Yasmani Grandal, Catcher You Want To Have

When the Toronto Blue Jays made their somewhat surprising move to add Russell Martin, they didn’t just weaken the free-agent catching market. They decimated it. Sure, you could probably piece together a decent backup from guys like Geovany Soto, Nick Hundley or David Ross, but there’s no one close to being a full-time starter. Of the remaining free agents, there’s not a single one who’s even projected to manage even a lowly .300 OBP in 2015, according to Steamer projections.

That’s a considerable problem for some of the other teams that were expected to be heavily interested in Martin, like the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers, because their paths forward are less clear now. In Los Angeles, A.J. Ellis is better than his .191 batting average would indicate, but he’s also nearly 34 and coming off several serious leg injuries. The Cubs might need to stick with Welington Castillo, who’s coming off a poor season. The Pirates will replace Martin with a trio of catchers more suited to be backups; the current Rangers starter is 30-year-old Robinson Chirinos, who has less than a full season of major league play under his belt.

It’s not a good time to be looking for a catcher, is the point, and the main trade options being talked about come with questions of their own. (Arizona’s Miguel Montero has had two consecutive bad years and is still owed $40 million; Houston’s Jason Castro followed up a breakout 2013 with an atrocious 2014; Atlanta’s Evan Gattis has excellent raw power but can’t really catch.)

The flip side, of course, is that if you have catching depth, you’re in a favorable position. If you need a catcher, you want to call the San Diego Padres, and you want to ask for Yasmani Grandal.

Grandal only just turned 26 years old earlier this month, yet his career has already had some pretty tumultuous ups and downs. He was the No. 12 overall pick by the Reds in the 2010 draft and was a key part of the 2011 trade that sent Mat Latos to Cincinnati, but he also missed 50 games in 2013 due to a PED suspension and blew out his right knee barely a month after being reinstated. He rushed back to be ready for Opening Day 2014, but he played infrequently as part of a three-headed catching situation with Hundley and Rene Rivera. Though Hundley was eventually traded to Baltimore, Grandal’s catching time didn’t increase all that much, because he became the semi-regular first baseman for most of the final third of the year because of Yonder Alonso’s injury problems.

If you like batting average, then Grandal has been pretty underwhelming, hitting only .225 this year and .215 last year. Of course, we’re smarter than to rely on a number that ignores walks and treats home runs and singles equally, and that low average hides the truth about Grandal, which is that he’s been an above-average hitter. By wRC+, which accounts not only for the low offensive environment around the game but particularly of San Diego’s home field, Grandal’s 111 mark means he was 11 percent better than a league-average hitter. Since his 2012 debut, 37 catchers have had at least 700 plate appearances, and Grandal’s 119 mark is the seventh-best in baseball — a ranking that looks even more impressive when you remember that two of the men above him (Joe Mauer and Carlos Santana) aren’t really catchers any longer.

The batting average doesn’t reflect that because Grandal is a poor baserunner who never beats out hits — he is a catcher coming off a knee injury, after all — and struck out his fair share this year, but he makes up for that with patience and power. His 13.1 percent walk rate this year, for example, was well above the nonpitcher MLB average of 7.8. More impressively, his average fly ball batted ball distance of 304.13 feet was not only the eighth-best in all of baseball, it was the best by any non-righty hitter. Of his team-leading 15 homers, Hit Tracker measured that 14 of them would have left the yard in at least 80 percent of parks.

On defense, we know that there’s limitations in how we can measure catchers, so the data on Grandal is somewhat uneven. Empirically, the fact that Grandal started only 67 games behind the plate while Rivera — a career journeyman on his sixth organization, not including a 2010 stint in independent ball — became the regular starter and personal catcher to Andrew Cashner and Tyson Ross would seem to be a red flag.

Of course, there’s context to that. Grandal’s rushed return from the knee injury may have caused the Padres to hesitate in catching him too often, and Alonso’s spotty availability opened a need at first. Rivera, one of the most-respected defensive catchers in the game, had a breakout season himself by putting up a 114 wRC+ to go with excellent pitch-framing numbers.

When Grandal did get behind the plate, however, he rated as an above-average pitch framer, as well. While single-year numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, StatCorner ranked him as being better than Martin, who got his big deal in no small part because of his skill in framing. Baseball Prospectus didn’t quite go that far, but it still considered him as the 13th-best catcher overall. One might also assume that with another year away from the knee injury, Grandal’s ability to catch more often might improve, as well.

If we’ve sufficiently established that Grandal is an intriguing young player at a thin position with youth on his side, then what we haven’t done is answer the most important question of all: Why would a Padres team fresh off one of the most inept offensive performances in team history consider moving him?

San Diego could very well keep him and split his time between catcher and first to keep the trio of Alonso, Grandal and Rivera healthy, but that might not be the most ideal usage of their assets. The switch-hitting Grandal is much more effective from the left side of the plate, making a platoon with the lefty Alonso an awkward fit, and while Rivera may not be likely to repeat his breakout 2014, his defense alone will keep him in the lineup. Furthermore, prospect Austin Hedges, a consensus top prospect considered among the premier defensive backstops in the minors, may only be about a year away from being ready.

Simply put, new general manager A.J. Preller has a ton of holes to fix on this team, with potentially the entire infield up in the air depending on how you feel about the ability of second baseman Jedd Gyorko to bounce back from an awful season or shortstop Everth Cabrera’s continued off-field problems. Other than Hedges, most of the better offensive talent in the system is several years away, and the Padres aren’t generally a landing spot for big-ticket free agents. Trading Grandal wouldn’t be without risk, but catcher is one of the few San Diego strengths, and the market is ripe to play interested teams off one another.