After a strong start to his career, Wong has stalled. But that could change in 2025.
A year and a half ago, I wrote about the potential for Connor Wong to be right on par with other AL East catchers who were considered some of the best at their craft. Since then… he hasn’t quite lived up to those standards.
Currently, FanGraphs ranks the Red Sox’ catching 28th in the league, which isn’t great. Even less ideal is the fact that the Orioles, Blue Jays and Yankees rank within the top-7 of those depth chart rankings, and even the Rays who have Danny Jansen and a dude who hadn’t logged more than 40 games in a season since last year are ranked 21st. While the Red Sox’s ranking is definitely not helped by the fact that Carlos Narvaez is their No. 2, Wong’s value impacts this a lot as well, as his 0.6 fWAR is 1.3 away from the next closest starter’s WAR from last season, which is Jansen at 1.9.
Wong’s offense hasn’t been anything to write home about and hasn’t been the most consistent, but his .265/.314/.401 slash line since I wrote about him on June 22nd of 2023 is something I’ll definitely take from a catcher. The 27% K% certainly needs to be fixed, but his 13 home runs last season were encouraging, along with his just above-average .145 ISO.
But it’s Wong’s defense that’s been the real killer over the past year and a half, as Fangraphs currently ranks him at -10.8 in their fielding metric, and he ranks in the third and ninth percentile, respectively, of Baseball Savant’s blocks above average and framing measurements. Wong does throw out more baserunners than average, but overall ranks in the first percentile of fielding run value.
This has been a known thing. Wong has never been great at framing, and struggled significantly more in all defensive categories last year. But with Kyle Teel out of the organization and Narvaez and “Blake Sabol” as the two backups coming into spring training, it’s time for Wong to step up in his third full season as a major league catcher.
While the Red Sox lineup will have plenty of offense to carry Wong’s average at-best bat (which is what it has been for a catcher over the past year-and-a-half), his defensive woes will hurt them more than ever now that he’s not paired with a veteran like Reese McGuire. He will have to significantly improve on his defense to be a real, full-time starting catcher on a team that needs him to be just that.
Even though Wong hasn’t quite boosted my confidence in him since I wrote about the come-up he was having in the first half of 2023, a story by Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic last week shone a really positive light on the training he put in over the offseason in search of real improvements. Possibly the best thing to learn from this article was that Wong’s resolution for improvement came months before the Teel trade, when he was in a spot to fight for competition later in the season and had no guarantee for a spot that’s been firmly within his grasp for the past two years.
I won’t say that Teel was the reason for him searching for improvement, nor do I think that would be a fair assumption, but Wong definitely chose the right offseason to really lock down and improve the defensive side of his game.
With Jason Varitek taking on much greater roles than just working with the organization’s catchers, Boston recently brought in a few new faces to have a bigger focus on catching coaching. Wong specifically connected with new bullpen catcher and catching instructor Parker Guinn, with whom he has worked to refine his positioning to receive the ball and refine his receiving techniques.
But while also working on the technical aspect of his game, Wong touched on something maybe even more important: his nutrition. At 6-foot-1, Wong is a relatively big catcher, but he ended last season listed at 185 pounds and has never weighed over 200 pounds. But over the offseason, he worked with a nutritionist and used a Whoop watch to track his calories for the day, which really helped him to be able to stay in the calorie surplus that he needed to be in in order to add on weight. With a winter of working on this, Wong hit 200 pounds for the first time and hopes to break camp at 205, but added that he worked to add on the weight quickly in order to get used to it and focused on gaining healthy weight and maintaining his athleticism through that. With Wong ranking as one of the fastest catchers in the division, this is definitely a perk he wants to keep going, and he looks to be doing so through the start of camp.
With all of this, I hope and believe that Wong can make significant improvements behind the plate this year. His offense isn’t the most consistent, but is fine for what you should expect a catcher to provide. If he can make improvements on the framing and blocking end of his defense, he could be right back in the conversation with the Alejandro Kirks and Adley Rutschmans of the division.