When somebody who played as poorly as Yasmani Grandal in 2022 is hitting as well as Yasmani Grandal is the following spring, it'd sure be nice to know if the Cactus League stats are going to translate.
Grandal is hitting .320/.379/.560 with a homer, three doubles and a reasonable six strikeouts over 29 plate appearances. I'm inclined to treat it as noise, but I also want to point out that Grandal's previous two spring trainings foreshadowed the subsequent start to the regular season.
In 2022, Grandal hit .200/.259/.360, and that looked enviable compared to what followed. Grandal's average languished below the Mendoza Line from April 15 to June 3, and he never hit higher than .208 at any point in the season. His slugging percentage dropped below .300 on April 17, and stayed there the rest of the season.
In 2021, Grandal hit .233/.294/.233 during Cactus League play, then followed it up with some of the weirdest lines you'll ever see (on May 9, Grandal was hitting .113/.378/.242). Midseason knee surgery fixed the glitch. If only it was his only knee surgery that year.
Maybe Grandal is typically a slow starter, but in 2020, he immediately generated excitement by going 5-for-15 with four extra-base hits in six games before the COVID-19 outbreak cancelled spring training. The interruption was so profound that you can't draw a straight line from the end of Cactus League play to Opening Day here, but it was the one season that he hit like any previous version of himself from the get-go.
Acknowledging that the sample sizes are sketchy, Grandal is 3-for-3 in using spring training to tell us about whether he'll be able to summon any kind of expected offense out of the gate. I wouldn't give that a ton of weight, but I felt inspired to look it up when going through Statcast's new catcher blocking metric, because the three years of data are similarly blunt about Grandal's steep decline.
You can read about the uses of the tool here, and you can start generating your own reports here, but here are Grandal's run values in blocking during his time on the South Side:
- 2020: +1
- 2021: -3
- 2022: -11
You might be surprised to find that Grandal was ever considered an average blocker of balls, but the breakdown on the leaderboard makes sense to me. He created all his values on tough chances, which jibes with the eye test suggesting he let his guard down on easier chances, or turned rather routine pitches into passed balls because of his attempt to frame them.
Nobody would be surprised to see that Grandal allowed a whopping 36 passed pitches in 2022 when the data only estimated 25 because everything about his game was rickety.
Grandal says he feels way better this spring, and you don't even need to suspend skepticism to acknowledge why that could be the case. He doesn't have any new surgeries to rehab, and there aren't any interruptions like a pandemic or a lockout to interfere with his physical preparation. The lack of radical infield shifting should also reward his best swings, so that's another point in his favor.
The skepticism starts when predicting how much Grandal will contribute once the games count, because all it takes is one wrong step or awkward twist to aggravate his knees or back, and his base will evaporate once more. There's even silver lining here for the pessimists, because if the precedent holds, the Statcast tool should be suitable for sizing up against the untrained scouting reports, and we can at least be informed grumps.
There's also some upside with the White Sox's other catcher. Seby Zavala strikes out a ton and lacks a great arm, but he provides a true complement for Grandal in this department thanks to some major improvement:
- 2021: -7 over 1,012 opportunities
- 2022: +4 over 2,031 opportunities
It'd be great if Zavala could hold these gains because you can pair it with his decent framing to present him as a defense-first catcher, which then mitigates the effects of his 30-percent strikeout rate and team-worst contact rate. Ideally, a backup catcher defends well enough that there's always a reason to play him, even if everybody would prefer to see less of him. Zavala's arm probably is what it is, but it's cool to see him doing what he can to shore up the rest of his game.
It's also cool to see Zavala hitting 5-for-16 with two homers and four walks in 22 spring plate appearances this year. If either one of these catchers can turn Cactus League results into regular-season success, they should have enough production to last the year.
