Mike's Mets - I'm a James McCann Fan Already

 

By Mike Steffanos

I remember over the winter when the New York Mets elected to sign James McCann to a surprisingly large 4-year deal rather than wait out J.T. Realmuto. As the offseason got underway, McCann was basically seen as the consolation prize for a team that didn't sign Realmuto. While Realmuto was arguably the top free-agent position player and a lock for a 9-figure contract, the speculation was that a team could get McCann on a 2-, maybe 3-year deal. In actuality, it took a 4-year deal to lock down the catcher who will celebrate his 31st birthday in June. The Mets will be paying McCann $12 million for the final year of the deal — his age 34 season when presumably he won't be the Mets starting catcher.

In many ways, signing McCann was an analytics-driven decision, not the type of move we were used to seeing from the Wilpon era Mets. The numbers on the back of his baseball card didn't seem to indicate that he was the second-best catcher on the market this past offseason. Tim Britton had a nice piece in The Athletic on all of this back when the Mets signed him.

McCann's first 5 years in MLB were with the Detroit Tigers. His batting line over those seasons was .240/.288/.366, good for an OPS+ of 76, far below league average. He always had a great arm but wasn't known as that good of a defensive catcher, particularly in the area of pitch framing. Detroit elected to non-tender McCann after those 5 seasons.

The Chicago White Sox signed McCann for the 2019 season, and he rewarded them with his best offensive season, featuring a slash line of .273/.328/.460 and an OPS+ of 107 — terrific numbers for a catcher. But he ranked dead last in an important framing statistic for the season among MLB catchers. Yasmani Grandal was signed to be the White Sox' starting catcher for 2020, while McCann backed him up and DH'ed.

McCann was proactive about his framing numbers, working with catching guru Jerry Narron after the 2019 season. Even though he was no longer the starting catcher, McCann still caught a significant number of games behind the plate and moved up to ninth in Baseball Savant's Catcher Framing Leaderboard for the 2020 season. His slash line also improved to .289/.360/.536, good for an outstanding OPS+ of 143, albeit with the usual small sample size warning for the oddball 60-game season.

I don't think anyone expects James McCann to produce offensively at last year's level. I'm sure the Mets would be absolutely thrilled if he was around his 2019 season's numbers. For what it's worth, Baseball Savant has him ranked 20th on their Catcher Framing Leaderboard so far this young season, but it's mighty early, and he's still getting to know his pitchers. Hopefully, that will improve.

He showed off that cannon of an arm on the last play of Sunday's win over the Colorado Rockies. McCann has earned raves from the pitching staff on how well he's worked with them so far. Like many of the Mets hitters over these past three weeks of starts and stops, he's underperformed offensively, with numbers that look more like what he produced for the Tigers than the past couple of years with the White Sox. It's quite possible that playing in a new league and not having the opportunity to play games as a DH will hold his numbers down below the last two seasons.

If that's the case, he can still be a very valuable Met, just managing the pitching staff and giving opposing base stealers something to think about. It's been a while since the Mets had a real good catcher behind the plate, and I'm loving watching him go about his business.

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