REPORT: Twins To Sign Jason Castro

A one year deal makes absolutely no sense for this or any other team, and a two year deal puts them basically in the same situation after 2018.  

Disagree about the any other team aspect. If you're a contending team looking for catching help, a one or two year deal to Ramos is a great move that makes all the sense in the world. He is only 29 and he had a great year last year. You have a good shot at an elite catcher for a few years and don't have to throw out the huge contract Wieters will get.

That said, agreed about the Twins not going after Ramos. He'd be a heck of a gamble on a long-term deal and in the short-term, he'd likely not move the dial enough to be worth the risk.

Agree on the pitching needed...but we had similar catching prospects (to Castro) in Herrmann and Butera....except they both hit better than Castro over the last three years.

If you're going to look at this through the narrow lens of hitting, Castro is never going to look good. This move is predicated on a view of a catcher as a fielder first and a hitter second. Hermann was a terrible outfielder, let alone catcher. And don't get me started on Butera. Besides a fluke SS year in KC at age 32, his highest OPS is .555 and his defense has never gotten the acclaim that Castro's has. Castro may not be the best player ever but he's not Butera or Hermann. In fact, it's an insult to the word prospect to apply it to Herrmann and Butera.

I think the lens we're looking through this is off. Castro is not the solution to the Twins catching woes but he's a vastly superior bridge to the next long-term Twins catcher than Suzuki was. He's relatively inexpensive ($8 million is not as much in today's MLB as it was) and didn't cost prospects to get. I expect the Twins to continue to target catching prospects in the draft and to hope that Ben R. and Garver continue to develop.

I'm late to the conversation, but are there really people on this site that have a problem with the Pohlads "overspent" by paying $8M/year? I think this is a good move for the team. I like Garver and I hope he succeeds, but we can't count on that happening. If we didn't go out and sign Castro, we'd have to start the year with Murphy and cross our fingers that Garver is ready. Or we offer try to get a catcher on a 1 year deal, but what kind of catcher are the Twins able to lure for a 1 year deal?

I think this is purely about pitch framing.  Castro's catching defense is not impressive, with 12 passed balls and 50 wild pitches last year alone.  For comparison, Suzuki had 12 passed balls *in the past four years* while catching guys like May, Berrios, and even Deduno, and never more than 36 WPs against him in any year while in a Twins uniform.

 

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When it comes to the CS%, people ran on Suzuki a lot more than Castro in 2016, and the 5% difference between the two of them could be statistically attributed to that.  Just a couple more stolen bases and that 5% can vanish (or it can get better.)

You make interesting points overall but I loathe the "a few less X means that difference is negligible" argument when people make it. It's true - but so is the fact that the difference could have been 10% of the couple of stolen bases went the other way. We can't erase statistics without acknowledging they could be wrong the other way.

Also, I have a different interpretation of your PB and WP stats. I don't think we should blame catchers for wild pitches - they are pitches a catcher is not supposed to get. I do think they provide an insight into how wild a pitching staff is - if a catcher has a lot of wild pitches, it likely means he's getting more balls that are tough to handle. This may also help explain some of the discrepancy in passed balls - it seems reasonable to assume that a catcher under duress trying to block wild pitches would be more prone to making some mistakes of his own. His pitchers have wilder stuff and it's harder for him to anticipate where the ball will be.

Not sure that's right but I think it's an argument that we should take a moment to think about what stats might mean before using them for a narrow purpose.

Here is a snippet of a 2014 article from Grantland on the value of pitch framing. I would recommend reading the entire thing and the hyperlinks to other articles inside. Sorry if this is a long post, but I think it is relevant to the discussion. 

http://grantland.com/features/studying-art-pitch-framing-catchers-such-francisco-cervelli-chris-stewart-jose-molina-others/

Fast found that Molina, the best receiver, was worth 35 runs above average per 120 games, and Doumit, the worst, was worth 26 runs below average. After Houston hired Fast, another analyst named Max Marchi succeeded him at Baseball Prospectus2 and brought with him a sophisticated model for framing that accounted for most of the potentially confounding factors: the umpire, the ballpark, the batter, the ball-strike count, and the pitch location and type. According to Marchi, who has consulted for a major league club and whose work has been mentioned by Rays manager Joe Maddon, Molina has saved his teams 111 runs — or, using the standard 10-runs-to-a-win conversion, about 11 wins — because of framing from 2008 to 2013. (The only other catcher with a higher run total over that same time period, Brian McCann at 122, has caught more than twice as many pitches.) Doumit, on the other end of the receiving spectrum, cost his teams 155 runs. That comes out to 0.50 runs added by Molina and 0.55 runs subtracted by Doumit per 100 pitches, an enormous difference.3 For comparative purposes, Barry Bonds’s bat during the 2001-2004 seasons, when he basically broke baseball, was worth about 0.78 runs above average per game.

