Christian Vázquez is a bad hitter. You know this. Rocco Baldelli knows this. Derek Falvey and Thad Levine knew this when they signed him going into the 2023 season. Christian Vázquez surely knows this.
But for completeness' sake, let's put his badness at the plate in context. This century, exactly 100 players have taken at least 300 plate appearances in a Twins uniform. Using wRC+, FanGraphs' measure of overall offense where anything above 100 is above average, only six of those players have been worse hitters than Vázquez.
Vázquez has had such a long career, however, because he has not been an awful hitter for his position. Since his debut in 2014, the league-average catcher's OPS sits a bit below .700 — the worst of any position. Vázquez's career OPS is .678, more or less in line with what one should expect.
Catcher is the hardest, most physically draining defensive position, so defensive value is a better measuring stick. In this regard, Vázquez is stellar: Among active catchers, he has been the 3rd-most valuable framer and saved the 5th-most stolen base runs. To this day, he is an elite catcher. This is before taking into account the harder-to-quantify aspects of his value that he possesses at least by reputation: handling pitchers, calling games, contributing to overall team chemistry. Vázquez's glove and veteran presence mean he is still worthy of a major-league roster spot.
Should that be somewhere else, however? If the Twins were still getting a previous version of Vázquez, his place would be unquestionable. The problem is that his hitting has gone from underwhelming to abysmal.
To start 2024, Vázquez has posted a .200/.216/.243 line. That is not far off from what Jake Arrieta, a pitcher, batted in his career. By wRC+, his hitting is 77 percent worse than the major-league average.
There is not one explanation for the drop-off. We will start by looking at his Baseball Savant chart from this year. The ends of each bar are his percentile ranks for 2024. Over that I have laid in blue text Vázquez's percentile ranks from last season, which provides a comparison.
 |
| Click to enlarge. Stats through May 9. |
You can see that when Vázquez has made contact, he has actually hit the ball harder than a year ago. Based on that, according to xBA, his average "should" be close to 40 points higher. However, batted-ball stats take longer to stabilize, and I do not think that a 33-year-old has finally found his physical peak. That trend will probably not hold.
