It seems a little bit crazy that we’ve reached this point in the 2022 fantasy baseball season where we look at the catcher position and ask what we need to be doing? It’s certainly been a spot where we’ve had an abundance of waiver wire acquisitions and this week is no different. Adley Rutschman has been sluggish for the first few weeks of his career but he had a pretty big game on Saturday. However, once Rutschman got the official call up to the big leagues, Gabriel Moreno was on the watch list Major League Baseball’s incumbent top prospect at the catcher position. And sure enough, he got the call over the weekend.

 

Without a doubt there will be questions about Moreno’s status and what you should do for fantasy baseball. To start it’s worth being honest with ourselves and admitting he doesn’t possess a ton of power. In 2021-2022 between Double-A and Triple-A he hit nine home runs in 71 games. That’s good, but not great based on what we’ve seen from better power hitters at those levels. He’s more of an “overall hitter’ in the sense that he hits for contact to get on base and once he develops into a good big-league hitter he could be the kind of player that hits .300 but let’s keep expectations in check. At least he collected his first big league hit over the weekend…

And there was this great release before Bo Bichette blundered the tag…

The concerns with Moreno have to do with whether he was brought up too soon. There’s no doubt about it, the injury to Danny Jansen’s hand escalated the situation. Make no mistake about it, Alejandro Kirk is not going to lose playing time to Gabriel Moreno. Kirk has been great this year hitting .325/.404/.481 and while the counting stats haven’t been otherworldly, he still has 24 runs scored with 18 RBI and he is flexing the plate discipline with just a 9.6% strikeout rate.

The Blue Jays have seven games in the upcoming scoring period and they’re all at home against the Baltimore Orioles (four games) and New York Yankees (three games). The good news for the Blue Jays is that if they want to get both Kirk and Moreno in the lineup, they can slot Kirk at DH and Moreno at catcher as we saw on Sunday. 

Alejandro Kirk is still locked in as a top ten catcher. Does the presence of Gabriel Moreno change that? Absolutely not. Most fantasy baseball rankings may slot Moreno in as a top 15 option but playing time will dictate if he can stick around in that range. I’m not entirely optimistic. We recently have seen Adley Rutschman come up and struggle offensively as the big-league level and he possesses much more power than Moreno.

Moreno is at least in a position where the Blue Jays don’t need to overfeed him with plate appearances. If he needs to gain his confidence on the defensive side of the ball, then so be it. But he’s a top prospect that is on a winning team at the moment who needs depth due to the broken hand of Danny Jansen. Is there a little pressure on Moreno? Sure. But let’s not act like the Blue Jays will overuse him.

However, Moreno does possess a short swing where he can put the ball in any area of the ballpark. His bat speed and overall plate discipline lead us to believe he can maintain a good batting average even if he’s just a 20-home run kind of player once he’s fully developed. Long-term Gabriel Moreno is expected to be another pillar in the Blue Jays staple of talented and loaded prospects next to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alek Manoah, and Bo Bichette. 

There’s no doubt that Moreno should be added in two-catcher formats, but I’m a little more hesitant in one-catcher leagues where he won’t cut too deep into the production of Alejandro Kirk. If the injury was to Kirk over Danny Jansen then we might be looking at a top 12 option at the catcher position. But given the current situation we may very well see struggles for Moreno similar to Adley Rutschman and we still need to figure out exactly how they’ll utilize both Moreno and Kirk.

It’s not that Moreno isn’t a bad waiver wire acquisition. We’ve clearly seen Toronto mix in two viable options at the catcher position. The hitting profile leads me to believe he can contribute if he isn’t trying to overcompensate for power. But given the notion that he’s a rookie and being called upon in an injury situation, we do still need to keep expectations in check. Moreno is a top 20 option at the catcher position but unless anything drastic comes from him in the upcoming scoring period, we shouldn’t see a negative correlation for Alejandro Kirk.

 

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