The backup catcher is often one of the most easy-to-like players on a baseball team. Little is expected of him except for a basic kind of “don’t fail in obvious ways” defensive competence, and some positive hitting every now and again. The Orioles signed Gary Sánchez to inhabit the backup catcher role for the 2025 season. He did not get to experience a season as one of fans most-liked players on the team.
In the 2023 and 2024 seasons, the Orioles had a player who was pretty much the platonic ideal
of a veteran backup catcher: James McCann. He was capable defensively and he hit just enough that you got a little bonus from him sometimes. The guy was also tough as nails, perhaps most famously with the Orioles playing through the first game of a doubleheader after getting hit in the face by a pitch. McCann finished the game with cotton wadded up both of his nostrils and one eye swollen halfway shut, all to make sure that Adley Rutschman didn’t have to catch both games of the doubleheader. I still can’t believe he did that.
It remains strange that the Orioles did not just go ahead and bring McCann back. There’s a vague, not strongly reported notion that he was seeking a multi-year deal. I don’t know about that. What I do know is that he had to settle for a minor league contract with the Braves in late March, from which he was able to jump ship to the then-contending Diamondbacks when a major league job opened up there towards the end of June. I have to imagine that if McCann had been willing to sign for like, one year and $4 million in December, the Orioles would have had him back.
Whatever was going on with what McCann wanted, the Orioles moved on quickly. Sánchez was signed on December 10, fairly early in the offseason. This was not a “go cheap” signing, as the O’s handed the former Yankee top prospect an $8.5 million deal for this season. That’s a lot of money for a backup catcher. It suggested to me at the time, and I still believe, that the intention was to have Sánchez shouldering a big chunk of the catching burden, maybe in the range of 60-70 games started at the position, with some designated hitter duty in his future as well.
Two things knocked this plan off course. One is that by the end of April, Sánchez was batting a whopping .100/.200/.100 with 13 games played. It’s not a great way to make a first impression. The other is that he got hurt and missed about a month and a half. Possibly Sánchez was dealing with the wrist soreness even as the season began, which is what led to him hitting so poorly. Either way, Sánchez going on the injured list started the Orioles down the chaotic path of using seven catchers, at one point using fifth- and sixth-string guys who weren’t even in the organization prior to the start of June.
Believe it or not, by season’s end, Sánchez had played his way to roughly average hitting. That’s because when he did return from his wrist soreness in mid-June, Sánchez went bonkers for the remainder of the month, OPSing over 1.000 for 13 games. For that brief candle, you could see something like sense in Mike Elias’s design here. In this period, Rutschman also got hurt, so Sánchez was actually the primary catcher towards the back end of that hot streak. There were positives, overall, in Sánchez’s batted ball data, namely that he was doing a good job of hitting it hard.
This did not last either. Sánchez hurt his knee, went on the injured list in early July, and ultimately never played from then to the end of the season. To be fair somewhat to Sánchez, there was some squirrely-seeming behavior by the Orioles in keeping him on the IL all the way to season’s end. After Samuel Basallo was promoted in mid-August and with Alex Jackson looking intriguing enough to be too good to just toss aside for nothing, the Orioles were in no rush to bring Sánchez back into that mix and so they just… didn’t.
In an entirely different set of circumstances, this could have been a decent enough signing. If Elias had assessed that there was a need for righty-batting balance on his roster, signing a player like Sánchez who’d hit them well in his career – and in the 2024 season – made sense.
Elias was correct that there was a weakness to address against lefties with the 2025 Orioles! As a whole, the team ended up OPSing just .661 against southpaws. Two of the righties Elias signed to address this – Sánchez and Tyler O’Neill – were hurt a lot, and bad against lefties when they played. That’s the Elias 2024-2025 offseason in a nutshell. Frequently hurt, frequently bad, or both. The only exception to this ended up being Ramón Laureano.
Sánchez was certainly not likely to inhabit the defense-first backup catcher mold, and sure enough, he didn’t. When he did play, he graded particularly badly at blocking errant pitches, he did not control the running game, and he was not any good at framing pitches to steal strikes. The bat was supposed to balance it out. Maybe if he’d been healthy, it would have.
The choice to sign Sánchez rather than some other backup catcher doesn’t rank as one of the biggest problems that faced the Orioles this year, but there is no question it was one of their problems all the same. At least, knock on wood, there should not be any need to find the perfect backup catcher on the free agent market this coming offseason.
Tomorrow: Heston Kjerstad
