With Four Catchers Off the Board, Cubs Have Three Choices Left for Position This Offseason

[Matthew Trueblood]

Two segments of the free-agent market have moved quickly this MLB offseason: that for starting pitchers, and that for catchers. The Cubs have made additions to each group, but are they still looking to make a bigger backstop splash?

Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images

Many Cubs fans had set their sights on catchers Danny Jansen or Kyle Higashioka this winter. Those fans were bitterly disappointed this week, when the Rangers signed Higashioka to a two-year deal and Jansen secured $8.5 million from the Rays on a one-year pact. Nowhere on most fans' radars was Gary Sánchez, but he could also have been a fit, so when he agreed to a one-year deal at the same value as Jansen's on Saturday night, it narrowed the path to upgrading behind the plate even further.

The Cubs, of course, have the temporary and minor luxury of getting to decide just how badly they want that kind of upgrade. They also missed out on Travis d'Arnaud, after the erstwhile Atlanta catcher had his team option declined and ended up signing for two years with the Angels. On that very occasion, though, they were able to scoop up Angels castoff Matt Thaiss, a reclamation project and a refugee from one of the league's worst player-development and -instruction outfits. Thaiss, who could improve rapidly with some tweaks to his pitch framing, signed a split contract and is out of options. That means that the Cubs can feel fairly confident about retaining him even if they initially have to pass him through waivers at the end of spring training, because unless another team wants to claim him and make him their backup, he'll be more incentivized to stick around and keep the pay associated with the minor-league aspect of his deal.

The first option facing the team, then, is simply to keep Thaiss, wait for Moises Ballesteros, and hope the combination of those two is sufficient support for what they hope will be a full season of the much-improved Miguel Amaya they saw in the second half of 2024. That's appealing, because from here, it's functionally free. The team can spend all of its available resources of money and young, expendable talent elsewhere on their roster. The downside is equally obvious: Thaiss (bat) and Ballesteros (glove) face major questions about their viability as even complementary MLB catchers. Most teams are struggling to find catching right now, but that doesn't mean any team should be complacent with one not-even-proven backstop atop their depth chart.

When it comes to realistic external options, though, there are just two apparent remaining ones. The first is Twins catcher Christian Vázquez, whom I first flagged as a potential target in this trade speculation piece two months ago. Vázquez is the defensive specialist—not only among the players remaining available this winter, but arguably, among all of those who ever were or looked poised to be so. Rank all 56 catchers who were behind the plate for at least 300 innings last year, and Vázquez came in ninth in 2024 in Defensive Runs Prevented, according to Baseball Prospectus. He's one of the game's best pitch framers, and is deeply respected as a manager of the pitching staff and a partner in their daily preparation. Two winters ago, the Cubs vied to sign Vázquez, but the Twins were willing to offer a third guaranteed year, so they landed Vázquez. After consecutive poor seasons at the plate, his trade value is in the red, but that only means that the Cubs could acquire him for almost no talent and still pay him less than the Rays and Orioles will pay Jansen and Sánchez, respectively.

The final option, though, is the most intriguing. Carson Kelly, the former Cardinals farmhand and potential Yadier Molina successor, was instead traded to Arizona in the Paul Goldschmidt trade several years ago. He's bounced around even more since then, including splitting 2024 between the Tigers and the Rangers, but Kelly, 30, had a very strong campaign in 2024. In fact, he's probably the player more fans tended to hope Jansen or Higashioka could be.

Player	Framing Runs	Blocking Runs	Throwing Runs	Batting Runs	Total
M. Amaya	-2.7	1.5	-1.5	-4.4	-7.1
D. Jansen	-1.9	1	-1	2.1	0.2
C. Kelly	-0.8	0.6	2	2.3	4.1
C. Vázquez	7.2	0.5	-0.2	-10.4	-2.9
K. Higashioka	4.3	-0.9	-0.4	0.5	3.5

If the Cubs believe in the swing transformation and the defensive improvements Amaya made in the second half of 2024, they might believe him to be the best of this set of players. Any way you slice the data, though, Kelly looks like one of the best. He's only a few months older than Jansen, and each of them are at a few years younger than Vázquez or Higashioka. Kelly might be looking for a multi-year deal, whereas Jansen chose a one-year prove-it opportunity over the chance of such a payday, but there are good reasons to prefer Kelly.

