The Braves have signed catcher Kurt Suzuki to a one-year deal. MLB.com’s Mark Bowman initially reported (Twitter link) that the two sides were finalizing a new contract, with The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reporting that the deal will pay Suzuki $3.5MM in 2018. Suzuki is represented by the MVP Sports Group.
Suzuki, who turns 34 in October, came to Atlanta last winter on a one-year deal worth $1.5MM in guaranteed money. He more than delivered on that agreement, producing a career-high 18 homers as well as a .271/.343/.525 slash line over 287 plate appearances. Remarkably, Suzuki has an .868 OPS both at home and on the road, so his unexpected breakout at the plate can’t be entirely chalked up to the Braves’ move into hitter-friendly SunTrust Park.
Suzuki has markedly improved his hard-hit ball rate and his contact rate for pitches outside the strike zone, and his .255 Isolated Slugging mark is the third-best of any catcher with at least 275 PA this season (just one percentage point ahead of fourth-place Gary Sanchez). Suzuki’s defense continues to garner below-average grades as per StatCorner and Baseball Prospectus, though that is a tradeoff the Braves are willing to make given Suzuki’s bat; it also doesn’t hurt that battery-mate Tyler Flowers is one of the league’s top defensive catchers.
Between Suzuki and Flowers, the Braves have generated 4.4 fWAR from the catcher position this season, more than any other team in baseball save the Buster Posey-powered Giants. Atlanta has a $4MM club option on Flowers that seems like a no-brainer to be exercised, so the Braves head into next season looking very strong behind the plate.
Rosenthal notes that talks between Suzuki and the Braves had been ongoing “for weeks” about a new contract, so the catcher was seemingly pretty unlikely to ever hit the open market. Still, teams looking for catching help this winter now have one less ’plan B’ type of option behind the three backstops (Jonathan Lucroy, Welington Castillo, Alex Avila) who are bound to attract the most attention amongst free agent catchers.
Yes
Great move. Not a huge risk either.
Glad to hear. As a fan, been happy with the Catching duties this year.
Great signing! I was thinking he’d get away during free agency with the season he’s had.
3.5 mil? That’s it? Wow, GREAT sign for the Braves.
Sort of kills the theory of $/WAR as absolutes for Free Agents. Suzuki (2+ WAR) wasn’t going to get 16M$ nor is Cozart (5 WAR) going to get 40M$.
Honestly, when has that 7M/WAR rule ever been on display?
Ohh yeah, there are just too many other important factors to figure in, and those factors ultimately change the outcome of contracts signed by free agents….
Every once in awhile, maybe the two line-up for a contract signed by a younger or middle aged free agent..But, often times, the WAR to $$ rate just does not line up perfectly, like mrkinsm is suggesting..
Umm…. Almost always? That’s why sites such as Fangraphs use it… Lol
The formula for WAR, which Fangraphs and Baseballs Reference can’t even agree on, needs significant revision. There’s NO WAY Byron Buxton and Andrelton Simmons should be near the top of the list due to their defense. So somebody is worth 5 WAR…which five games did they actually win that a replacement would not? What specific plays led their team to win a game that another “replacement level player” would not? WAR is a statistic that exists in a vacuum and doesn’t take actual game results into play. Don’t you think clutch players should be rewarded more? When a player hits a game-winning home run, he actually won the game for his team. Downgrade the defense fetish and increase actual performances in the calculation of WAR.
Why are we downgrading defense again? I don’t understand how a run saved is somehow less valuable than a run created according to these offense fetishists. Defense counts. Watch the San Diego Padres, 2017 version, and try to tell me it doesn’t….quite possibly the worst collection of defensive infielders I’ve ever seen assembled on one team and, hey, guess what? Despite playing in a pitchers’ park the Padres are dead-last in the majors in run differential – and it’s not even close. Defense matters. Defense counts.
I don’t think you understand the theory. It doesn’t have anything to do with the past years’ WAR total. It’s based on projected WAR for 2018 and beyond. Nobody thinks Cozart is a 5 win player going forward, just as nobody thinks Suzuki is a 2 win player.
I know quite well what the “theory” is, the fact is way too many people think it’s a definite. It’s not, that $ figure is based on an average; and too many people fail to realize that.
So, the Braves and Suzuki’s camp believe he’s a .5 WAR player? Is that what you are suggesting?
That’s the monetary value of a win, not exactly what a team should pay for a win. How they stay in business is by valuing undervalued assets, right? If everybody paid cost for everything there’d be no such thing as capitalism.
If you assign a “monetary value” to something, that means that’s the amount of money that someone is willing to pay for that thing on the open market. If the thing goes unsold at that price, then it’s worth less than that; if the thing brings more in an open market, then it’s worth more.
According to the silly $7M per 1 WAR idea, a one-year deal for him should be worth somewhere around $17.5M based on this year’s performance. If you based it on his average career WAR per season of about 1.7, then Suzuki is worth about $11.9M per season. Either way, and even accounting for personal preference and other reasons that Suzuki may have made the decisions to sign and stay with the Braves, the fact that he signed for $1.5 million this season and $3.5 million for 2018 after a 2.5-WAR season does kind of call bullshit on the $7M per 1 WAR theory.
great value
What position is Ken Rosenthal playing for the A’s?
Not a bad move for an organization in disarray according to Ken
Nice move. I was afraid that a catching desperate team would pay more than that for Suzuki. That still is more than most “back up catchers” but Suzuki has performed quite well in the time share with Flowers.
The man made 6M$ per for 2 years off his solid 2014 season, Braves fans should be ecstatic at this price.
