Swihart had sky-high value at this time and was considered untouchable by many when it came to trade talks. Young catchers who could play the position defensively and could hit for average and pop were not a common commodity, and they still aren’t. At BP, we published three scouting reports on Swihart between August of 2013 and May of 2015. These reports were glowing. Scouts raved about his 60-grade FV glove and arm, as well as his 55-grade FV hit tool. Our own fantasy prospect guru Bret Sayre called him a “lock to stick at catcher long term and hit for a strong average” and ranked him the 31st-best fantasy prospect in baseball. He was Buster Posey-lite, with his potential impact being compared to good Jonathan Lucroy.

A lot can change in a little over 1000 days. For Swihart, his position has changed and then changed back again. His health has changed for the worse and is now close to his old form. His value has also changed. Swihart is no longer talked about as a sought after trade chip, but rather as a player fighting for his baseball life in Boston.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

If you haven’t seen the catastrophic video of Swihart’s ankle injury, consider yourself lucky and do not look it up. On June 4th, 2016 — while playing in left field of all places — Swihart severely sprained his ankle after running into the side wall at Fenway Park. The rest is history: he underwent surgery on August 15th and worked his way back to health by last spring. The positive news was evident, and Swihart was strong enough to battle for a spot on the team during spring training of this past year. Let’s agree not to rehash the poor decision to play him there in the first place.

WHAT WENT WRONG

It was probably a forgone conclusion that the just-recently-healthy catcher who had been moved around the diamond the year before would not be the favorite to make it out of camp as the backup catcher. So what though? He was healthy. That was what mattered. As the year wore on, he played at Triple-A, returning to catching part-time until it became evident that his ankle was still not right. He struggled at the plate and needed a DL stint to get his body right. It was in large part a lost year — the second such year in a row for the player. He was called up in September and played just 12 innings behind the dish. By this time many folks were doubting if he would ever be relevant again.

WHAT TO EXPECT

In many ways 2018 will be a make or break year for Swihart’s future as a member of the Red Sox. He is now as healthy as he has been since his injury initially occurred, which will be key as he battles to make the roster this spring. You see, Swihart is out of options. He either makes the team out of camp or he is on a different team. Luckily for Swihart and the Red Sox, things are finally starting to break right for the former prospect. This winter he was healthy enough to play in the Dominican Winter League, where he batted .407/.515/.481 over 33 PA while catching for the Leones del Escogido.

If I were Dave Dombrowski, I would take a long look at Swihart and try and find any reason at all to have him on the bench to start the year. Swihart has pedigree, he’s only 26 years old, and he’s actually healthy! He still has the most offensive upside out of all of the Red Sox catchers and he’s athletic enough to play other positions. The bat is what should be the selling point though. His offensive upside is far greater than that of Brock Holt, Devin Marrero, and Sandy Leon, who he is potentially competing against for a roster spot. I have long defended Swihart, and now see him as more underrated than ever. I don’t doubt that we haven’t seen his best yet as a player. If I were DD, I’d want to make sure that we do see his best in the future, and that it’s while he’s wearing a Red Sox uniform.

Photo by Kim Klement – USA TODAY Sports

Boston’s pick in the fifth round of the 2011 draft has, by Baseball Reference WAR, out-produced every player taken in the first round of that same draft. That would be Mookie Betts.

Partly that’s a function of the fact the Red Sox have been a better team than the Orioles over that time. Thus when Baltimore has picked it has more often been at the top of the draft where more is expected to come of the selection, whereas the Red Sox have often picked later where star power is much harder to come by.

But even then, the Red Sox have still done better than Baltimore. There are probably other teams that have done better than the Red Sox over the past three decades (going much deeper into draft history is pointless as the draft has changed so much since) but though they exist they likely aren’t many. Take for example, Boston’s pick in the fifth round of the 2011 draft has, by Baseball Reference WAR, out-produced every player taken in the first round of that same draft. That would be Mookie Betts, and that would be amazing.

Of course, that’s not the only time the Red Sox have had a non-first round pick and (to date) got more production out of it than any of the first rounders used that in that same draft. They did it in 2004 when they used the 65th overall pick to take Dustin Pedroia. If you want to hold this exercise to just the first round though, well, even then the Red Sox have done well. The following draft, 2005, the Red Sox had the 23rd pick as compensation for Orlando Cabrera signing with the Angels. They used it on outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, the sixth most valuable player (B-R WAR) taken in that draft.

