Connor Wong is playing pretty well. Is he a starting catcher?
I'm less interested in divvying up his playing time with respect to Reese McGuire than I am in assessing whether he clears the bar to be a starting-type catcher. This question has a number of ramifications, both forward-looking, in thinking about the construction of the next Red Sox core, and backwards-looking, in evaluating the return Bloom got for one year of Mookie Betts. (If Bloom got $50m in payroll relief, six seasons of a starting outfielder and six seasons of a starting catcher for one year of Betts at $20m, that's pretty great. But it's less great if Wong isn't a starting-caliber catcher.)
Here are a few facts that I would like to start us off with.
I'm less interested in divvying up his playing time with respect to Reese McGuire than I am in assessing whether he clears the bar to be a starting-type catcher. This question has a number of ramifications, both forward-looking, in thinking about the construction of the next Red Sox core, and backwards-looking, in evaluating the return Bloom got for one year of Mookie Betts. (If Bloom got $50m in payroll relief, six seasons of a starting outfielder and six seasons of a starting catcher for one year of Betts at $20m, that's pretty great. But it's less great if Wong isn't a starting-caliber catcher.)
Here are a few facts that I would like to start us off with.
- MLB catchers are batting .237/.308/.379/.687 so far this season.
- Connor Wong, after his great game Sunday afternoon, is hitting .250/.323/.375/.698, and, given that he had a poor first couple of weeks at the plate, that line reflects a positively torrid pace since the sweep in Tampa Bay.
- Stolen bases are up sharply, for obvious reasons. Last season, baseball saw about 400 SB/month league wide. This April, that number will approach or could even exceed 600, depending on how many happen this weekend. They are succeeding at an 80% clip, which was the number teams used to aspire to.
- Connor Wong is already, in just 147 innings through Saturday, +3 in rSB, stolen base runs: i.e. the value, denominated in runs, of his impact on the running game.
- His pop times are magnificent.
- Connor Wong personally has 4% of all CS recorded in MLB this season (6/151), in 2% of the innings caught (147/7263), as of Saturday.
- Connor Wong is not terrible, but below average by most measures, at pitch framing.
- His offensive profile is at best complicated: Good walk rate; bad K rate, with the chase and contact peripherals that one would expect; and fluctuating EV numbers, ranging from pretty good to pretty bad.
- Wong has an .832 OPS in his minor league career.
- He's among the fastest players on the team.