I don't know that the positional stuff is as much of a factor as the injury. He switched to the outfield for a month in 2016 before getting hurt, then was almost exclusively a catcher in Pawtucket in 2017. He only switched to playing some 1b late in the year (only 7 total games) after another trip to the DL for his ankle.
Yep. The ankle injury basically wasted 2 years of development time.
The notion that Swihart wasn't living up to his billing as a top prospect doesn't hold water. This is a list of the top catching prospects right now. All these guys are top 100 type guys.
According to SoxProspects.com, there is exactly 1 catcher among the Sox Top 60 prospects. Can you guess who that is?
I was under the impression that catchers tended to develop more slowly than other players. Is that no longer the conventional wisdom?
Leon’s BA is .107.
This has been a popular theme wrt Swihart. Yes, like many prospects they would have been better served by trading him when he was a top 10 prospect. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
What should they be doing with him? His greatest value to the team right now is as the third catcher because if something were to happen to either of the other two, they have no other alternatives but him (on the 40-man roster). If he had options, they could send him down. But he doesn't so the only thing they can do that assures them that he stays in the organization is to keep him right where he is.
Word.
You're disregarding a crucial part of those numbers, and that's that they occurred a year or two before they typically do for catchers at those levels. What would his BB/K rates look like as a 24yo in AA? I bet a lot better. But at that age, he already had a season of major league success. We rarely see 23yo catchers having (even moderate) success at the big league level. While some of the underlying statistics aren't fantastic, the overall picture was very positive. Age is important when you look at his minor league track record. And, yes, I left off the 71 PA in 2014 and 80 PA in 2015 because those sample sizes are not large enough to try to draw anything from.
Apparently it's not the conventional wisdom here these days. Yet, it's still the general rule, not the exception, from what I see in MLB. Especially for a guy who was not a full-time catcher until he was drafted. I do not believe it's past time, and I don't think his 212 2017 PA tell us much of anything. This is a player who was not healthy the last two seasons. From the very first post in the Blake Wants to Rake thread (the starting point for discussion of Blake this spring):
Or maybe that OPS+ ranks him slightly above average among catchers who have at least the whopping 400 PA he does since 2015 (without considering that 384 of those PA came as a 23yo in 2015) and we know that he wasn't healthy for 3/4 of the AAA PAs you're citing.
Guy put up a .539 OPS in AAA as a 25yo. Even accounting for injury setbacks, how common is it really for a top prospect to take that extreme of a development turn and bounce back to be a notably successful player? That in itself has the potential to tell something imo.
Well, ideally he’d have another option, so we could have him catching 4 games a week in Pawtucket to see where things really stand. But as it is, all we have to look at are his DWL numbers (good) and his spring training numbers (great).
All this is true, but he only has to be better than Leon who has a career OPS+ of 72 and has struck out more than 3 times as much as he’s walked (in a far larger sample).
Depends on how bad the Sox believe Swihart is behind the plate. If he's only moderately better with the bat but much worse with the glove, why bother?
Give him a couple starts at 2B because Nunez can't defend and isn't hitting enough to justify keeping him there full time?
The Sox are right up against the LT bad penalty aren’t they? Putting Rusney back on the 40 man means his contract counts back against the tax. Ain’t happening in a “try him out” sense. Its gotta be a sure thing because they are going to have to make corresponding moves to cut out someone else.
Remy mentioned during the game last night that Nunez was likely getting the night off tonight. I expect Lin to be in there instead of Swihart though.
Isn't the answer to "when will he play second?" likely to be the same as the answer to the "why isn't he ever catching?" question? Namely, that the Sox think it's an emergency-only solution?
If they really believe he's "emergency only" at his two most viable positions, especially one where we could use some help, he shouldn't be on the roster. It's literally a waste of a spot to have a guy riding the pine for less than a handful of PH PA a week, so I find that difficult to believe.
Dude.
I didn't read you to be suggesting that, but Castillo was a 2B in Cuba. Maybe he could be a candidate for bench IF/OF — probably for another team.
How is 2B one of his 2 most viable positions when he's currently the 4th OF with Mookie hurt, and was the 5th OF before that?
Because with the presence of JD, Mookie, and Brock, there's precisely zero chance he'll see time in the OF?There's a lot more depth and a lot less need there than there is at 2B.
Is he blocking someone who would be getting more playing time than he's currently getting? If not, then he's not wasting a roster spot. He's their third catcher and, this is the important part, there is no fourth catcher on the 40-man roster. That's the biggest reason he's still around. They can't send him down since he is out of options. They'd lose him and further hurt their depth at their shallowest position if they tried to outright him to the minors (he wouldn't clear waivers). He's stuck where he is.
Yeah, I did. The quote above yours last talks about Rusney, and like nvalvo says, I know Castillo played 2B in Cuba, vs Blake who to my knowledge has never played there. My b, though both ideas are terrible.
As a 23 and 24 year old in the major leagues over 350 plate appearances, Blake Swihart had a 715 OPS.
There was never any suggestion at all that Swihart was a liability behind the plate when he was the everyday catcher for the team over almost half a season in which they played playoff-quality baseball. I think the idea that Swihart is a poor defensive catcher is a function of the need to inevitably justify the decision to demote him, but he was only demoted to insert a gold-glove-caliber defender in Vazquez (who, for all his skills, makes a whole lot of boneheaded plays like using your mask to pick up a ball with runners on base tonight), and, I assume, a similarly defensively talented and out-of-options Sandy Leon. Because there's no other reason for Leon to be in the major leagues.
I agree that with the now traditional roster composition of 12 pitchers and 13 position players, there's not much harm in having Swihart be a little-used 25th man.
This is why this debate likely ends with Swihart, who could have been the centerpiece of a trade for a major piece of the puzzle, being DFA'ed. Another good reason not to lament the end of the John Farrell era.
The day in 2016 they decided that Vazquez was the starting catcher, they should have traded Swihart to the highest bidder instead of switching him to the outfield. He was a great prospect -- AS A CATCHER. He was a mediocre prospect as anything else. Regardless of how things worked out after John Farrell decided to demote Swihart because he liked Vazquez's defense better, the organization squandered Swihart's value totally needlessly. I predicted this outcome way back then.
I agree with basically everything you articulated in the above post, but you've got to admit that hindsight is 20/20. Swihart before the ankle injury was on a different trajectory.
Velazquez doesn't belong in the Swihart conversation because he has options. There's also the case to be made that he doesn't belong in that group of players because of performance, despite the SSS. Poyner and Velazquez together probably belong in a separate bin, of guys whose performance warrants a spot as an 8th reliever, but whose options and our MLB depth force to Pawtucket as the first guys up. If e.g. Wright doesn't stick on the roster, Thornburg/Smith hits the DL again, etc. it's really nice having those guys available. I like the idea of going short on the bench - at least in AL parks - to have those guys available at times.
This is probably worth talking about as a separate topic (but as a 15-year lurker and newbie poster, I'm obviously not going there), but I am wondering if it bothers anyone else that in the NFL, Ray Rice loses his career over domestic violence, but in MLB, guys like Jose Reyes or Steven Wright are basically assured roster spots somewhere after merely missing games.
