THE CATCHER EFFECT
As an outfielder Evan Gattis is nothing other than a mere injury fill-in. As a catcher he becomes an all-star caliber fantasy performer.
All leagues are different in terms of qualifying for a position in season. Some leagues it’s one game (horrible), some five, some 10 and some 20. If you’re in one of those leagues with a five game qualifier Gattis now qualifies at catcher (he is set to appear at catcher for the sixth time Thursday as Jason Castro is out of the lineup with the flu).
Last season Gattis hit 27 long balls with 88 RBI.
This season in 34 games he’s hit six homers with 16 RBI.
Per 162 games for his career Gattis has averaged 31 homers and 90 RBI.
The dude can mash.
Alas, you know the drill by now. Gattis is an extremely limited batter. He’s a career .248 hitter, a number he has reached just once in three previous seasons. He’s currently batting .233.
Gattis never gets on base. His career .296 OBP is terrible and over his last 187 games the mark is below that. Pathetic.
As a result of a lack of getting on base, he just doesn’t score much. Remove the homer and this guy has scored 91 times in 400 games. Yikes.
He also has attempted just one steal in his career.
He’s a top-10 catcher, even higher than that actually. To find out just how high he goes on the list check out our JUNE RANKINGS UPDATE that was just released.
THE CATCHER POSITION - OVERALL
Since I started talking catcher above, I’m blowing out the position today.
Francisco Cervelli hit .321 in April and everything was fine. He then hit .198 in May and now it’s panic time. A career .281 batter he’s hitting just .253. Plenty of time to bring that number up, and his OBP of .363, while a four year low, is just barely below the .370 mark he posted the last two seasons. The real issue is that with his lack of power if that average dips he’s not a top-10 play.
Welington Castillo hit six homers in seven games in late April and EVERYONE had to have him on their roster. I warned about Castillo before the season started in Misplaced Love, and pointed folks back to that piece at the time. No one listened. He’s now gone 18 games without a home run and he hit just .243 in May. He’s still on pace for 20 homers, and is hitting .265, so what’s the problem? Meanwhile, Chris Herrmann has one hit his last 13 at-bats and has just one RBI his last eight games. Castillo is still the better option.
Yan Gomes is batting .176 with a .215 OBP. DREADFUL. Still, he plays daily and is on pace for 19 homers and 80 RBI. At this position that still leaves him as a potential catcher one.
Yasmani Grandal has scored eight times this season. Prior to the last week he has scored five times in 32 games. How bad is that, right? A career .345 OBP man, the reason Grandal isn’t scoring is that he’s not getting on base with a sickly .288 OBP. That mark is still .104 points above his batting average, his career spread is .112 points, so the real issue is simply a lack of base hits. Grandal has continued his downward spiral of losing line drives as the rate, year to year, keeps regressing: 23.9, 19.4, 17.1 and 15.5 percent this season. Grandal also has seen a drop in his fly ball rate with an increase in the grounder rate (it’s up to 54 percent). The result is a mere four homers. He’s screwed up, big time, and that’s a growing concern for a guy who is a moderate hitter to begin with.
Jonathan Lucroy has nine homers, 28 RBI and a .886 OPS. He’s been a star. Funny how that happens when he’s healthy. He’s the second best catching option in the game.
Russell Martin has three homers and six RBI his last seven games. Baby steps. He’s still batting .192 with a .518 OPS, but like Gomes he plays daily and that should help him in the fantasy game. Been too good for too long to be this awful, that is unless his neck injury is more significant than we have been led to believe.
Brian McCann hit .203 in May which is dreadful. He also hit four homers, drove in 14 runs and walked 10 times. There are holes, but this is still one of the most powerful run producing bats at the position.
Yadier Molina, like Cervelli, needs to be producing in the batting average category since he’s not exactly a big time power bat at this point of his development. Molina hit .341 in April and it looked like the recently injured one was “back.” He then fell on his face and hit .212 in May. A career .282 hitter Molina is sitting at .266, but that does hide the 10.1 percent walk rate, a career best, that has still led to a solid .346 OBP.
Miguel Montero is struggling with two homers and a .218 batting average, but talk of his failure is overblown. If he kept up his current pace over 450 at-bats he would hit 12 homers with 66 RBI and 72 runs. What’s wrong with that? Also, he has a .347 OBP which is just eight points behind Lucroy and .024 points better 
than Mr. Posey.
Derek Norris is in big trouble. Through 47 games he’s batting .182. That run of struggling drops his batting average his last 99 games down to .228. During that time he’s also hit just seven homers with 23 RBI. That’s a very long time with terrible work on the back of your ball card.
Buster Posey is having a down season by any objective measure. His current slash line of .264/.323/.455 is light years from his career rates (.308/.372/.482). The good news is (A) he’s Buster Posey and (B) he’s actually been a better hitter in the second half of the season than the first as his average goes up .018 points (.318), his OBP goes up .016 points (.381) and his SLG goes up .014 points (.490). Rather remarkable for a catcher.
Wilson Ramos got his eyes fixed. That doesn’t explain the massive growth we’ve seen to date. In the previous six seasons Ramos hit .270 twice with a career best of .278. This year he’s batting .338. The growth here is unexpected, unsustainable and not explainable by offseason LASIK surgery. How about we look to the BABIP gods who register a .352 mark this season? The previous five years the mark has never been above .306. He owns an 18.7 percent line drive rate and the mark is currently 22.7 percent. Neither of those paces will continue. It’s also unreasonable to expect his current 23.3 percent HR/FB ratio to continue (his career mark entering the year was 16 percent). Oh, his fly ball rate of 22.7 percent is also a four-year low. The homers will slow. The hits will stop falling. Caution is warranted.
J.T. Realmuto is batting .299 on the year and he figures to be one of the better average guys at the position moving forward. He also plays daily which gives the average a nice boost. He’s not taking a walk though, just give this season, and the result is a poor .320 on-base rate. He also doesn’t drive the baseball at all with a .098 Isolated Power mark. He’s in the Cervelli/Molina mold.
Stephen Vogt had 18 homers and 71 RBI last season, great numbers for a backstop. He’s still batting .268, pretty much dead on his last two seasons of work, but his OBP is down to .303. Moreover, if we look back at his last 106 games we see a .238 average and .286 OBP. His power has vanished as well with a .371 SLG leading to a .286 wOBA. He’s a solid second catching option, but a return to catcher one status, that’s gonna take something we haven’t seen from him in a long while now.
Matt Wieters has a fan in Ray Flowers. After looking like a fool for the better part of a year, Wieters is finally starting to hit again. This season he has a .281/.321/.430 slash line. For his career the marks are .259/.320/.423. His 25.5 percent K-rate would be a career worst, ditto his 0.23 BB/K ratio, so it’s not all happy fun time. Still, Wieters had a big May hitting .333 with a .879 OPS so he might finally be ready to flash the old bat that made him one of the better hitting options at the position.
Ray Flowers can be heard Monday through Friday, 7 PM EDT and Friday on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio (Sirius 210, XM 87). You can also hear Ray Sunday nights at 7 PM on the channel talking fantasy sports. Follow Ray’s work at Fantasy Alarm and on Twitter (@baseballguys).