Better know your Blue Jays 40-man: Danny Jansen

Danny Jansen may be our most successful homegrown catcher since (if you could see the pages flipping back in my mind now) Pat Borders. Pat was drafted in the 1982 draft. Between then and now, there have been a lot of catchers of the future come and go.

Skipping the ones who never, or barely, made the majors. We are down to guys like:

• Sandy Martinez caught 141 games for the Jays
• Greg Myers got 9 at-bats in 1987, 17 in 1989, then 194 over the next two seasons, then 24 in 1992, before being traded away. He came back in 2004, playing 121 games, then 14 over the next two seasons.
• J.P. Arencibia, who played in 380 games, spread over four seasons.

Danny has played four seasons and 251 games for the Jays. One of those four seasons was Covid shortened to 60 games.

If you want a battle of the bWAR:

• Jansen: 3.6.
• Myers: 2.8 (most of that, 2.4, coming in 2003 when he returned to the team)
• Arencibia: 2.4
• Martinez: -1.3.

If you want to be technical, the most successful Jays' catcher of the future would be Carlos Delgado, but he didn't have his success as a catcher.

When he came up, we were told he was an offence-first catcher whose glove would be good enough. Instead, he's been a glove-first catcher whose bat wasn't good enough. At first, we thought that he was spending all his time working on his defense and learning his pitchers.

Last year his bat was a fair bit better, .223/.299/.473 with 11 home runs in 70 (missing a fair bit of time with a hamstring injury, missing most of June and a reoccurrence that cost him all of August.

When he went on the DL the first time, he was hitting just .157/.248/.278. However, the rest of the season he hit .316/.374/.750. If he can do more of the latter, Gabriel Moreno will spend most of the year in Triple-A. If we get the former, we'll see Moreno much sooner.

Danny turns 27 next month. He will be losing the excuse that he's a young catcher, and we have to forgive his hitting.

PECOTA figures him to play 76 games hit 9 home runs, with a .235/.326/.408 batting line for a 1.6 WAR. It's always best to project fewer games for catchers. Injuries happen to them. I'm going to hope for more home runs and more games. But that kind of depends on what the team thinks of Moreno, Kirk, and McGuire to a lesser extent.

I like Danny, but Moreno looks like a star, and Kirk's bat is hard to ignore. It would be great if Jansen could build up some trade value this year. Jansen may have been the COTF, but we have other COTFs (I guess that should be CsOTF). Danny's team as our catcher may be running out.