Top Free Agent catcher Jason Castro, formerly of Houston, signed with the Minnesota Twins.
Castro, 29, has signed a three year deal with the Twins, with a guaranteed $24 million dollars coming his way.
As I mentioned in our Top 25 Free Agents posts, catchers are a hot commodity this season, and while Castro is moderately weaker at the plate than some other prospects available, he is an excellent pitch framer and can work well in a platoon.
The Twins are looking for an everyday catcher since moving Joe Mauer to first base due to concussion protection. Last season, their usual catcher was Kurt Suzuki. Castro should be more productive both defensively and offensively than Suzuki, who presumably will be leaving Minnesota.
This signing leaves Wilson Ramos and Matt Wieters as the two biggest profile catchers available.
Fan Interference 
Offensively he’s trending down, hitting 210 last year, but sadly is a significant improvement over the lovable Suzuki. His success rate throwing out runners was a below league average of 24%, which at least beats out the lovable Suzuki’s 19% rate. Regarding his pitch framing according to some fancy statistical metric he got 97 more strike calls then average. Given that over the course of a game a catcher receives maybe about 150 pitches and around 100 of them are strikes and if the average starting catcher catches about 120 games, we’re talking about an improvement of under 1%.
Those goldarn Twins are so lovable that they’re trying to trade in their lovability for mere badness.
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I was hoping you’d chime in, seeing as how you’re our resident Twins fan! 🙂 Thanks for the breakdown, Happy.
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That’s a pretty good assessment, twinsfan. I like Castro, but I was not sorry to see Houston to try to upgrade. Unless he relocates his one year of All Star performance, he doesn’t offer much upside.
One faint hope I will give you. On those relatively rare occasions when Castro hits the ball, he tends to hit it hard. You may get a little more HR pop than you were expecting.
Otherwise, just pretty much a platoon catcher with moderate skills.
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