His arm really stands out; Kelly is the only player in this set who was better than average at slowing the running game. (Thaiss, for what it's worth, was one of the very worst catchers in baseball at that this year.) He did it with just an average exchange time—that is, he got rid of the ball after catching it in only a roughly average fraction of a second. He also had a below-average arm, in terms of sheer throwing speed. Yet, he caught four more runners attempting to steal than expected, based on the lead distance and speed of the runners he was throwing against, according to Statcast. How? I'm glad I asked.

Updated Catcher Throwing metrics at Baseball Savant break down the contributions of each aspect of a steal attempt to its success or failure. The runner's speed and position are included. So are the catcher's exchange time and throw strength, plus a teamwork element—things like great (or lousy) tags by the infielder, perhaps; it's really just anything other than the catcher's contributions. But among those contributions, there's one more delineated category: Accuracy. On 12 different throws, Kelly's throw accuracy added at least 20% to the chances of a caught stealing, relative to the expected accuracy from an average catcher. On only five throws did he lose at least that much value with an inaccurate throw, relative to the average expectation.

Here's that trait in action.

Almost any big-league catcher can do that once, but Kelly does it consistently. Let's take a look at another one, and treat ourselves to a Javier Báez tag, for old times' sake.

[DJ Khaled voice] Another one.

Seriously, he makes throws like these a lot. These are two important things:

1. Effective; and
2. Beautiful.

In a world in which runners are freshly emboldened by rules preventing pitchers from messing with their timing as much or throwing over repeatedly to keep them close; the bases into which they're sliding are bigger; and fielders can no longer halfway cheat by cutting off access to the base while they await a throw, there's no surer way to give your team a chance to record outs on steal attempts than dropping the ball into that imaginary bucket, about shin-high and just to the first-base side of the keystone. Kelly does it as well as anyone. It's wonderful that we have stats to capture this now, because accuracy might well turn out to be the biggest key to catcher throwing efficacy, but we don't even need the stats to grasp this. Just watch those videos, and know there are more like them. It's dazzling. Kelly has a near-elite ability to thwart the running game, at a time when that's rising in importance.

Kelly's bat-tracking and batted-ball data were also better than Jansen's this year. Overall, I would rather have him than Jansen, so as long as he remains available, the Cubs have a path to a clear (if, perhaps, costly) upgrade at catcher. They could probably sign Kelly for two years and less than $20 million, but not much less. If they're not willing to spend that much on what would probably be just half a position's worth of playing time—even an obviously vital and fairly scarce one—then they'll have to either accept the all-glove, no-stick option of Vázquez or make do with Thaiss. Each option is viable, but requires a different set of other moves to work. The option that puts the least pressure on other moves would seem to be signing Kelly, but since free agents are just that, Kelly could elect to go elsewhere, as Jansen and others did. That's why having at least snared Thaiss and signed him to a deal that secures him as a floor for the secondary catching job was an important early step this winter.

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[Bertz]

I like Carson Kelly.  I wanted Jansen more, but the difference between the two feels like one of floor vs. ceiling, and given the debacle behind the plate last year I'm not going to cry about raising the floor.

I'll say too that signing Kelly feels like the most urgent item on the to-do list by an order of magnitude.  There's just not any other area of Free Agency shallow enough for it to be one guy or bust, but catcher is there.  I like Kelly, I wouldn't be happy but I could stomach Diaz or Bethancourt, and everyone else is sub-Thaiss level.  And signing a catcher is one of the few things that is completely independent of Cody Bellinger's place on the roster, so it needs to get done here at the meetings IMO.

[LBiittner]

Just going by visuals because I'm too dumb-dumb to explore these statistics. Amaya was a dog turd April may june then improved july august then spiraled back to dog turd statistics immediately once labor day bell rang. How Jeb hasn't made a significant move at catcher before now is criminal negligence