So the Red Sox have scored when they should’ve scored and scored when they probably shouldn’t have scored. But they haven’t always nailed it. In 2010, they used the 20th overall pick on Kolbrin Vitek with Christian Yelich taken three picks later. Vitek never made it above Double-A, retiring four years after being picked. Even so though, the 20th pick isn’t a surefire star waiting to happen. That’s more like a guy you’d hope could turn into a solid contributor. Vitek never was that (why he’s mentioned in this paragraph!) but missing out on the 20th overall pick isn’t something to quit over. Oddly enough, current Red Sox star pitcher Chris Sale was selected seven picks earlier, but I digress.

The real problem, as the Orioles can attest to, is getting a top-ten pick and blowing it on nothing. The Red Sox haven’t officially done that yet, but it’s pretty close. Trey Ball has a 5.53 ERA in Double-A and is looking less like a future rotation cornerstone and more like a guy who gets dropped in the end of an insubstantial trade, or even converted to the outfield because why not? Worse, Boston took Ball with a bunch of still promising guys available (Austin Meadows, JP Crawford, Hunter Dozier, Christian Arroyo, Aaron Judge), though that’s how every draft is. There’s always someone promising available. The trick is knowing who it is.

You have to go pretty far back to find so high a pick go so badly for the Red Sox. In 1995 the Red Sox took pitcher Andy Yount two picks before Roy Halladay went to the Blue Jays, but that was with the 15th overall pick, not the seventh. In 1994 Boston took Nomar Garciaparra with the 12th pick, and in ’93 they took Trot Nixon with the seventh pick. Hard to complain about either, even if Nixon didn’t ever quite live up to the star power that was projected upon him.

Since Theo Epstein took over the GM’s seat in early 2003 the Red Sox have been incredibly good at getting value out of the draft. It’s hard to win three World Series in fifteen years without getting something substantial from the draft. The Red Sox built the foundation of their first World Series winning team through trades and free agency, but their second, the 2007 team came far more from the draft. While there were ’04 crossovers in Jason Varitek and David Ortiz, and free agents like J.D. Drew and Julio Lugo, the ’07 team was also Kevin Youkilis, Jacoby Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia, Jon Lester, and Jonathan Papelbon. The 2013 team was similar in its composition. Lots of free agents and players acquired in trades, but with a solid core of home grown players like Lester, Pedroia, Felix Doubront, Clay Buchholz, Will Middlebrooks, and Ellsbury, with assists from Xander Bogaerts and even Jackie Bradley.

Looking at that 2013 squad, you can still see the roots stretching back to Theo Epstein and Boston’s first world championship in almost a century, but so can you see the future, or as we here in 2017 say, the present. The Red Sox don’t owe it all to the draft. They’re not the Rays or the Astros, but the draft has provided the Red Sox with a lot of value and a sizable amount of star power over the past few decades. So when going to look for Boston’s biggest draft busts or some such thing, you’ll have to be searching for a long time. Or, put more succinctly, the Red Sox aren’t the Orioles. Because when it comes to the draft, the Red Sox are hobgood at it.

Photo by Eric Hartline – USA TODAY Sports

Kid: One box of popcorn, please.
Vendor: Four dollars, kid.
Announcer: It’s gone!
Crowd: [looks bewildered]

So 108 runs more than second place is pretty incredible when you think about it, or even when you don’t. It calls to mind the other three World Series winning teams of recent vintage. The Red Sox led the league in runs scored in 2013, were tied for third in 2007, and first again in 2004. So you can see that a top offense has been a commonality between the Red Sox championship-winning clubs. But is this 2016 offense better? Let’s see how they all stack up! We’ll go position by position to see which team is the best, then total up the scores at the end. 

Catcher

2004: Jason Varitek
2007: Jason Varitek
2013: Jarrod Saltalamacchia
2016: Sandy Leon

The best offensive season here might be Saltalamacchia’s 2013, wherein he hit 14 homers and appeared, not un-Leon-like, out of a fog of irrelevance to become a championship-caliber starter at catcher. Still, Salty’s defense was never very good, a fact that ended up getting him replaced during the World Series by David Ross. Varitek had one of his best seasons both offensively and defensively in 2004, so I’ll give it to ’04 Varitek.

