After the 19 infielders covered in the last preview, we take a look at the catching situation, which has a guaranteed starter who may be looking over his shoulder soon. We also have a competition for the backup spot, as well as a few minor leaguers who may or may not turn out to be something in the future.
Most importantly, we have a contact-hitting human fire hydrant who became everybody’s favourite player in the span of nine games. Don’t deny it, you know and I know that’s the truth.
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Now on with it!
Part 1: The Bullpen
Part 2: The Outfield
Part 3: The Infield
GUARANTEED STARTING CATCHER
Danny Jansen, options (pictured)
Maybe it’s just me, but I think sole postseason hero Danny Jansen has had a really weird major league career. In his 181 games and 626 plate appearances since being called up in 2018, Jansen has slashed .208/.297/.370 with a 79 wRC+. Very bad. And yet, he’s also contributed 2.6 fWAR. Why is that?
Before we get to his defence, the main contributor to his value, let’s take a look at his offensive metrics. Throw those dogshit stats I mentioned earlier in the trash and take a gander at his 2020 Statcast metrics.
Soooo…. Not great. But! Check out that xBA (Expected Batting Average). Jansen had an xBA of .244 in 2020 (compared to a .183 batting average) and a .241 for his career. Again, not good per se, but there’s reason to believe that he’s making better contact than his crappy average would indicate. He also walks a ton, his 14.3% walk rate in 2020 ranking 28th among all players with at least 140 plate appearances. What this would seem to indicate is that, hopefully, Jansen is due for a breakout of sorts. Projection systems Steamer and ZiPS both predict that Jansen finishes 2021 with a wRC+ over 90, which the Jays would take from their number nine hitter in a heartbeat, I would imagine.
Despite a down year in 2020, Jansen has provided a generally fine glove. His Defensive Runs Saved sits at a solid +5. He’s also a good, if unspectacular framer, earning a 9.3 FRM grade from Fangraphs, and +4 Runs Extra Strikes from Statcast. His one weakness appears to be in containing the running game. Statcast doesn’t have pop time data for 2020, but in both 2018 and 2019, he graded out quite poorly. Per Fielding Bible, his career rSB (Stolen Base Runs Saved Above Average) is actually positive at +2, but that may be less a case of Jansen’s arm preventing stolen bases, but his pitcher’s arms.
Despite bad luck and some legitimate shortcomings, Jansen will easily be Toronto’s catcher come Opening Day. However, Jansen does have a handful of candidates waiting in the wings, should he falter or get hurt.
BACKUP COMPETITION
Reese McGuire, no options (pictured below)
Alejandro Kirk, options (pictured above)
To say that Reese McGuire had a “difficult” 2020 season would be to do a massive disservice to the myriad ways that the English language provides to describe a colossal, unimaginable clusterfuck. In February of that year, McGuire was charged with… Actually, I don’t feel like kicking someone when they’re down, and I mostly just don’t trust myself to not immediately have this post devolve into a series of dick jokes. I’ll just say it involved both McGuire pleading guilty to a misdemeanour, and a shopping centre parking lot in North Florida and I’ll leave it at that.
Poor self-control aside, McGuire was pretty much the uncontested backup catcher for the Blue Jays going into the regular season. A combined 1-for-32 stretch over August and September changed that dynamic quite a bit. On September 5, McGuire was optioned to the Alternate Training Site, his backup catcher job stolen away by Caleb Joseph, and later Alejandro Kirk.
McGuire was never exactly projected as a bat-first catcher, but he had hit the ball pretty well during shorter stints with the Jays in 2018 and 2019, slashing .297/.343/.539 with a 133 wRC+ over 44 games and 138 plate appearances. This was maybe boosted by some good luck, and he’s never hit for any power, but even his expected stats from Baseball Savant are pretty good. And then he hit .073/.073/.146 with a wRC+ of -57. No, the “-” is not a typo. Granted, this was over a mere 19 games and 45 plate appearances, but still! He had a fWAR of -0.7! -0.7! In 19 games! I know I waxed obnoxiously poetic about the descriptive capacity of the English language before, but I’m not sure any language has a word for how bad that is.
In the minors, McGuire’s strong point was his glove, and in a relatively small sample size, his defence at the big league level has been fine, if not amazing. He’s got a good arm behind the plate, and he’s a solid framer. If he can continue to provide average to above-average defence while hitting close to his career numbers, that makes him more than acceptable as the backup to Danny Jansen while a certain fan favourite continues to develop.
However, should McGuire’s offensive shortcomings continue to be overexposed to the grotesque extent that they were in his very short 2020 season, Alejandro Kirk is ready to step in. In Fangraphs’ and Keith Law’s (paywalled) Top 100 Prospect rankings, the 22-year-old Mexican is ranked at 74th and 92nd, respectively. It’s not hard to see why. Even in a tiny sample size of nine games and 25 plate appearances, anybody who watched Kirk play can see that his contact skills are close to Major League-ready, if not there already. He has fine power, but his main selling points are his sheer ability to get hits, and his terrific eye. The power is more of a compliment to that.
As Keith Law puts it:
“His bat-to-ball skill and swing decisions are both excellent, leading to very low strikeout rates, while he’s got explosive acceleration at the plate and showed in the majors he can hit for power the other way and turn on 97 in.”
The bigger questions lie with his defence. Not so much his actual ability to play catcher, though that could use some work. To quote Longenhagen from Fangraphs’ rankings:
“Kirk’s receiving and framing are okay. He catches on one knee even with runners on base, which makes him especially good at framing balls toward the bottom of the zone. He sets his target then lets his glove hand go slack and works back to the ball as it heads home, which magnifies issues with visual presentation to umpires when his pitcher misses his spot.”