Granted, those run totals aren’t typical. Molina and Doumit are outliers; no one else comes close to costing his team as much per pitch as Doumit, and only Brewers catcher Jonathan Lucroy has approached Molina levels of framing effectiveness. (Lucroy has some advantages over Molina. He’s 11 years younger and has a better bat, which allows him to stay in the lineup. Since his debut in 2010, he’s saved almost twice as many runs due to framing as any other catcher, aside from Molina.)

Still, consider the implications. Giancarlo Stanton, one of the most coveted young players in the game, was worth as much4 (in terms of Wins Above Replacement) over the past two seasons as Molina’s framing alone was worth in a part-time role over the past five-plus, yet Molina’s value, unlike Stanton’s, is largely overlooked. And that’s without factoring in any value Molina added by calling games, handling his pitching staff, and controlling the running game. Best of all, Molina’s done it all for an average of $1.5 million per season, in an era when a single win on the free-agent market usually runs teams around $5 million. It’s no surprise that Molina plays for the Rays, low-payroll competitors who’ve found ways to make a dollar go further than any other organization. Nor is it a coincidence that Molina, a career backup catcher whom standard sabermetric stats peg as a replacement-level player, became a first-time starter and appeared in a career-high 102 games in his age-37 season, barely six months after Fast’s study appeared on Baseball Prospectus.

Eleven wins sounds like too much for a single part-time pitch receiver to add in just over five seasons, but think about how many opportunities to gain and lose strikes there are over a 162-game schedule. A durable catcher can catch around 10,000 called pitches in a single season. Many of those pitches are clear-cut calls. But that still leaves hundreds, maybe thousands, of pitches in the shadowy border region between ball and strike, where a good receiver can perform the catching equivalent of turning water into wine. Even if an extra strike doesn’t send the batter back to the dugout, it puts him in a less-favorable count and makes him less likely to do damage later in the at-bat. Dan Turkenkopf, another former Baseball Prospectus staffer who was recently hired by the Rays, put the average value of turning a single ball into a strike at 0.13 runs. If you do that a few times per game, as Molina does, the run total climbs quickly.

Agree on the pitching needed...but we had similar catching prospects (to Castro) in Herrmann and Butera....except they both hit better than Castro over the last three years.

Hermann was not a good defensive catcher hence playing the outfield often, and he may have a little higher average with backup plate appearances but it would suffer from exposure.  Butera is excellent defensively but the improved offense is a low plate appearence mirage.  Neither are starting calibre with Castro has proven to be, hes not a top 10 guy or anything but hes an average starter at a premium position. 

Agree on the pitching needed...but we had similar catching prospects (to Castro) in Herrmann and Butera....except they both hit better than Castro over the last three years.

I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers from, but Butera last 3 years:

.604 OPS

Castro last 3 years:

.660 OPS

30+ runs? His pitch framing metrics are worth 0.92 called strikes per game. That's never 30 runs. That *might* be 30 walks, but probably not even that many.

 

His base stealing defense is easily negated by his terrible pitch blocking skills. Those cost bases too, you know.

 

The Twins traded one set of defensive liabilities for another. We're fixing to find out which liabilities are worse for a young pitching staff. But definitely be careful when calling this guy a huge improvement over Suzuki.

Poor pitch framing doesn't only cost you walks. Batters hit much better ahead in the count than they do when behind in the count.

The difference between 2-1 and 1-2 is huge, as is 1-1 and 0-2.

Depends on the hitter.

I'm pretty confident that almost every hitter in baseball hits better ahead than behind.

You should look at split stats more often.

 

In any case, we are talking about 1 pitch per game. If you are choosing to go to war over that, go for it I guess. I'm willing to concede that 1 batter per game could conceivably fall behind in a count due to Castro's wizardry. Now what?

What do you mean by now what?

Getting those calls is better than not getting those, so it has value.

And I doubt you can name a single player in baseball with at least 1000 PA's who has better numbers behind than ahead.

I get that Castro is good at pitch framing, but is that enough for $8 million per season?

He isn't a good hitter, he has a weak arm, and he is average at calling games.

I get that Castro is good at pitch framing, but is that enough for $8 million per season?

 

He isn't a good hitter, he has a weak arm, and he is average at calling games.

Yes. His bat isn't bad for a catcher and 8 mil. isn't all that much money these days. When the other options are in house (murphy, garver, centeno - not good), signing Wilson Ramos (ACL popped and looking for a short term deal to rebuild value, will need regular rest days at DH), re-signing Suzuki (no thank you) or trading assets for a catcher from another team, I would say that it is a good deal. By no means is Castro a star, this is not an earth breaking signing. But his addition to the team is an upgrade, and he will help significantly.