Late last week, Mark Feinsand of MLB.com reported that the stove was already roaring for one free agent in the offseason’s early going: former Astros catcher Martín Maldonado. The 37-year-old backstop just missed our ranking of top 100 free agents, of which we only ranked 50. While the interest is almost certainly for employment as a backup, even that would seem to fly in the face of everything we know.
Let’s not sugarcoat this. By WARP, Maldonado was the worst regular in baseball last year, notching a -2.5 WARP. (Nor is it a BP thing: FanGraphs put him at -1.2, and Baseball Reference, which doesn’t incorporate framing, assigned him a 0.3) No one has scored worse by our metric in 15 years, and it’s not a coincidence that the name of his predecessor is the retrospective pariah of another era: Ryan Doumit.
If we have a measurement of a player’s capability, it’s probably going to cast Maldonado in a poor light. He still has the power to pull mistake pitches; of the 31 catchers with at least 300 plate appearances, his ISO (.157) ranked just below the median, as did his home run total of 15. And… that’s pretty much it. Maldonado was never a good hitter, or even an average one by the standards of DRC+; he got there once, thanks to the pandemic, with wRC+. But he was at least fine for a catcher in his youth. Since then his chase and whiff rates have risen in tandem, and bat speed is a glaring concern. Against pitches 95+ mph, the league whiffed 11% of the time, batted .240 and slugged .386. For Maldonado, those numbers, respectively, were 17%, .100, and .150.
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