Shea Langeliers Emerging as One of Baseball's Best Catchers

Following a competitive 2021 season for the A's that ultimately led them to missing the playoffs, the team decided to trade away some of their talent as they had a ton of arbitration eligible players that were due big raises, and were still too many pieces away from being successful.

So, in a slew of trades, star first baseman Matt Olson would get dealt to the Atlanta Braves for a package including prospect backstop, Shea Langeliers.

Langeliers would go ahead to debut in the following summer, but his first two seasons with the A's were a little bit underwhelming, which caused fans to be concerned about 'losing' the Matt Olson trade.

In 2024, Langeliers would step up his game, although only finishing with a .739 OPS, he would hit 29 home runs. This would raise some excitement for Shea, but having a poor batting average and holding a just above league average OPS were certainly areas where he could grow.

Something would start to click for Langeliers in 2025 as he burst onto the scene, winning the American League Player of the Month in August. In that month, he hit 11 home runs and had a .968 OPS. It wasn't just a hot August for Shea, though, as he posted a .900+ OPS in July, August, and September. He also showed some ability to hit for average as he batted .353 in September.

Much like Tyler Soderstrom, Langeliers was finding success going the other way a bit more, and he drastically cut down his strikeout rate from 27.2% down to 19.7%, which is a huge jump.

Heading into the off-season, the catcher is one of the A's extension candidates. The team handed out extensions last off-season to Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler, and will look to add to that list this off-season. He'll be an attractive candidate because having your backstop locked up is a plus, as he'll serve as a key member of the A's lineup as long as he's on the team.

Offensive production from MLB's catchers has improved over the years, as before the position had very little value offensively. However, in today's MLB, there are guys like Mariners' backstop Cal Raleigh that are swatting 60 home runs in a single season. While this isn't the norm by any means, it does show how much value a backstop can add at the plate.

According to CBS Sports Fantasy Baseball catcher rankings, they have Shea Langeliers as the third-ranked catcher in all of baseball. The only two in front of Shea are Raleigh and William Contreras. You could certainly even argue that Langeliers had a better 2025 season than Contreras, who funnily enough landed in Milwaukee in the Sean Murphy trade with Atlanta.

Both catchers had the same 3.9 WAR, but Shea had 31 homers to Contreras' 17, and Langeliers had 17 more points on his batting average (.277), and around 110 more points to his OPS (.861).

No matter how you put it, Shea Langeliers is a consensus top-3 catcher in baseball right now, and he's only going up from here as he continues to gain more years of experience under his belt. After a great second half of 2025, the catcher will be looking to keep it going in the first half of his 2026 season to put himself in a position to become an All-Star for the first time in his career.