Just a Backup Catcher, Except Not Just a Backup Catcher
There are lots of implications to the Caratini signing. He'll play a lot. Meyers and Dubon will play less. The team is deeper. Joe Espada's job got easier, & Jim Crane will pay the luxury tax.
Happy Hannukah. It’s a backup catcher.1
As Chandler Rome and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported last night, the Astros have signed Victor Caratini.
General Manager Dana Brown had talked throughout the offseason about seeking a backup catcher and said Monday at the Winter Meetings that the position that was “the one that’s weighing on me the heaviest” and that he would target “a veteran that can really catch and receive and block and just kind of complement [Yainer] Diaz.”
Brian McTaggart and Mark Feinsand of MLB.com reported that the deal is for 2 years at $6 million per year.
Backup catcher is not a position that usually gets your juices flowing, and fair enough. But I think this signing has a number of interesting angles that I’m going to talk about here. Caratini has a skill level near the top of backup catchers in the game and his contract (more than the team paid starter Martin Maldonado last year2) reflects that. It has implications for how playing time will be allocated in 2024 for a number of players, and how Joe Espada can manage the team and the pitching staff. In addition, the Caratini signing means the Astros will go over the luxury tax threshold in 2024, and that they will likely add more players (and payroll) as the front offices prioritizes the 2024 season.
I’ll address each of these below.
Caratini the Player
What type of player are the Astros getting in Caratini? As I noted, he will be among the top backup catchers in baseball. His Steamer projection for 2024 is for a slash line of .246/.323/.396, which would be good for a 99 wRC+.3 That’s 1% below league average…and likely a bit optimistic. Caratini’s career high wRC+ is 94 from last season and his career number is 85. But the average wRC+ for a catcher is 90 (h/t Tony Adams), so even hitting at his 2023 or career numbers would put Caratini around league average for a player who is a backup.
Caratini also compliments Diaz defensively. In my offseason preview I noted that “one weakness of Diaz’s is in framing pitches…One free agent with good framing skills (6 framing runs)…is Victor Caratini.” Maldonado was also a poor framer, so this move gives the Astros somebody who can steal more strikes while behind the plate, which they have lacked in recent years.
I had wondered if Caratini’s skillset might earn him a starting job, but the Astros dealt with that by paying him starter money for a catcher. At the moment, only 10 catchers will make more in 2024 than Caratini.
An Effect on Playing Time, Especially for Meyers and Dubon
Caratini’s relatively high salary and high skillset opens the question about how much he will play in 2024. It could be quite a bit.
In 2023, only 12 catchers started more than 100 games and only one started more than 116. In short, the average catcher stars somewhere around two out of every three games. Diaz may start fewer than that because he has never played more than 60 games in a season at catcher.
Of course, when Diaz does not start at catcher, he does not just have to sit on the bench. Manager Joe Espada may want to keep his bat in the lineup by putting him at designated hitter—he got 36 starts there last year, second most on the team.
When Diaz starts at DH, Yordan Alvarez is likely to move to left field. The starting left fielder in 2024 will be Chas McCormick, but Brown said this week that McCormick “is an everyday player and will be treated as such.” So he will move to center field which will move either Jake Meyers or Mauricio Dubon to the bench.
Caratini may also see some time at first base to spell Jose Abreu. He has played 62 games in his career at first base, though the majority of those games were in 2018 and 2019.
Caratini could see a good bit of playing time, but it will come not at the expense of the other catcher, but of the team’s outfielders. Obviously, health will affect all of this, but Caratini gives the team better depth overall. Caratini makes the team broadly more able to withstand an injury basically anywhere on the field.
A Clean Slate for Espada
The choice to sign Caratini means that the Astros will move on from Martin Maldonado who has been with the team since 2018 and its clear first choice catcher since 2020.
Chandler Rome had reported that there was “mutual interest between the Astros and Maldonado in a reunion,” but those talks obviously did not come to fruition.
The more I have thought about Maldonado in 2024 the more I’ve come to oppose it for the sake of new manager Joe Espada. Maldonado has a number of starting pitchers who have “demanded” that he catch their starts. In 2023, this became a source of tension as it cut into playing time for Diaz.
With Brown having declared all offseason that Diaz would be the starting catcher in 2024, bringing back Maldonado might create more tension. Starters might demand that Maldonado catch their games, despite his weak bat. That would cut into the playing time of better offensive players. Espada may have chosen to push back on that request, but doing so might have created tension with his starters.
Moving on from Maldonado means that Astros pitchers cannot demand he catch them. And I believe that will remove a potential area of clubhouse tension for Joe Espada. Pitchers know they’re not going to get Maldonado and can’t ask Espada to start him. I think this move makes Joe Espada’s job a little bit easier in 2024.
Over the Luxury Tax
At this exact moment, Roster Resource estimates that the Astros “estimated luxury tax payroll” is $237,396,032. That number is quite meaningful because the first luxury tax threshold is $237 million. The Astros are going to pay the luxury tax for the first time in their history.
Now it is worth noting that the number calculated is an estimate, in large part because we do not know the exact number for the seven Astros players who are involved in the arbitration process.4 That number may go up or down over the course of the offseason, and again during the season.
But if the Astros were focused on ducking the luxury tax, they would not have spent so much on a backup catcher. They are going to go over the tax, which is what I said would happen in the offseason preview.
I then wrote “there is no logic to go over the tax just a little. If you’re going to pay taxes, it makes sense to run up the payroll a good bit over the $237M threshold, and closer to the next threshold at $257M.”
That would leave the Astros room to make an addition here in the offseason, probably in the bullpen. It is possible they could identify a left handed batter to play the outfield corners and first base. It would also leave room to add payroll at the trade deadline.
The Caratini signing adds to what was clear from the Verlander deal at the 2023 trade deadline—the Astros are all in on winning in 2024, and going over the tax threshold is part of that.
Well, the news came out two night early for Hannukah, but close enough. Also, the roster is pretty set for 2024, so we’re not getting eight nights of free agent present. Just one or two, but remember this on Hannukah, the Astros have the major’s best Jewish player. I don’t let the Yankee fans at my synagogue forget that.
Maldonado’s last contract paid him $5 million in 2022 and $4 million in 2023.
wRC+ stands for weighted Runs Created Plus. According to the glossary at Fangraphs, “Weighted Runs Created (wRC)…attempts to quantify a player’s total offensive value and measure it by runs. In Runs Created, instead of looking at a player’s line and listing out all the details, the information is synthesized into one metric in order to say, ‘Player X was worth 24 runs to his team last year.’”…It's adjusted, so a wRC+ of 100 is league average and 150 would be 50 percent above league average.”
116 is apparently a magic number for catcher starts. In 2023, five catchers Maldonado, Elias Diaz (COL), Jonah Heim (TEX), Keibert Ruiz, (WAS), and Shea Langeliers (OAK) all started that many games. JT Realmuto lead MLB catchers with 130 starts.
Framber Valdez, Kyle Tucker, Jose Urquidy, Mauricio Dubon, Luis Garcia, Bryan Abreu, and Chas McCormick.
Amid all the CBT concerns, I think it gets lost in the shuffle that CBT figures are calculated at the end of the year. To that end, CBT thresholds come not only with financial penalties but have impacts on compensatory draft picks. It seems pretty clear the Astros are going to be losing Bregman to free agency (and thus presumptively eligible for a comp. pick). If Houston is out of the race at the deadline, Houston will likely look to shed contracts to get under the threshold so they can get a better comp pick for losing Bregman (or may even trade Bregman).