’re certainly not going to trade Will Smith to unblock his playing time. The Cardinals might make Iván Herrera available – he’s out of minor league options, and he’s blocked by Contreras – but they might just as easily decide to keep Herrera and give Contreras more rest days at DH.

The best bet for these seven catching-needy teams is to find a non-contending team willing to trade a serviceable major league catcher in exchange for some reasonable package of prospects. Just one problem: that team doesn’t really exist. The top 15 teams in terms of Steamer projections for catching WAR next year are all playoff teams with the exception of the Royals, and the Royals only appear on that list because of MJ Melendez, who is on the catcher depth chart despite being an outfielder/DH who only makes occasional cameos behind the plate. Maybe the Royals would trade Salvador Perez, but he’s looking fairly rough behind the plate these days; he might be more of a DH at this point. They might trade Freddy Fermin, but he’s right in line with what the teams we’re considering already have available.

That leaves exactly one possibility for our septet: convince the Angels to trade Logan O’Hoppe. The Angels almost assuredly don’t want to trade O’Hoppe. At only 23, he’s one of their youngest players and also one of their best. They haven’t pivoted fully to a rebuild – Mike Trout is still there, after all – but they’re certainly leaning that way. Regardless, they certainly put a high value on youth. O’Hoppe manages to fit into both any current dreams of relevance and their plans to fix things in the future; he won’t be available for a song. And it goes even deeper than that; the Angels traded Edgar Quero, their top catching prospect, in their last-gasp pursuit of the playoffs this year. That leaves them thin at catcher, and it also puts pressure on the Los Angeles front office to get something worthwhile back if they move O’Hoppe.

I don’t think the Marlins, Tigers, or Padres are likely to trade the Angels what they might be looking for in exchange for O’Hoppe. All three of them are the wrong fit. The Marlins have enough holes elsewhere that they might as well focus there first. O’Hoppe isn’t enough of an upgrade on Rogers to justify Detroit going crazy with the limited prospects they might look to trade. The Padres surely can’t afford to dip into their farm system any more; they also need pitching so badly that it will take priority in any trade decisions.

The Cubs have a farm system that’s full to bursting, to the point where they’re probably looking to make trades that consolidate value. But Amaya is part of that farm system, and he’s roughly the same age as O’Hoppe. O’Hoppe will fetch a lot in trade because he looks like he could be a starting catcher for multiple years – but the Cubs already have that. I think they’ll look elsewhere – to DH, center field, or starter – if they decide to trade for a big league roster upgrade.

The Rays might fit the bill, if only they weren’t the Rays. I’m not saying there’s no chance they’ll get involved, but trading for a catcher who has already established himself in the majors doesn’t really fit their normal operating procedure. They’ve historically prioritized pretty much every other position when they make deals; instead, they’ve stocked catcher with waiver claims and minor trade fodder. With other teams, I might call this a coincidence, but Tampa Bay always seems to have a plan, so I think they’re probably out.

That leaves two options for an O’Hoppe trade. I’ll start with the less likely of the two. The Reds would dearly love to upgrade at catcher, and they have approximately eight trillion infield prospects. There’s surely some deal that would look mutually beneficial for both them and the Angels. But that doesn’t really track with the way the Reds have behaved with their recent core. They haven’t traded to accelerate their clock at all. They didn’t add at the trade deadline. They seem to be playing the long game, accumulating small advantages rather than taking swings to change their fate now. Surely there’s some level of either good deal or good player that would change their mind, but I doubt that’s in play here.

That just leaves the Red Sox, and here I feel like the two sides could find common ground. Boston’s farm system is also excellent – they’re currently second in our farm system rankings behind the Cubs. They like Wong’s throwing, but I think they’d prefer to use him as a part-time player rather than the everyday starter. They’re interested in building a sustainable winner, or at least they talk a good game that way; that means O’Hoppe’s youth and contract status will both appeal to them. They’ve been connected to several top free agents this year, but again, none of them are catchers; it feels like a perfect time to build the team by combining spending and trading.

To be sure, they did just draft a catcher, Kyle Teel, in the first round. But catching prospects are notoriously volatile, and they often take a long time coming through the system. You can’t treat a first-round pick like a surefire future part of your roster; it would be completely reasonable to add O’Hoppe and keep Teel, or to use them in tandem at some point in the future.

There’s certainly no guarantee that O’Hoppe is available. There’s no guarantee that the Red Sox would be interested even if he were, or that the two teams would agree on a valuation. But there’s one thing I’m certain of: unless you’re trading for him, there’s probably no help at catcher coming for your team this winter.