Article: The Case for Carlos Narváez

[Davy Andrews]

The minor league data says that Carlos Narváez is an excellent pitch framer. The spring training data says he might be one of the best in all of baseball.

If you went into the offseason hoping the Red Sox would focus on upgrading at the catcher position, you weren’t alone. With trade acquisition Danny Jansen a free agent and Connor Wong due for regression after a too-good-too-be-true offensive performance in 2024, the team needed either a new starter or, at the very least, a decent backup. Once the Red Sox traded Kyle Teel away in the Garrett Crochet deal, the need became all the more pressing, and once again, you weren’t alone if you felt underwhelmed by the three moves the team made.

The Red Sox signed Seby Zavala to a minor league deal, traded pitching prospect Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz to the Yankees in exchange for Carlos Narváez, and traded international bonus pool space to the Giants in exchange for Blake Sabol. Zavala is a glove-first 31-year-old with 2.3 fWAR to his name. Narváez is a 25-year-old who has performed adequately on offense in the minors, but his reputation is also as a defensive specialist. Sabol is 25, and was once a fairly-well regarded prospect, but has failed to put it together over the last two years.

On Thursday, the plan became clear. The Red Sox optioned Sabol to the minors, and appear set to name Narváez as Wong’s backup to start the season. If and when the team sends Zavala down, he should have the opportunity to opt out, looking for a chance to catch on with another team before accepting a minor league assignment. So what made the team decide to go with Narváez? It probably isn’t the .226 average he’s run in spring training.

Narváez has “an incredible track record as a defender at the minor league level,” Red Sox catching instructor Parker Guinn said to MassLive. “He was one of the top, if not the top defender in Triple A last year. Incredible receiver." That's why the Red Sox want him. He's an excellent pitch framer. Unfortunately for us, public framing data for the minor leagues can be hard to come by, so I pulled information from Baseball Savant’s new minor league search tool. I focused on pitches in the shadow zone, which includes any pitch that’s within one baseball's-width of the edge of the strike zone. It’s the pale pink area in the diagram below, zones 11 through 19.

Those are the pitches where a catcher’s framing comes into play, so I looked at every minor league catcher who received at least 1,000 tracked pitches there over the past two seasons. That gave me a sample size of 121 players. Narváez has caught 3,230 such pitches, converting 45% of them for strikes. That’s not an incredible percentage. It puts him in just the 55th percentile, which doesn’t sound elite at all. However, not all of that is Narváez’s fault.

The shadow zone includes pitches both inside and outside the strike zone. Just 42% of the shadow zone pitches Narváez’s received were actually in the strike zone, the third-lowest total of all the catchers in our sample. In other words, he converted an above-average percentage of strikes even though almost no one had a smaller percentage of pitches that should rightfully have been called strikes. If you subtract those two numbers: each catcher’s called strike rate minus the percentage of pitches that should have been called strikes, Narváez comes in at 3% above his expected called strike rate. That differential ranks 20th among all catchers, putting him in the 86th percentile.

If we just look at pitches inside the strike zone, Narváez earned called strikes 86% of the time, which ranks 12th. He converted just over 15% of pitches outside the zone, which ranked 36th. In other words, any time a pitch was close, Narváez was toward the top of the minor leagues in making it look like a strike. Over at Baseball America, they broke the numbers down slightly differently, looking only at the stats after June 25, when Triple-A implemented the full-time challenge system: “During that time, he got called strikes on 85% of pitches in the shadow area of the zone, ranking eighth among Triple-A catchers in that time. He drew strikes on 26% of shadow pitches outside the zone, which was best among Triple-A catchers by a huge margin.” 

If that's not enough for you, let's dive into spring training numbers. As of Friday, Narváez has received 156 Statcast-tracked pitches that were in both the strike zone and the shadow zone. He has converted 68 of them for strikes. In fact, here's a pitch chart that shows all 68 of them.

Those 68 strikes represent a 47.1% conversion rate. Among the 118 catchers who have received at least 100 pitches in the same location, that's the second-best conversion rate in spring training. On shadow zone pitches outside the zone, his 12.1% conversion rate ranks 18th. Almost no one has been better than Narváez this spring. 

I know I've thrown a lot of numbers at you, but the bottom line is pretty clear: The Red Sox might be onto something here. Narváez really does seem to be elite when it comes to earning extra strikes for his pitchers. There’s real data, quite a bit of it at this point, behind the assertion that Narváez has the chance to be an excellent defender in Boston this season. 

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[moonslav59]

I'm wondering if Narvaez ends up with more starts than Wong in 2025.