Nod: 2004

DH

This one is David Ortiz, David Ortiz, David Ortiz, and of course, David Ortiz. Ortiz had his best year in 2007 by OPS+ (171) but he’s not far off as he currently sits at 161. This season Ortiz stands as one of the best hitters in baseball, ranking first, second, third, or whatever depending on the stat you pick. Regardless he’s never far from the top.

Nod: 2007

First Base

2004: Kevin Millar
2007: Kevin Youkilis
2013: Mike Napoli
2016: Hanley Ramirez

The similarities are pretty remarkable here. Aside from Millar, all are converted from other positions. Youkilis from third, Hanley from shortstop with a stop in left field, and Napoli from catcher. Also, all had very consistently good offensive seasons, about 20 percent above average. Hanley’s actually had the best offense of the bunch, but weighing the combination of offense, defense, and total sweat output, the winner has to be Youkilis.

Nod: 2007

Second Base

2004: Mark Bellhorn
2007: Dustin Pedroia
2013: Dustin Pedroia
2016: Dustin Pedroia

Again, remarkable similarities in offensive output from all these seasons, all falling in the 10-15 percent above average range. Bellhorn was a great Theo Epstein find, as he came from nowhere and gave the Sox a great offensive season at a position at which they had nothing (Pedroia had just been drafted out of Arizona State months before). Still Bellhorn wasn’t much with the glove. Given the similarities in offensive seasons, I’ll give this to the 2013 squad based on beard quality. 

Nod: 2013 

Shortstop

2004: Nomar Garciaparra/Orlando Cabrera
2007: Julio Lugo
2013: Stephen Drew
2016: Xander Bogaerts

Garciaparra was done as a regular shortstop even if Boston didn’t know it at the time and Cabrera, while a good fielder, wasn’t much over an above average hitter. Lugo was the one regular on the 2007 team who wasn’t actively helping the team win, so they’re out. That leaves Bogaerts whose fall in the second half has dropped his season numbers well below the more defensively stout Drew. It sounds strange to say, but I think Stephen Drew is the answer here. [Editor’s note: wrong and bad opinion]

Nod: 2013

Third Base

2004: Bill Mueller
2007: Mike Lowell
2013: Will Middlebrooks
2016: Travis Shaw

I remember Mueller winning the batting title hitting ninth for the 2004 squad, and he did put together a great slash line, but offense was so bonkers during that era that it wasn’t really that far out of the ordinary. Middlebrooks and Shaw are both weak links in their teams, so the answer here is Lowell, who put together a season in 2007 every bit as good as his teammate Manny Ramirez did. Not bad for a throw-in on the Josh Beckett deal. 

Nod: 2007

Outfielders

2004: Manny Ramirez/Johnny Damon/Gabe Kepler (Trot Nixon was injured a lot that season)
2007: Manny Ramirez/Coco Crisp/J.D. Drew
2013: Jonny Gomes/Jacoby Ellsbury/Shane Victorino
2016: Holt/Bradley/Betts

The current outfield probably comes in second in this group, even if you add Benintendi, which you can’t because Holt has played the most there. The 2004 group had a prime year Manny who basically hit .300/.400/.600 with 43 homers. Damon was good if not great and Nixon was an above average player when he was healthy while Kepler looked a lot better than he played. Still, even with Kepler in there, Manny was just SO good. 

Nod: 2004

Totaling it up, the 2007 team is the winner with wins at DH, first base, and third base. Oddly the 2016 team didn’t win anywhere. Or maybe that isn’t odd. We are comparing it to three World Series winners. Still though, the current team is the league leader in runs scored so maybe I did this wrong, I don’t know. Or maybe what this points to is the tremendous balance that the 2016 offense features. There isn’t anyone who stands out tremendously with the exception of David Ortiz who has been on all the other teams as well. Beyond him, Betts is the standout, but I got seduced by Manny. 

Perhaps that’s the point though. The 2016 Red Sox offense is both very good and very deep. There really isn’t an easy out when Travis Shaw is hitting well and when he’s not, well, eight good hitters is pretty impressive for one lineup. Maybe that will serve them better in the playoffs than it did here.

