Seby Zavala entered Tuesday's opener against the Yankees hitting .153/.189/.235 with 36 strikeouts over 90 plate appearances, the second-highest strikeout rate of anybody with as many plate appearances as he has.
Yet he's also catcher, which makes it difficult to single him out, since so many other teams have to wrestle with the same dilemma.
The one guy ahead of him on that K-rate list is Cleveland's starting catcher (Mike Zunino, 42.4 percent), and Jake Rogers isn't far behind with Detroit (37.2 percent). It's hard for teams to find one playable option behind the plate, so the backups tend to be freely swapped about until one works, like so many USB thumb drives.
Yet just like so many USB thumb drives, teams generally like to have some level of trust before plugging and playing, because a bad one can pose larger problems. Basically, if the first two or three options falter, the desperation and dread spike pretty quickly.
While the White Sox had a score of problems while losing a score of games in April, catching wasn't one of them. But while the rest of the White Sox started showing signs of life in May, their catching situation started caving in on them.
And if you want to itemize those catchers:
| Catcher | April PA | April Line | May PA | May Line |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grandal | 93 | .241/.323/.446 | 77 | .296/.351/.352 |
| Zavala | 35 | .182/.229/.303 | 54 | .137/.167/.196 |
Because Grandal and Zavala are both credible receivers, there managed to be eight teams that fared the same or worse in May, including the Guardians bringing up the rear by a considerable margin.
It's not necessarily a back-breaker than the White Sox have a bottom-third catching corps, even if FanGraphs' preseason projections had them at 10th. That initial assessment struck me as bullish; a clumsy attempt to balance Grandal's sterling track record against a nosedive with very real reasons underneath it. Grandal's OPS starts with a "7" instead of a "5" this time around, but we're still seeing the limitations of his leg and back problems. You'd rather him sacrifice some OBP for some ISO if he has the choice because it's painful watching him run the bases, but he also may not have the choice. He is what he is, whatever that is.
Zavala didn't have to replace Grandal's missing production in order to salvage the position, but he had to provide stable second-catcher work along the lines of Reese McGuire prior to the doomed Jake Diekman trade. His May could be masked by the White Sox's easy schedule, but if it carried into June against a tougher slate of opponents, he, and the White Sox's catching setup as a whole, could end up failing the stress test.
His performance at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night was more like it. Zavala doubled his season homer total by going deep twice, and the second one would've been a homer in any park at any time in baseball history, because it might still be rolling.
Zavala raised his OPS nearly 100 points in a single day, and if he keeps that up, he'll be leading the All-Star voting within a fortnight. In reality, he just needs to spend the rest of the month stabilizing somewhere around his pre-2023 career levels (.233/.303/.368) in order to be serving his purpose.
It doesn't make sense to spend much more time dwelling on Zavala, because has has as many homers as Tim Anderson, Andrew Benintendi, Oscar Colás, Elvis Andrus and Yoán Moncada combined. The White Sox's larger hopes ride on so many underachievers elsewhere.
But it's at worth spending a day to acknowledge how critical adequacy is here, because unlike third base, second base or right field, the White Sox can't address the position with waiver-wire fodder or players who previously wore other gloves. The Sox are probably going to stick by Grandal and Zavala, with the hope that they play well enough to make sticking by an active decision, rather than a passive situation of being stuck with them.
