On the face of it, the Cardinals’ decision to call up minor league catcher Tres Barrera didn’t seem like the sort of deal to make headlines around baseball, but the ramifications of it are significant. It’s not so much the call-up of Barrera, but the fact his arrival means St Louis will shift Willson Contreras off catcher for the “next couple of weeks,” as Katie Woo of The Athletic reports, with Andrew Knizner to take over as the primary backstop.
It’s a huge move to shift your star offseason recruit off his primary position just a month into his first season, but the Cards clearly feel this is the best move to help them turn around their 10-23 start to the season. Contreras, signed to a five-year, $87.5M deal in the winter, will now serve as a DH/outfielder for the team, further muddying an already crowded outfield picture in St Louis.
At the plate, Contreras has been his usual self, slashing .280/.361/.421 with a pair of home runs, good for a wRC+ of 119. That’s a slight drop on his numbers from last year but pretty much in line with his career stats. His offensive work was never likely to be the source of any concern, though, with the focus here surely on his work behind the plate.
Catchers are a challenging position to assess statistically, but there’s generally been some question marks over Contreras’ work behind the plate. Concerns over his ability to handle a pitching staff and call a game surfaced around the trade deadline last year when he was with the Cubs, and Chicago wound up holding him onto him until he hit free agency at the end of the season. That’s obviously a tricky concern to really quantify, but it’s certainly worth considering in the wake of this news.
FanGraphs gives him a -1 mark on their framing metric, while Statcast has him about middle of the pack in that regard. As far as pop time goes, Contreras ranks 10th out of MLB catchers and has cut down five of a potential 17 stolen bases so far this season. While he doesn’t rank as elite in either regard, it’s not awful and certainly suggests that there’s more than just catching statistics that are driving this move. While there will surely be some explanation of this move from the Cardinals front office, there’s a good chance their pitching staff’s start to the season played a part here.
St Louis ranks 24th in the majors in starting pitcher ERA, which could be a lot lower were it not for the excellent start made by Jordan Montgomery. Behind the left-hander, Steven Matz, Miles Mikolas and Jack Flaherty are all sporting ERAs well north of 5.0. While the reporting suggests this move is only for the next couple of weeks, it’ll be interesting to see if Contreras can force his way back into handling catching duties or whether this the long-term move.
For now, though, it creates even more uncertainty in the Cardinals' outfield picture. In Saturday’s game, the team ran out Lars Nootbar, Dylan Carlson and Alec Burleson in the outfield, with Contreras handling DH, and that seems like the most common group we’ll see over the next few weeks. Yet the team will welcome back Tyler O’Neill at some stage, and still has top outfield prospect Jordan Walker at Triple-A, while Contreras is expected to feature in the outfield mix as well.
It’s possible Contreras winds up working his way back into the catching picture at some point, but the Cardinals were often speculated as a team that could look to trade an outfielder before this move, and with another key bat now in that mix, a trade certainly seems like a possibility at some point over the summer.
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