How much does having a good offensive catcher like Adley Rutschman matter? — Yahoo Sports

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

How much does having a good offensive catcher like Adley Rutschman matter? — Yahoo Sports | AIPROPX

Apr 5, 2024; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Baltimore Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman (35) at bat against the Pittsburgh Pirates during the first inning at PNC Park. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports | USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con

Ever since the Red Sox traded for Adley Rutschman on Monday , I’ve been fascinated by the debate over how much having a solid stick behind the plate matters. On one hand, the bat is not your primary focus at that position, and most of the league stinks offensively at catcher anyway, so even if you have a catcher with a slightly above average bat there, he’s still not a true slugger in the vast majority of cases.

But on the other hand, this also makes it the easiest position to get a leg up on everybody else, and in some cases, a huge leg up. For the 2026 Red Sox specifically — who are getting paltry production from their combination of crummy catchers — it screamed the most obvious path for improvement.

And no, I’m not just saying this now that the Sox landed Rutschman. I felt catcher should’ve been the target for the Sox even when most rumors were connecting them to a shortstop.

I'd rather target catcher. While shortstop is a mess with a bevy of broken candidates, I don't have to squint that hard to envision a scenario where Trevor Story, Marcelo Mayer, or even Franklin Arias is there at the end of the year and playing surprisingly well. Catcher? You're… https://t.co/oC7liKaael

— Matthew Gross (@MattGross87) July 27, 2026

So in any case, I started looking back at all the World Series winners over the last several decades and what type of offensive production they got from their catching. And you know what? The results are pretty fascinating. Here’s the raw data going back for the last 50 World Series (1975 to 2025, with 1994 missing because of the strike) and each catcher measured by OPS+.

( For this exercise, I used whatever catcher got the most plate appearance for their team during that championship season and their regular season OPS+. It’s imperfect if you want details, but it gets the job done as a broad overview, and the OPS+ metric being park and league adjusted over time brings everybody onto a level playing field, which is a must in this type of comparison .)

Doing it chronologically makes it easy to find certain guys and seasons, but you can glean even more from the results when you take that same data and organize all the seasons by OPS+. Since this is where some real patterns start to emerge, let’s see what that looks like below:

A few things jump out here immediately. First off, the 2018 Red Sox are a complete anomaly. They had not one, but two completely useless bats at catcher on that roster between Sandy Leon and Christian Vazquez. Together they played 89 and 80 games respectively, and posted an OPS+ of 37 and 46. In other words, if you use either guy for this exercise, you end up with the worst hitting catcher on any World Series team in the last 50 years.

Secondly, the example closest to the 2018 Red Sox almost doesn’t even count, for several reasons. First, we know Yadier Molina is better than that 53 OPS+ he posted in the 2006 regular season, and this was specifically illustrated by the fact he hit .358 with a .971 OPS in 16 games for the Cardinals during the 2006 postseason. Additionally, that 2006 Cardinals team only won 83 regular season games, so they literally only started acting like a World Series team once October started, which is also the precise moment they started getting explosive offensive production from behind the dish. So this is pretty much the exception that proves the rule.

Taking a broader view, above average offensive production from catching compared to the rest of the league tends to be a pretty serious championship building block. For reference, the average OPS+ among catchers in 2026 is 89, and if we look at the second table up there, 33 of the last 50 World Series winning catchers posted an OPS+ of 89 or higher (so we’re talking two thirds of the batch).

If I had to take a guess as to why this is the case, I’d guess it’s because the MLB postseason becomes a game of outs even more than a game of runs, and while many of the catchers on that list weren’t big boppers, they also weren’t automatic outs either, meaning the opponent found it just a little bit more difficult to collect 27 outs against them each night, and ultimately couldn’t do it without cracking over a seven game series.

However, the really fascinating data starts when you look at the names near the top of the table above. Specifically, when you hone in on the guys who posted an OPS+ above 120 during a World Series winning season. If you go from Jason Varitek’s 2004 upwards (121 OPS+ and higher), you get seven names (spanning eleven seasons). Here they are in bulleted form:

Buster Posey

Will Smith

Johnny Bench

Jorge Posada

Yadier Molina

Thurman Munson

Jason Varitek

Do you know what those seven guys all have in common? They all won the World Series more than once! And in Posey, Smith and Posada’s case, it was at least three times. So when you get to this level, not only does a big bat at this position help you win one World Series, it puts you in a hell of a position to eventually go for a second bite at the apple.

So now the question becomes, where does that leave the Sox with Adley Rutschman? Rutschman’s OPS+ right now is 115, and that’s true for both his 2026 season and his career mark. So if he can come back and get just a little bit of a bump from that number and start looking like the guy he was earlier in his career, you start playing with some extremely enticing numbers. (This is undoubtedly the vision the front office saw, and why they paid such a high premium for him.)

Then again, do you know what there’s almost no track record of on that list? A catcher as good as Adley Rutschman switching teams in the middle of a season and then leading that new team to a World Series title that same...