They take longer to develop than players at other positions, and they have shorter peaks, too. They fall off out of nowhere, and they get hurt more often, too – and those things aren't unrelated, unfortunately. It actually has more in common with pitcher than any of the other hitting positions, because of how much outcomes are determined by who avoids attrition as much as anything else.
We're going to spend the next couple of weeks taking a very, very early look at 2027 rankings before unveiling the first look at rankings the first week after the season ends. Before then, I'm going to be writing about the toughest players to rank for every position, and of course, we're talking about catcher. As you may have heard, catcher is a position that is in a bit of a renaissance.
Of course, that was more true earlier in the season. At the All-Star break, we had five different catcher-eligible players ranked among the top-100 overall players in Fantasy, with three more inside of the top 112. Things have looked a lot worse since the All-Star break, as only three catchers rank among the top 100 since then.
Only Drake Baldwin, Hunter Goodman, and William Contreras were both top-120 players in both periods, with Ben Rice, Ivan Herrera and Dillon Dingler slumping and Hunter Goodman and Shea Langeliers suffering injuries that kept them off the field for long stretches. Things never stay the same for long at catcher, and even when it looks like things are changing for the better, you should expect things to go sideways eventually. That's just the nature of the position, and it makes it arguably the toughest to figure out.
And the stakes are going to be higher than ever in 2027 drafts, because catchers are surely going to go higher than usual, second-half, position-wide swoon or not. It's important to get it right, so let's take our first look at some of the names who will cause us the most anguish come 2027 draft season. Raleigh was the toughest catcher to rank for 2026, too, but for precisely opposite reasons as this season.
This time a year ago, he was putting the finishing touches on maybe the greatest season a catcher has ever had offensively, and there was no question where he ranked among his peers at the position – first! The question was how high could you justify ranking him among everyone else? As it turned out, any reasonable ranking for Raleigh would have been way too high, as he suffered through some historically bad regression, putting together the worst full season of his MLB career.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
