2024 Fantasy Baseball Catcher Preview
Previewing the catcher position ahead of 2024 fantasy baseball draft season. I give you tiers, projections, analysis, and strategy for how to handle the catcher position in any league type.
Other Positions
Catcher Preview Podcast
As promised, I am doing podcast episodes with all of these. You can listen to that here. Currently, the podcast is only available on Spotify, but you can also listen on your browser or the Substack app. You’ll see how to do that if you click that link.
This one was about 45 minutes, super laid back, just me talking through the article. There’s a nice buzzing from the baby monitor I was watching and then a crying baby in the middle of it, so I met my promise of giving you a low-quality production. Let me know if you find the podcast beneficial or enjoyable or useful or whatever - it would help to know if anybody cares or not because I’m not going to do it if nobody cares.
It is position preview season! We are now in the month before the month when the season starts, and we’re within three weeks of Spring Training games getting started. So it’s time to get ready for your draft.
If you’ve been following along with the team previews and checking out the projections and other draft tools, you’re probably already ready to go, but these position previews will be the icing on the cake. If you’re just getting your prep started, this series will do the heavy lifting for you.
I will be repeating a lot of the stuff I’ve already said during the team previews, and we’ll be referencing those along the way.
Another wrinkle here is that I’ve included OBP league and points league data in the screenshots and in the Google Sheet that I will let paid subs access, so I have your league type covered in all likelihood.
We start, of course, with catcher! I’m not going to talk about each player individually, because again, I’ve already done that. I’ll try to keep it somewhat brief, but I do want to cover all the angles here, so let’s get it started.
Position Overview
We’re getting going here, so let’s set the landscape. If you missed it, I checked out positional depth in detail here. Since then, we’ve added two new projection systems to the mix, so we can take another quick look.
Here’s a table analyzing projection-based roto values at each position. We show the max, average, and replacement level, and then see the differences from the max and average down to replacement.
Replacement level is defined by how many players at each position will be started in the league at hand. I had to pick something for this to work, and I typically view the “standard” league as a 12-teamer that looks like this in terms of starting lineups:
C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, CIF, MIF, OF, OF, OF
So multiplying that by 12 we define the replacement level as this:
C: 12 (12 * 1)
1B: 18 (12 * 1.5)
2B: 18 (12 * 1.5)
SS: 18 (12 * 1.5)
3B: 18 (12 * 1.5)
OF: 36 (12 * 3)
Take catcher as an example. The max is William Contreras at $12.46, the average of the top 12 is $9.60, and the replacement level is the value of the 12th-best catcher, which happens to be Keibert Ruiz at $7.47.
What those last two columns tell us is how much value you’re missing out on by picking at the back of the pool instead of the front. The biggest opportunity cost is in the outfield, but that’s mostly because Ronald Acuna Jr. is breaking things this year. If we look at the Avg$-Rep$ column, we see the biggest drop-off at third base. For our purposes today, we want to note that the lowest cost of waiting is here at catcher.
That’s true for two reasons.
The max and average values are lower overall. No matter how deep the catcher position can get, it will still be the lightest position in terms of raw output. The vast majority of catchers have no path to 150+ games played, and they are generally inferior hitters because they are promoted more based on defense than offense.
Catcher is deep this year. There are some really solid bats even around 10-15.
The Top 20
This will handle most drafts out there. I assume the majority of readers here play in one-catcher leagues with 15 or fewer teams. Here’s the data we’re working with, and I’ll explain the columns here to get us familiar:
The ATC, JA, Steamer, and BATX columns give you the system’s dollar value of each player given a 5x5 roto league (R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG), and the Avg$ column just averages them. Those numbers won’t match what you get if you run it on the Fangraphs calculator because I do it differently, but it doesn’t matter in this case - the point of those numbers is to compare with the rest of the players in the pool.
ADP Rk is the rank based on ADP, so that coincides with the ADP column.
The Avg$ Rk column ranks the players based on their Avg$
The OBP Diff column shows what percentage boost the player gets when we calculate the average $ values with OBP instead of AVG.
The Pts Rk column is where the player ranks in a standard points league
Scoring system used there
Total Base / R / RBI / HBP/ BB = 1 point
Stolen Base = 3 points
Strikeout = -0.5 points
Okay, that’s covered. Let’s do some tiers.
Tier 1
William Contreras
Adley Rutschman
Will Smith
J.T. Realmuto
My tiers won’t be solely projection or ADP-based. The one thing projections don’t do fantastically well is account for risk. Salvador Perez projects out as the #2 catcher, as you see above, but that's assuming he stays healthy and doesn’t lose a ton of skill - which are both iffy assumptions.
Catcher feels way deeper than ever before, that will be a running theme of this article. Because of that, my recommendation is going to be to wait.
That doesn’t mean that there’s not a clear top group, and this is it.
All of these guys are above-average Major League hitters with strong holds on playing time. Rutschman and Contreras played a ton last year, and they project to lead the position in playing time this year. Realmuto isn’t too far behind, seeing 539 PAs last year, but he’ll turn 33 in March and some of the skills are declining. Will Smith saw 554 PAs, and with J.D. Martinez leaving, there could be a few extra starts at DH for him.
Another thing we’ll see is that there are almost no steals at the position this year. Realmuto is the only catcher projecting for double-digit steals. He gives you an edge there. But another interpretation is that we can pretty much throw steals out when looking at catchers. After Realmuto is gone, so are the steals.
I’m a little bit more tempted to go to this tier in a points league format where playing time is king. There are some strong options later on, but having a near-everyday player in your catcher slot can be a pretty big edge when you’re accruing positive points from most games they play. But in standard roto leagues, I’m not going to be in this tier at all, there are too many other great options later on. I want to use my early picks to fill out other positions.
Tier 2
Yainer Diaz
Salvador Perez
Willson Contreras
Francisco Alvarez
Cal Raleigh
Each guy here has a question mark or two, which pushes them down into a clear tier two.
Perez / Contreras (age)
Raleigh (low average, losing some DH reps)
Diaz/Alvarez (never played a full big league season, lack of plate discipline)
But all of these guys are good with the bat. They all project for 20+ homers (although Contreras is right at that plateau), and they should all hit near the middle of the lineup.
In a one-catcher league, I’m probably skipping this tier as well because I don’t see a ton of difference between these names and a guy or two we can get much later. But in a two-catcher or very deep league, this is probably where I’d grab my first catcher. And most often it will be Raleigh or Contreras because they get drafted last of the top two tiers, and are most likely to fall a round or two past ADP.
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