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This past season, Luis Arraez became the first Minnesota Twin to claim a batting title since Joe Mauer last did it in 2009. That was, of course, an MVP season for Mauer, and it marked his third time in four years leading the American League in batting average.
As we all know, Mauer was something of a unicorn: the third backstop ever to become a batting champ, and the first to do it in the AL. Needless to say, it has been a historical rarity, but the shifting tides of the game make me wonder if we'll ever see it happen again.
In 2009, Mauer was one of nine catchers to qualify for the batting title. Same thing in 2008, and 2006, when he won his other two crowns. Compare that to five catchers who qualified this year, and just two (!) in 2021.
Around the major leagues, clubs have progressively altered the way they manage catchers, opting in most cases to spread out the workload rather than placing the full burden on one player – a movement the Twins have fully embraced.
Sure, there are still some throwbacks out there like Sean Murphy and J.T. Realmuto, but they're few and far between, and none of them are hitting like prime Joe Mauer.
The current landscape really puts into perspective how incredible Mauer was. We're less than a decade removed from a stretch where he bore the rigors of catching over 10 years (albeit with some injury issues mixed in) and slashed .323/.405/.469. He made enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title in seven of those campaigns.
It's a stretch of performance that, in my opinion, should (and will) get him into the Hall of Fame.
But enough reminiscing about the past. Let's turn the clock forward to present day. The Twins now find themselves with a need at catcher, and it's one they could seek to address in a profound way.
The big name on this year's offseason class, as covered in our extensive Offseason Handbook chapter on the subject, is Willson Contreras.
One of the better free agent catchers to hit free agency in some time, Contreras received his third All-Star nod in 2022 while slashing .243/.349/.466 for the Cubs. His .815 OPS would've ranked third among all Twins, behind only Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton.
Contreras is a highly-regarded star player and easily the pinnacle of the catching market. He's in his prime and coming off a career year. It'll take a very big contract to land him – I guessed 5/100 as a starting point in the Handbook – and that raises some challenging questions about the logic of spending so much on what is, essentially, a part-time player.
He's a perfect example of the diminishing durability benchmark for the modern catcher. Despite avoiding major injuries, and producing at an elite rate when on the field, Contreras has qualified for a batting title only once (sans-2020) since debuting back in 2016. That was aback in 2018, when he was 26 and made 544 plate appearances over 138 games (a typical, if not light, workload for a Mauer campaign).
Twenty million dollars is a lot of money in annual salary commitment for a team like the Twins. They've got to be smart in how they use it. Allocating such a big share to a player who has played 120 games per year on average, and would probably be in line for a timeshare of sorts here, if the Twins adhere to their existing philosophy ... it could be tough to stomach. And that's beyond all the other built-in risk with a player like Contreras who might have to move off catcher in the coming years anyway.
As the mechanisms of Major League Baseball shift, we'll start seeing financial implications play out. With the expectation for a starting pitcher's workload being more in the 150-170 range as compared to the 180-210 range of previous eras, teams will start scaling back the relative amount they're willing to invest in starters (if they haven't already). We'll very likely see a similar effect in the catching market, and Contreras will be a fascinating example to follow.
The Twins are among the few franchises to hand out a true mega-deal to a catcher, having signed Mauer for $184 million in 2010. They did so with the belief that he'd continue, at least for a while, to catch 900-1,000 innings per season. It's hard to realistically expect the same from someone like Contreras, who himself will be in the market for a mega-deal.
Circling back to the original question posed in this article, the heart of the matter is not so much asking whether a catcher will win a batting title ... but whether it makes sense to invest heavy resources into players who might never qualify for one.
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