Christian Vázquez and a Philosophical Question

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.

Where Vázquez has taken a step back is getting his bat to the ball in the first place. Over his career, he has maintained a roughly league-average strikeout rate, if not slightly better, and a passable walk rate. Instead, he is chasing more pitches out of the zone and making contact less often than at any prior point in his career.

While Vázquez has never been dangerous, he has generally been a better fastball hitter in the major leagues. Per FanGraphs, his batting average against four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters has been 54 points higher than against all other pitches.

Pitchers have been cognizant of this. As Aaron Gleeman noted recently, several Twins hitters have stopped seeing as many fastballs. Over half of the pitches Vázquez has seen this season have been breaking or offspeed pitches, according to Baseball Savant, and he is hitting .158 against them.

That only tells part of the story, though: When Vázquez does get a fastball, he is handling it worse than he has in the past. His whiff rate on fastballs is the highest of his career by far, at nearly 27 percent. That holds for both pitches he has chased and those that were in the zone.

Over his career, Vázquez has typically done more with fastballs in the lower half of the zone and on the inner half of the plate. Up around the letters, though, he has struggled, especially if the pitch is not over the middle. See the following heatmap from FanGraphs:

Averages are displayed a little awkwardly here, but just know that
red means good, and blue means bad.

Pitchers have therefore stopped giving him easy pitches to hit. Take this graph. Each dot represents the average position of the fastballs Vázquez faced in a given season. The dots get more transparent, bright, and yellow the further back into the past you go. The most opaque, darkest, most red dot is 2024.

Data via Baseball Savant, originally in feet. View is from the catcher's perspective.
Home plate is 17 inches wide, with x=0 as the center; the vertical boundaries of the
zone as displayed are more approximate, being based on the batter's height.

It may not seem like much movement year-over-year, but you can see that the opposition has gradually worked their way higher and farther inside. Pitchers are not throwing heat out of the zone, but merely to a spot that it is harder for Vázquez's hands to catch up with — especially he must increasingly be ready for junk low and away.

A previously ineffective hitter, Vázquez has lost all control of the zone. Maybe with a bit more batted-ball luck, he can be less of a black hole in the lineup, but he is in truth a black hole.

This brings us back around to the original question: Does Vázquez still have a place on the Twins?

Ryan Jeffers spent the back half of last season becoming the best offensive catcher in baseball and taking more and more starts. He leads the team in fWAR and rWAR this season and deserves a place at the All-Star Game.

But outside of Salvador Perez, nobody catches three-quarters of their team's games anymore. Jeffers has adequate defensive metrics but has made frequent starts at designated hitter because more time behind the plate means putting the team's best hitter at greater risk of injury and long-term fatigue. Even if Jeffers catches most or all postseason games, someone else will have to fill in for close to half the regular season. Unlike Kyle Farmer, whose offensive start may be even worse if you account for position, the Twins cannot just shove Vázquez onto the bench until the late innings and send someone else up to bat.

If not Vázquez, then who? There is Jair Camargo, a 24-year-old in Triple-A who came up just long enough to make his MLB debut in April. However, his (marginal) prospect status has always been based more on his bat than his defending, and he is alarmingly strikeout-prone. ZiPS projects Camargo would have a .629 OPS if he came up for the rest of the season — which would be an improvement. Would the sum of his hitting and catching be worth more than Vázquez's contributions? That's debatable.

What about outside options? Backup catchers may go on waivers, and sometimes there is an okay one, but if the Twins keep winning, they will be lower on the waiver claim order and likely be beaten to anyone they target.

In the trade market, options do exist, but not many. The Rockies' Jacob Stallings is a cheap rental candidate who would bring great plate discipline and adequate defense, but his framing metrics have fallen off since entering his 30s. If the Diamondbacks stay below .500 into July, Tucker Barnhart would be available, but the power in his bat is all gone. Each is likely a small upgrade, if an upgrade at all.

The real targets would be Danny Jansen of the Blue Jays and Victor Caratini of the Astros. Jansen is a pending free agent with an oddly extreme reverse split; the switch-hitting Caratini is on a two-year deal after stepping in for Houston's own Christian Vázquez, Martín Maldonado. Both have relatively decent track records behind and at the plate.

Outside of Colorado, though, none of the teams mentioned above are obvious sellers. To find someone better than Vázquez, the Twins might have to wait until one decides to sell. Backup catchers are not very valuable until you have a good one, at which point it is hard to give up that marginal advantage.

If Vázquez keeps this up at the plate, at some point it stops being tenable for a pennant aspirant to give him at-bats. One would think, at least — even with this atrocious start, both major WAR models have Vázquez above replacement-level due to his catching. Plus, if Manuel Margot and Carlos Santana's struggles continue, Minnesota might have to devote more assets to finding upgrades for their positions. Whether Vázquez really gives the Twins more value than it would be worth to find someone better, and what "better" looks like, is ultimately up to the beholder.