The catching position was the strongest on the team for many years in Minnesota. Once a highly anticipated prospect, hometown boy and former first overall choice Joe Mauer became the 2009 American League MVP and three-time batting champion. He maintained the position for ten years, hitting.323/.405,.469 in over five thousand plate appearances between 2004 and 2013.
The Twins struggled to find an internal alternative, so they turned things over to a string of veterans when concussions forced Mauer to switch to first base.
Both Jason Castro and Kurt Suzuki signed multi-year contracts to be Minnesota’s starting catchers. In reality, those contracts worked out very well; Suzuki made the 2014 All-Star team and hit.263/.316/.364 over the course of three seasons. In his three seasons, Castro hit.229/.325/.390 while also providing excellent defense.
Along the way, the Twins were able to produce one elite offensive catcher in Mitch Garver, but they had trouble keeping him healthy. Eventually, Garver was traded for Ronny Henriquez and Isiah Kiner-Falefa by the Rangers. After that, Kiner-Falefa and Josh Donaldson were traded to the Yankees for Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela, giving the Twins access to Donaldson’s remaining $92 million deal.
During that captivating carousel, 2018 second-round pick Ryan Jeffers got lost in the shuffle. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the UNC-Wilmington product had a strong start, slashing.273/.355/.436 in a limited sample of 62 plate appearances.
But in almost 30% of his plate appearances that season, Jeffers fanned, and in the next two seasons, his contact problems worsened even further.
He only hit 203, 277, and 384 with a 32.4% strikeout rate from 2021 to 2022. Despite his obvious power (21 home runs and a.182 ISO in 529 plate appearances), Jeffers was a much below-average hitter due to contact problems.
After a successful 2022 season, the Twins signed veteran Christian Vazquez to a three-year, $30 million contract that was largely in line with market expectations.
Though Jeffers wasn’t put in a typical backup role going into the 2023 season, it was expected that he and Vazquez would split time behind the plate, with Vazquez’s superior defense perhaps taking up a bit more of the effort. In the initial months of the season, that’s exactly how things transpired as well.
Compared to Jeffers’ 157 first-half plate appearances, Vazquez received 202. Vazquez hit just.210/.287/.265 over that span, but he still delivered his usual style of outstanding defense. Conversely, Jeffers hit.256/.357/.421—numbers that are more consistent with his impressive 2020 rookie campaign.
The distribution of playing time swung the opposite way after the All-Star break. Jeffers was the one whose name was called most frequently, with 178 plate appearances compared to Vazquez’s 153. In the second half of the season, Vazquez’s offensive game showed some improvement, but Jeffers’ output shot to levels not seen by a Minnesota catcher in a long time.
The 26-year-old blasted 10 home runs and bashed at a.294/.379/.549 rate in the last two and a half months of the season. That was 54% better than the league-average hitter by wRC+. Furthermore, Jeffers’ breakout was especially noteworthy because catchers typically hit for 12% less than average.
Nor did it seem to be straightforward small-sample noise. Jeffers improved his contact rate significantly after the break last season, fanned at a lower but still above-average 26.4% clip. This includes a strikeout percentage in the last month of the season of just 17.1%. Although Jeffers didn’t abruptly cut down on his chase rate for pitches outside the plate, he generally adopted a more aggressive stance and appeared to gain from it.
In September, his overall swing rate of 50.3% was significantly higher than the 43.7% of pitches he had offered in the five months before. In the last month of play, he made contact on 71.4% of his chases off the plate and 87.8% of his swings inside the strike zone, up from 57.5% and 82.2%, respectively, on his previous performance.
Five weeks into the 2024 season, Jeffers has continued exactly where he left off in September of last year. In his 107 plate appearances this season, he has already blasted five home runs, batting.300/.393/.556. His strikeout percentage of 16.8% is easily a career low. He is still using the more aggressive strategy he displayed in the latter part of last year; he is swinging at a 47.4% clip and making greater contact both off the plate and inside the zone than he did before September of last year.
Jeffers has established himself as the Twins’ starting pitcher of choice. Of their 30 games, he has played in 27, 14 as a catcher, and 11 as a designated hitter. Jeffers is now frequently batting in the top third of manager Rocco Baldelli’s lineup. This year, he has batted first, second, or third in 70% of his plate appearances.
Jeffers has always been a heavy hitter against left-handed pitchers (career.267/.362/.487), but since Opening Day 2023, he has been hitting.285/.368/.489 against righties, which is a significant improvement from his.185/.256/.361 slash line against righties from 2020 to 22.
Despite the previous discussion around Vazquez’s defense, it’s important to remember that Jeffers is by no means a weakling in that area. Despite Statcast’s dismal performance last season (five fewer blocks than normal) in his ability to stop balls in the dirt, Jeffers has consistently received high overall marks from Defensive Runs Saved. However, in each of the remaining nine seasons of his big league career, Jeffers has performed better than average in that area. According to FanGraphs and Statcast, Jeffers has been an average or superior pitch framer overall.
Throughout his career, he has had a somewhat below-average caught-stealing rate, but a large portion of that is due to his dismal 13% caught-stealing rate as a rookie. In 2023, Jeffers caught 25% of the thieves (compared to a league average of 21%), and in 2024, he is 0 for 5 (23%).
There are seventy-five major league catchers with at least 100 plate appearances since the previous season. With a 146 wRC+, Jeffers leads the field by a wide margin; the Contreras brothers, who rank second and third on that list, respectively, come in at 133 and 132.
While Jeffers’ sample size of 442 plate appearances is still small, since last year he has quietly outperformed talents like Will Smith, the Contreras brothers, Ashley Rutschman, and Sean Murphy in terms of hits per plate appearance.
Jeffers has established himself as one of the best hitters in the game at his position, even though his more evenly distributed timeshare with Vazquez and worse defensive abilities when compared to players like Murphy, Rutschman, Patrick Bailey, and others will likely prevent him from topping the WAR leaderboards.
The signing of Vazquez may have relieved some of Jeffers’ burden, but the Twins’ recent summer payroll reduction efforts, along with Vazquez’s breakout at the plate, made that signing appear unnecessary. Vazquez is a defender par excellence, but in 421 plate appearances as a Twin, he is hitting.222/.273/.309.
That $10 million in yearly compensation should be used more wisely for a team that faced some fairly obvious payroll limits from ownership throughout the summer.
That’s not to belittle Vazquez; if the Twins ownership had only permitted the front office to keep the payroll at roughly $155 million from the previous season, managing his salary wouldn’t even be that difficult, and he would undoubtedly gain intangible value from working with Jeffers and the team’s pitching staff.
Even yet, the Twins invested a fair amount of money to acquire a starting-caliber backstop, only to have one of their young, internal choices turn out to be the reliable backstop they had been looking for all along.
With his first-ever arbitration hearing salary of $2.425 million this season, Jeffers is still incredibly affordable for the Twins. If he can maintain his current level of performance leading up to Opening Day 2023, he will undoubtedly receive a significant increase in compensation. He is controllable through the 2026 season and will be eligible for the ARB twice more.
Though it’s unlikely that Jeffers, a client of Boras Corporation, would sign a long-term contract, it’s difficult to imagine the Twins wouldn’t be open to working out a deal to keep him in Minneapolis longer than he’s currently scheduled to stay.
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