Photo by Winslow Towson/USA Today Sports Images

Lowe is worth an article himself (I’m sure I’ll get to him at some point), but today it’s time to celebrate Jason Varitek. Famous for being a stalwart Sox player through the entirety of the first decade of the millennium, Varitek was a critical piece of the team’s 2003 playoff run as well as the squad’s 2004 and 2007 World Series victories. The fourth team captain in the franchise’s long history, Varitek remains a beloved and respected figure for the team’s fans today.

At times, Varitek was also lauded as one of the greatest players in the league, or at least one of the game’s best catchers … an assertion that the numbers at the time never really backed up. Today’s goal is to explore Varitek’s overall value and answer a few questions with the new data at hand: was Varitek legendary, or more ordinary?

Instead of breaking down Tek’s value on a year-by-year basis, as I often do in Olde Sox, I’d like to break his performance down into offense and defense. Varitek had a reputation as a good-hitting catcher through most of his career with Boston, and I’d like to touch on his skills and performance in that arena before talking about his defense–an especially appropriate and exciting topic given the release of Baseball Prospectus’s new catching metrics.

So let’s get into it. A switch-hitter with power and on-base skills, Varitek at his best was everything one could want in an offensive catcher. His career True Average (TAv) of .261 posits him as a league-average hitter over his career, no mean feat for a catcher. Catchers typically hit closer to 10% below league-average during that timeframe, so Varitek obviously was a good hitter for a catcher.

A switch-hitter with power and on-base skills, Varitek at his best was everything one could want in an offensive catcher.

How’d he succeed? Varitek hit for a little power with 193 career homers and a .435 slugging percentage. Most of his damage was done in four seasons: 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005. During those years, he wasn’t just a good hitter for a catcher, he was a good hitter. In each of those seasons, his TAv was .277 or higher, which would be suitable for a hitter at nearly any position, not just the toughest one on the diamond.

Varitek was also skilled at reaching base despite a just-okay career batting average and little to no baserunning ability. Tek had a career walk rate of 10.5 percent, which helped him post a career .341 on-base percentage despite his middling .256 batting average. Though his bat earned him only three All-Star berths and a few down-ballot MVP votes, he was a good enough hitter to win a Silver Slugger in 2005.

Also, Varitek was able to succeed in the postseason … once. Truthfully, his overall postseason numbers aren’t that great, but Tek made an effort to power the Sox to the World Series during the 2003 failed bid for the AL pennant. During that run, he hit four homers and posted a .706 slugging percentage in 11 games. Unfortunately, the rest of his postseason career was nothing to write home about–even with those games as part of the calculation, his career postseason line includes a .292 OBP due to a drastically slashed walk rate during October contests.

His one true Achilles’ heel was, well, attached to his heels. In nearly each season of his long, storied career, Varitek cost the team a substantial amount of runs on the basepaths. Over his entire career, he cost the team 40 runs via BP’s BRR metric for baserunning, though other metrics like FanGraphs’ BsR are slightly more forgiving. That’s four or more wins over the life of his career, and often between two and five runs per season. While not a lot of cost individually, this certainly adds up over the course of his career … you could say this is like taking one of his better seasons (before accounting for BP’s new catcher defense stats) and wiping it from the ledger.

Overall, Varitek wasn’t truly a premier offensive catcher, though he did have a few very good seasons, and a host more where he was average or good, if not great. Without FRAA in the conversation, Varitek’s WARP runs 23.2 wins above a replacement player–that’s a good, but not great career total. But, as we know now, offense (and position adjustment) aren’t everything. Varitek had the reputation of a great defensive catcher, and that deserves its day in the sun as well.

Now, with the new catcher defense statistics debuting today as part of “Catchella,” we can break down Tek’s defense into its component parts, and paint an even clearer picture of his excellence. Now, catcher defense has been broken down into four primary metrics, and we can see where Varitek rates among the best backstops at each of them.

We’ll start with the thing that, for many years, was the hallmark of catcher defense: the running game. Varitek never received much in the way of kudos for his arm, and that bears out using a statistic called Swipe Rate Above Average (SRAA). Among the thousands of catchers rated by SRAA, Varitek has the seventh-most runs to the negative in SRAA, having cost the Sox 16.5 runs more than an average catcher. That’s not great, and works out to a little more than a win and a half of value that he cost the team over his career. Funny enough, the guy Varitek unseated at catcher, Scott Hatteberg, has the third-worst SRAA in the existing sample, with -19.6 SRAA over his career.

