As Patrick so ably reported to you yesterday, the Houston Astros have agreed to a minor league contract with Christian Vazquez with an invitation to Spring Training. Fortunately, he has been working out with team Puerto Rico, so he will not be coming in completely cold and presumably could reasonably build up enough plate appearances to plausibly make the team out of camp. Of course, that brings up the salient question: should he make the team out of camp?
I would point out that Vazquez was likely
always on their radar and Dana Brown simply had a price he wanted to stick to. We don’t know know the exact parameters, but the wild suggestions that he could sign for something like four to six million dollars were always ridiculous on their face. Vazquez was always going to be in the Jonah Heim, Gary Sanchez, and Elias Diaz neighborhood of things.
Some of you will remember that we profiled Vazquez with the catchers in our current series. However, I looked at Cesar Salazar based on his big league numbers and we didn’t look at Carlos Perez at all. In this edition, we will look at Vazquez’s big league numbers since 2023 and compare them with the AAA numbers for both Perez and Salazar. I should note that the 2023 numbers for Perez came in Oakland which was nominally a big league team.
This is just a gentle reminder that we are looking at five different statistics on offense. That includes the chase rate, hard hit rate, BABIP, contact rate, and home runs per flyball. We have been looking at these fairly consistently, but I will include the league norms for those metrics below in case you are joining us for the first time.
- Chase rate: 30% league average
- Hard hit rate: 35% league average
- BABIP: .300 league average
- Contact: 75 percent league average
- HR/FB: 10 percent league average
Carlos Perez
There is one significant difference between Perez and the other two. The home run rates are significantly higher and he did club 27 home runs two seasons in a row at the AAA level. He has hit 20 or more home runs several times since the 2021 season in the minors. Even the 2023 rate (which came in Oakland) is significantly better than what the other two have done. So, if we assume he plays 40 games, how many extra dingers does this end up translating into?
Catcher BABIP is an interesting conversation itself. If the league average is ,300 then that would include all positions and some where the BABIP is probably naturally above .300. Catchers aren’t beating out infield singles as a general rule, so it makes perfect sense for their BABIP to dip to the .270 or .280 range naturally. Otherwise, Perez looks like an average big league hitter across the board. Maybe that’s not exciting, but getting average major league hitters on your bench can be exciting.
On the other hand, Perez has spent parts of five seasons in the big leagues as a catcher. He was significantly above average defensively back in 2015. Unfortunately, he was below average in 2018 and 2023 (his last two stints) according to both defensive runs saved and fielding run value. A vote for Perez is a vote for the bat. Given what the other two have going on, that might not be the craziest bet.
Cesar Salazar
It’s hard not to like a guy like Salazar. He probably gets about as much out of what he has as anyone has any right to do. When you consider the fact that there are 780 big league players we could then take that number and multiply by five to get the total number of players in affiliated baseball. Then, you take that number and probably multiple it two or three times to include Japan, Korea, Mexico, Australia, and Cuba. Then, you have the independent leagues. It would probably be fair to guess that there are around five or six thousands players being paid to play baseball around the world. That might be a conservative estimate.
Maybe Salazar is one of the top 1000 players in the world. That’s actually an accomplishment even if he never sticks in the big leagues. He doesn’t chase. He doesn’t swing and miss often. He just doesn’t hit the ball hard and he doesn’t have power. If you add in the fact that he does not have speed as a catcher then you see what we are up against. Soft contact from slow runners is not a recipe for a good BABIP. Add in very little extra base power and I’m not sure where the offense is going to come from.
He has been more or less a neutral defender at the big league level in minimal innings, but comes with a reputation of a good receiver. You did have the dust up with Framber Valdez last season, so there is some question over whether he has the cache to work with veteran pitchers. Simply put, you have to be over the moon about his defense in order to accept the lack of offensive production.
Christian Vazquez
I’m probably repeating myself from the last time I profiled Vazquez, but the ultimate question is whether he bounces back to the aggregate or continues to rot. In general, I like the choices he seems to have made to react to his aging. He swings at fewer balls outside the zone and makes more contact. I have to believe that is a conscious choice and one that could mask some of the decline in hard hit ball rate and home run rate.
The good news is that even with the low hard hit rate, that BABIP was ridiculously low last season. I think the aggregate in BABIP is actually a decent target and give him 35 points on his batting average and he would have hit about .225. No one would confuse that with Josh Gibson, Johnny Bench, or even Joe Mauer, but for a backup catcher that also produced good fielding numbers, that would be more than reasonable.
The question at backup catcher wss never about whether either Perez or Vazquez (or anyone else) was better than Salazar. That was likely always a given. The question was always how much more you would have to pay for marginal improvement? I wrote an earlier piece about preferring to stand pat because the costs being thrown around sounded ridiculous. A Christian Vazquez at or near veteran minimum seems like a reasonable cost to pay for a marginal upgrade. Assuming he is in shape, he would seem to be the preferred choice, but we will have to see how it all plays out.