So, okay at best, but there’s still room to grow and learn, in theory. The bigger concern is with his frame. Listed at 5’8’’, 265 lbs, descriptions of Kirk’s body type usually relate in some way to bowling balls, fire hydrants, and José Molina at age 40. This is absolutely delightful for slightly ghoulish, Extremely Online Jays fans who meme incessantly about Large Adult Sons (myself included), but it is a legitimate concern for Kirk, especially with how much wear and tear goes into being an everyday catcher. He doesn’t have the height to play first base and has neither the speed nor the athleticism required to play any other position, so if his body doesn’t hold up at the position, his last recourse is to become an everyday designated hitter. That’s not a job you want to condemn a very young player with.
The good news is that Kirk is working hard to address that, as this passage from Arden Zwelling’s fantastic article on Kirk indicates:
“That off-season work — completed at Kirk’s home in Tijuana, Mexico — focused mostly on nutrition and conditioning to address his body composition, an obvious area of needed improvement for a professional athlete who was listed last season at 5-foot-8, 265-pounds. And there’s no doubt he’s worked hard at it. Judging by early spring images, he’s noticeably leaner. Kirk says he isn’t certain exactly how much weight he’s lost — “I know I lost a lot” — only that he feels nimbler behind the plate and like he can turn on inside pitches more effectively.”
The competition for the backup catcher job eventually comes down to two factors. First: How badly do the Jays want to hold onto Reese McGuire? He doesn’t have any option years left, so if McGuire looks absolutely terrible in spring training, does that make the Jays more likely to DFA him to make room on the 40-man for one of Joe Panik, A.J. Cole, Francisco Liriano, Tim Mayza, or Tommy Milone?
Second: What to the Jays feel is the best course of action for Alejandro Kirk’s development? Would they like him to be the everyday starting catcher in Triple-A and continue honing his defence there? Or do they feel that his big-league bat justifies him being the backup to Danny Jansen as well as a pinch-hitter and part-time DH, even if that costs him reps behind the plate? Do they feel that he can still develop as a defensive catcher even if he’s only catching about a quarter of the games? Would keeping him in the minors allow them to employ some “creativity” with his service time? We’re probably not going to have a clear idea until the end of March, but it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
CURSED TO FOURTH-STRING HELL?
Riley Adams, options (pictured)
Often unfortunately forgotten in Blue Jays catcher discourse is 24-year-old Riley Adams, through no real fault of his own. Both Law and Longenhagen rank him as the 20th-best Jays prospect. Not too shabby, but it’s easy to be overshadowed when you’ve been leapfrogged by Alejandro Kirk, the greatest ballplayer of all time.
When we last saw Adams in 2019 (alternate site aside), he was coming off a strong season, slashing .261/.366/.443 in High-Class A and, mostly, in Double-A. He strikes out a bit much, and he’s not the greatest contact hitter, but he does have a fair bit of power. He’s not the best defensive catcher, but his arm is strong enough that he’s passable behind the plate. Law and Longenhagen both project him as a bat-first backup, which certainly isn’t nothing! It’s just hard to see him make much of an impact on the big league team barring injuries to two of Jansen, Kirk, or McGuire. He’ll likely stay at Triple-A until then.
PHILIP CLARKE, DESTROYER OF WORLDS + OTHERS
Philip Clarke, non-roster invite (pictured)
Christopher Bec, non-roster invite
Gabriel Moreno, options
22-year-old Philip Clarke was drafted out of Vanderbilt in 2019. He’s only played 37 professional games, all with the Short-Season Class-A Vancouver Canadians, where he slashed .257/.359/.333. His Isolated Slugging (.076) is somewhat low for someone whose strongest tool is his power, according to Baseball America (paywalled), but on the other hand, his wRC+ was 107, so maybe the Northwest League was a very pitcher-friendly league. Longenhagen mentions him in the “Role-Playing Bats” section of this year’s Jays prospect rankings, where he describes him and 2020 draftee and fellow catching prospect Zach Britton (no, not that one) as potential “third catchers”. The Jays inviting him to big league camp is a somewhat encouraging sign, though. We shall see. For now, he’ll likely start the season in Class A Dunedin.
Christopher Bec is another catcher who’s played in the lower minors whose slash lines don’t jump out at you (.232/.343/.333 in 2019 at High-Class A), but whose wRC+ is above average (108 wRC+), leading me to believe that the lower minors must be a pitcher’s paradise. I wasn’t able to find much information on the 25-year-old beyond the fact that he was familiar with Jays coach Gil Kim from Kim’s days in the Texas Rangers organization, as well as this 2018 piece from C’s Plus Baseball during Bec’s time with the Vancouver Canadians. As it stands, he looks bound for Double-A New Hampshire.
Lastly, it’s easy to forget now that Alejandro Kirk has burst onto the scene, but for a while, Gabriel Moreno was considered by some to be the more promising prospect in the system. That’s not to say that Moreno isn’t still highly regarded, he absolutely is. Both Law and Longenhagen rank him at 7th in the organization. In 2019, he wore out A ball pitching with a 134 wRC+. He combines solid contact with fine power and a low strikeout rate. Longenhagen sums it up as such:
“Even with the little extra juice, Moreno’s offensive profile is still all about hand-eye/bat-to-ball, punching airborne contact to all fields. He does enough of that to project as an everyday catcher.”
The 21-year-old Moreno is still a work in progress defensively but should prove to be adequate if not spectacular fielder according to Longenhagen and Law, both of whom project him to be an everyday catcher. If that holds up, the starting catcher job has the potential to be quite crowded in a few years between Jansen, Kirk, and Moreno. Not that the Jays are complaining.
2021 Jays Spring Training Preview (Part 4: Catchers)
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