There’s another, smaller factor in the running game that we can measure, and that’s Takeoff Rate Above Average (TRAA). This measures how good a catcher was not at throwing out runners, but rather preventing them from taking off at all in the first place: holding them on the bag, or using reputation to keep them from stealing. Over his entire body of work, Varitek was worth 0.5 TRAA, a very, very slight positive. Now, most catchers–even the greatest ones–never put up huge numbers in this category, and most registered within a run of average. Varitek’s mark is par for the course … another Sox legend is second all-time, as Carlton Fisk earned a (comparatively) enormous 7.6 TRAA over his career. Johnny Bench, by the way, has the greatest TRAA in history with 12.4 runs above average–a true outlier.

Those first two numbers paint Varitek in a bit of an unflattering light, but the next two redeem him, and then some. Errant Pitches Above Average is a measure of blocking ability the same way the other two measure control of the running game, and by this metric, Varitek is one of the greatest defensive catchers since 1950. Among all catchers, Tek ranks eighth all-time in overall blocking value, sandwiched on the leaderboard between Hall of Famers (and Mets) Mike Piazza and Gary Carter. His score of 10.9 EPAA undoes most of the trouble his arm caused the Sox, and underscores that blocking, while valuable, may only be worth a win or so even during a career as long as Varitek’s.

The real value for a catcher comes from pitch framing, and the BP statistic to judge that is Called Strikes Above Average (CSAA). This measure only dates back as far as 1988, but Varitek has amassed the 13th-most value by that metric over a career since that date. His CSAA of 85.6 tells us that he added more than eight wins to the Red Sox by getting extra called strikes and presenting pitches to the umpire in a favorable light. (This may have been one of the reasons why Varitek also caught a then-record four no-hitters in his career.)

It’s not surprising that Varitek also has the 13th-most overall catcher defense added overall in the history of the game, with a total of 80.5 runs added over his career.

With his CSAA stats so great, it’s not surprising that Varitek also has the 13th-most overall catcher defense added overall in the history of the game, with a total of 80.5 runs added over his career. That’s a huge amount compared to most catchers, and every drop of that value went to the Sox over his 14-year career.

When looking for a comparable to Varitek, it’s easy to bring up Blake Swihart, who also is a switch-hitting catcher with some solid offensive potential. It would take a couple of better-than-league-average offensive seasons for Swi to match up with Tek, but it’s a possibility. The trouble is this: in his 2015 rookie season, Swihart wasn’t nearly a Varitek on defense. In fact, he was nearly the opposite of the long-time vet’s defensive profile. The team’s rookie backstop cost the Sox six runs by framing, and 0.6 EPAA in terms of blocking. Swihart’s arm was fine, earning him no points by TRAA, and 0.3 runs by SRAA.

On the other hand, Christian Vazquez’s 2014 season was an elite framing year, earning him 13.4 CSAA, which is a number that is excellent … and in line with Tek’s best framing seasons. Varitek actually had five seasons in which he posted more CSAA than that, the best of which was a remarkable 25.8 CSAA in 2002. Now, CSAA tends to fluctuate a bit from year to year, so there’s certainly a chance that Swihart could develop his skills more behind the plate and come to approximate Varitek’s value, but right now it’s the other talented young receiver on the roster who looks more similar to Tek in the area that perhaps matters most.

The point of these Olde Sox columns is to help us understand Fenway’s greats just a little bit better through the use of more modern metrics. There’s literally no metric more modern than today’s release of the BP catching statistics, and those are very useful for helping us understand how much value a player like Varitek can earn by playing catcher at a high level for such a long run. His offensive stats, on the other hand, are a member of public record, and have been a mark in his favor for years … in sabermetric circles and otherwise.

Numbers don’t exactly peg Jason Varitek as a Hall-of-Fame player, but he was undeniably a huge part of some of the best and most important seasons in Red Sox history. Today, he’d be a sought-after commodity as teams look for catchers with defensive skills, and his bursts of slugging prowess and on-base ability would make him an asset to any club. But Varitek is also special for his durability and loyalty to the Red Sox, playing 1,546 games in Sox gear. He may not have been the greatest catcher in Red Sox history, but Jason Varitek has a substantial claim as one of the most talented and reliable players in the franchise’s storied existence.