Exactly, after the season he has had, I thought for sure Suzuki would get a sizeable bump in pay. While he still managed to more than double his previous salary, I figured his new contract would be quite a bit higher, ultimately pricing the Braves out of being able to resign Suzuki…
I’m curious what Suzuki would have been able to sign for, had he hit the open market…Clearly and thankfully, I will never really know, but it’ll be interesting to see how the catchers market develops and to see what other back stops ultimately sign for…
Either way, the two of Flowers and Suzuki combine to make an excellent catching tandem for the Braves, and both players have combined to turn a fairly big weakness into a solid strength for this franchise!!
Just as most Braves fans were thinking Suzuki would move on to greener pastures, Coppy and Co. swoop in and snatched him up for another year!! Great job getting this steal of a deal worked out. I mean, especially for such a disgruntled and dysfunctional front office!!
2004 college world series. He drove in the winning run. Great down to earth guy and a great baseball player.
Great signing. Great Titan and human being.
He’s a good guy to have around.
Its dumb to me that all we rate catchers by now apparently is pitch framing. Besides the pitcher, this is the most important position and the game calling and focusing and calming down pitchers is what’s most important. If you are going to tell me that’s not quantifiable I agree but it’s dumb to say Tyler flowers is a good defensive catcher because of pitch framing, and act like that’s all that matters. Kurt Suzuki works very well with pitchers, hence the fact he’s been a starter pretty much every year until now and only has put up good offensive numbers a few times. Nowhere does analytics get things more wrong than with rating catchers. I’m neither old school nor new school and to a degree it’s a false dichotomy anyway, but my problem with analytically minded people is they typically can never be talked out of their own biases. I’ve had this argument about catchers many times with people. Throughout the year I’d even argue it is probably the most important position on the field.To add another quick defensivething that they get wrong, I’ll add that first base is underrated defensively. If you have a first baseman able to stretch out far, they save a hit just by stretching a little more all the time.I know it’s still probably the least important position but a first baseman basically can’t accumulate any WAR on defense which is ludicrous. I digress. Point being, just because you can’t value things with numbers yet doesn’t give you the right to use absolutes when speaking such as “Tyler flowers is a good defensive catcher”.Really I’d rather have Suzuki catching for defensive reasons. I watch the games, I’ve caught my entire life basically as well. Absolutes thrown out by these people kill me. So and so is due for regression. I hate that one most of all and it’s largely based on a misunderstanding of the fact that people get hot and cold and players actually try to hit balls in between a hole or up the middle, whether they are hard hit or not, and usually they do this when they are hitting well at the plate. So let’s have more of,.. he could be due to regress or flowers could be a good catcher. Dont speak as if you know from one stat.I speak too much but someone has to set know it all egoists analytical people strait, just as much as they set other dumb people who like wins and have tons of other dumb biases straight.
Yeah, pitch framing is really over-valued. When you get right down to it, even the best players only average out to something like a single extra strike per game. And that’s assuming these public framing numbers are accurate – which is probably not the case.
StatCorner’s numbers are a joke, so I don’t know why anyone uses them. Prospectus’ numbers are better, but they basically ignore the umpire (lol) and can’t factor in the pitcher’s command, which is a huge influence on called strikes. DRS is probably the best, because they weigh the umpire into the equation much more and can account for a pitcher’s command, but those framing numbers aren’t public.. Well, they’re sorta public – the DRS totals on baseball-reference include pitch framing, but the DRS totals on fangraphs do not, so you can just check both sites and calculate the framing runs from the difference.
Tyler Flowers is a good example of how framing can be over-valued. Last year, on fangraphs, Flowers had a -12 DRS. An incredible -7 from his throwing arm, -3 from his fielding/blocking, -1 from his pitcher’s ERA, -1 from fielding bunts.. So, really really bad at just about everything a catcher needs to do. Checking with baseball-reference, Flowers had 2 DRS. So we can infer that he gained +14 runs from DRS’ framing metric. Now, if framing was all you looked at or valued – like over at Baseball Prospectus- you’d think Flowers was one of the best defensive catchers in the game. But, from a system that looks at everything a catcher does – Flowers sinks down to a fairly average defensive catcher. And this holds true for much of his career- with 2015 (+15 DRS) and this year (+10) DRS being the only years in which he was well above average.
But the part I find hilarious – he’s an incredible pitch framer, sure, but that doesn’t ever seem to help the staff any. All those extra strikes Flowers is giving his pitchers should produce better results from the staff than somebody who is a poor framer, like Suzuki. But they don’t. There is very little difference in the Braves staff between Suzuki and Flowers. They have a lower ERA with Suzuki. So all those runs saved from framing don’t seem to make an appearance. Like many defensive stats (or offensive ones, for that matter), these run values exist in a vacuum. Teams clearly aren’t placing much value on them – or Flowers would have made way more money when he hit the open market after the White Sox dumped him.
Well, when you factor in all the wild pitches and passed balls that Flowers allows while trying to frame things…
Despite being a “know-it-all egoist analytical” person, I actually do tend to agree with you that pitch framing value is still kind of nebulous, and I personally don’t place a ton of value in it, although I think Jeff Mathis getting a two – year contract despite having a below – average arm and being one of the league’s worst hitters suggests at least some teams believe it means something.
As for your hated of regression, though, this is one I’ve never understood. If each hot player were actually trying (and successful) at hitting balls through the hole, why do almost all but the league’s very best stop doing it? I don’t have any sort of statistics background, but I think Statcast has made clear that regression isn’t necessarily indicating that a player has been lucky to have the results that he has, but just that it’s unreasonable to expect him to continue to be that good. A player could very well deserve a .400 BABIP over a small stretch, because he’s pounding the ball on a line or something, but opponents adjust, and, eventually, that player will stop being as good.