The Twins Should Target James McCann as a New Half-Solution at Catcher

Though it's theoretically possible for the Twins to trade either Ryan Jeffers or Christian Vázquez this winter, it seems much more likely that they'll ship out Vázquez. He's set to cost them about twice as much as Jeffers in 2025, and while he's a far superior defender to Jeffers, it's the younger, strapping Jeffers who can deliver major offensive firepower when he gets hot. The Twins might slightly prefer a great defender to a good hitter, but they have to prioritize their budget, and they have Jeffers under team control through 2026, unlike Vázquez.

Let's imagine the roster after a Vázquez trade, then. Over the last two seasons, the Twins have balanced their catching workload between their two backstops as evenly as any team in baseball history over a similar span. Though they won't have Vázquez back to carry his half of the load in 2025, they'll want someone they can trust to work roughly in parity with Jeffers. With the free-agent pickings slim and their financial constraints telling, though, finding the right player to fill that void could be tricky.

Enter James McCann. No, he's not sexy. McCann, who will turn 35 in June, has become a professional backup catcher, playing between 60 and 70 games in each of the last three seasons. He's not an above-average hitter or an above-average defender. However, he'd be a huge step up offensively from Vázquez, who has put up DRC+ figures of 67 and 72 in his two seasons with the Twins, according to Baseball Prospectus. McCann has posted 89, 91, and 99 marks since the start of 2022. He doesn't have great plate discipline, but he's still capable of hitting the ball quite hard, and runs slightly above-average barrel rates. Defensively, he's a subpar framer, but he throws well.

McCann is at his best when pulling the ball in the air, which is part of why his numbers have been fairly hideous for the last two seasons. He has all-fields punch, because he's exceptionally strong, but he couldn't find the range to hit the ball out to right field with any consistency at Camden Yards. Meanwhile, the high, distant wall in left field stole a bunch of home runs from him, though it turned most of them into doubles, rather than outs.

In the image above, I've overlaid his hits onto Target Field's dimensions, to show how much he would benefit from joining Minnesota. It's not a perfect form of analysis, but it gets us closer to seeing his real value. Here's an example of the types of balls that Walltimore kept in the park over the last two years, but which would easily leave the yard in Minneapolis.

Of the 372 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances over the last two seasons, only two had larger gaps between their expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) and their actual results (wOBA) than did McCann. Those numbers can tell their own kinds of lies, and at his age, there's every chance that McCann's skill set will crumble all at once. On balance, though, he's a solid bet, and the market for catchers has already petered out a bit. Guys like Danny Jansen and Gary Sánchez ($8.5 million apiece on one-year deals) are off the board. So are the slightly better options—the guys who earned two-year deals, like Carson Kelly, Kyle Higashioka, and Travis d'Arnaud. 

There are still teams who want and need catching help, but McCann slots in at a lower tier than any of the players named above, and he's unlikely to be in high demand. The Twins could probably snare him for $4 million or less on a one-year deal, and at that price, he would give them similar production to that of Vázquez, plus the flexibility to improve other aspects of the roster. McCann is the right target to replace Vázquez, but before the Twins can even consider being the team who snaps him up, they have to find a taker for Vázquez. Frustrating though salary dump trades always are, this one needs to be a priority for the team as the new year begins, to pave the way for an overall improvement.