Tyler Heineman is a 34-year-old journeyman catcher. He\u2019s 35 in June, so it will go down as his age 35 season<\/p>\n
He\u2019s played parts of six seasons in the majors. His 174 PA in 2025, tied his career high. Also, his .289 batting average was a career high, as well as the 3 home runs.<\/p>\n
He had a 1.9 bWAR, giving him a 2.6 career number.<\/p>\n
Tyler had a terrific start to the season, he had high water mark of a 429\/.441\/.625 batting line on June 9th, which slowly dropped to .289\/.361\/416 by season\u2019s end, which is still pretty great for a backup catcher. He didn\u2019t do well over the last two months, hitting .170\/.264\/.191 from August first to the end of the season.<\/p>\n
I thought his defense was terrific. Baseball Savant has him at an 88th percentile for blocks above average, 81st percentile for caught stealing above average, 84th percentile for framing and 80th percentile for pop time. There were very few complaints about his work behind the plate.<\/p>\n
And our pitchers seemed to like pitching to him. The Blue Jays pitchers had a 3.54 ERA with Tyler behind the plate. They had a 4.34 ERA with Kirk behind the plate. It might have been luck, I like Kirk\u2019s pitch calling a lot, but I\u2019ll be curious to see if Heineman has an edge again next year.<\/p>\n
My wife would like to tell you that Heineman has an edge on Kirk with his shirt off, too.<\/p>\n
Heineman is out of options, so he can\u2019t be sent down to the minors, not that I think it is likely the club would want to send him out.<\/p>\n
I wonder how often a waiver pickup has posted a 1.9 bWAR the next season. I\u2019d guess that he won\u2019t have a number that high again, but you never know. His defense is great and, this year, his bat looked good.<\/p>\n
The Jays and Heineman avoided having to go in front of the arbitrator, with him signing a $1.2375 million contract for the 2026. I\u2019m glad for him. I think Ross or Mark or whatever scout thought that Tyler would be a good pickup deserves a prize of some sort. Or a DQ Blizzard.<\/p>\n
Steamer projects that Tyler will appear in only 25 games, hitting .226\/.305\/.331 with 2 home runs in 99 PA. I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t see anyone taking the backup catcher job from him (at least not in the organization right now), and starting catchers don\u2019t play 120 games anymore, so I\u2019d take the over on the games played.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tyler Heineman is a 34-year-old journeyman catcher. He\u2019s 35 in June, so it will go down as his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2378],"tags":[5,377,2554,4,282,70,38962,2553],"class_list":{"0":"post-561157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto-blue-jays","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-blue-jays","10":"tag-bluejays","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-toronto","13":"tag-toronto-blue-jays","14":"tag-toronto-blue-jays-opinions","15":"tag-torontobluejays"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116035497738218754","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}