News broke late Tuesday afternoon that the Minnesota Twins had reached an agreement with free-agent catcher Jason Castro. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports first broke the story, with Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports nailing down the length and terms.
The traditional fan might look at Castro’s numbers and wonder what the fuss is all about. Castro hit just .210/.307/.377 this past year with only 30 extra-base hits while playing what amounts to basically a full-time slate behind the plate for the Astros (113 games). Yet if recent reports were to be believed, Castro had more than one offer in hand of multiple years before ultimately opting to sign with the Twins.
Castro hit well enough in 2013 — .276/.350/.485 — to be an All-Star but certainly hasn’t hit much in the three years since.
Case in point:
Now before people start thinking about Castro being Kurt Suzuki 2.o, let’s lay some groundwork here.
First of all, Castro has hit in the past. What Suzuki did over his three years with the Twins pretty closely mirrors the rest of his career. Could Castro hit again? It’s not terribly likely, but it’s possible. Getting out of Houston worked wonders for Carlos Gomez, who hit just .221/.277/.342 across parts of two seasons with the Astros before they ceremoniously dumped him. He latched on with the Rangers for 33 games and hit .284/.362/.543 in that stretch. There’s a lot of woulda-coulda-shoulda and small-sample-size judgment in there, but for the sake of argument let’s just say *maybe* there’s something more in there with Castro’s bat. The Rangers made adjustments with Gomez that took fairly quickly, but we still don’t really know who the hitting coach for the Twins will even be yet.
But let’s table that, anyway. Let’s assume Castro doesn’t get any better.
One thing manager Paul Molitor did fairly well was deploy platoons and used players to their strengths this past season. He batted Robbie Grossman higher in the order when he faced lefties and in doing so also shielded Eddie Rosario from more lefties. Grossman mauled left-handed pitchers this season (.994 OPS), and as a result, Molitor played to his strengths by hitting him third at times against southpaws.
Could Molitor do that with Castro? Well, yes. We’ve already displayed that Castro has been more or less Suzuki offensively over the past three years, but as a left-handed hitter there’s always the potential that they’re susceptible to same-sided pitchers. Castro is no exception.
Over the past three seasons combined — easily his worst years as an MLB regular — Castro has hit just .197/.252/.291 against southpaws. That’s a .543 OPS. Against righties, he’s a far more passable .221/.305/.398. That comes out to a .307 wOBA and 95 wRC+. The AL average for catchers this past season was a .296 wOBA, and the previous two years — so we get all three in this stretch by which we’re measuring Castro — were .293 and .300. So basically, the .296 about nails it. If you can have Castro face exclusively or at least mostly righties, he’s a pretty useful bat. That’s the right side of the platoon to spend money on.
Castro also hit righties rather well in isolation this past season. He had an 88 OPS+ and 88 wRC+ this past season with a .301 wOBA. Against righties this season, he hit .231/.331/.426. That’s a 105 OPS+ against righties (and ack, just a 32 against lefties). In Fangraphs numbers, that’s a .329 wOBA and 108 wRC+ against righties.
Again, it would seem fairly easy for Molitor to monitor Castro’s playing time to make him pretty useful as a hitter. It also makes sense to pair him with right-handed hitting John Ryan Murphy, who is a good defender and has a career OPS against lefties 130 points higher than he does against righties. Now, that’s still just a .691 career OPS against lefties, but that’s including his entirely rotten 2016. If he’s truly that bad, he’ll be out of the league within a year or two. But in his MLB career prior to 2016, Murphy had hit lefties at a .266/.314/.456 line. That’s not an ironclad .770 OPS there — it’s only 88 plate appearances — but it at least lays out the potential for this to work as a fairly good platoon.
That’s before getting to defense, where Castro’s value is probably highest. Even stripping out the run values if we aren’t confident with how they’d correlate, both Castro and Murphy project very, very well across multiple outlets. StatCorner has Castro as the No. 5 pitch framer overall, with him at No. 5 in terms of getting additional strike calls and rating favorably in getting pitches out of the zone called as strikes.
Instead of the seemingly easy solution of just finding new pitchers, this shows an element of problem-solving most fans might not think of. It’s easier to replace one defensive catcher than 12 or 13 pitchers.
Baseball Prospectus rates Murphy as the No. 3 catcher across multiple levels in terms of “framing runs.” Again, if we just ignore run values, rating that highly is still a very good thing. One needn’t look far to find Castro, either — he’s seventh. (Mitch Garver was 41st out of 406, by the way)
Basically speaking, the Twins have two of the very best pitch framers behind the plate. Even if they don’t hit, they’ll provide value to a pitching staff that desperately needs to find it. And just for a point of reference, here’s where Suzuki and Juan Centeno rated framing-wise on Baseball Prospectus (out of 406):
- Suzuki – 363rd
- Centeno – 388th
In short, the Twins are making the commitment to their existing starters to get more out of them. Instead of the seemingly easy solution of just finding new pitchers, this shows an element of problem-solving most fans might not think of. It’s easier to replace one defensive catcher than 12 or 13 pitchers.
Don’t be surprised if it pays huge dividends.
