Author: Alex Devorsetz

alexdevorsetz2025@u.northwestern.edu, Weinberg, 2025

There have been few prospects in baseball to be considered as sure a thing as Adley Rutschman. As a junior in high school, he committed to Oregon State after slashing .444/.581/.685 and throwing out 60% of base-stealers. As a junior in college, he slashed .411/.575/.751, which resulted in the Orioles drafting him first overall in the 2019 MLB draft and offering him an $8.1 million MLB draft signing bonus, the largest ever at the time. Entering the 2022 season, Rutschman became just the sixth player ever to be ranked top-5 by Baseball America’s annual top-100 prospect list on three separate occasions, joining Chipper Jones, Joe Mauer, Byron Buxton, Wander Franco, and Delmon Young. Baseball fans had every reason to think that Adley Rutschman could be a superstar, and in 2022, he proved it.

After missing the first 40 games of the season due to a strained tricep, Rutschman finally made his debut. He got off to a slow start, slashing .143/.226/.196 in his first 15 games, but played like a bona fide superstar after that. From June 10 onward, Rutschman slashed .272/.382/.485 with a 150 wRC+, 11.4 Def, and 5.4 fWAR. Only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani had a higher fWAR than Adley Rutschman over the final 117 days of the 2022 season. Despite only playing 113 games, Rutschman’s performance earned him second place in AL Rookie of the Year Voting and 12th in AL MVP Voting. With all that in mind, what can be expected from Rutschman moving forward? Is true AL MVP candidacy soon on the horizon? Can he be the best catcher in baseball?

But first, here’s a question that has plagued baseball discussions for the past half-decade: is J.T. Realmuto the best catcher in baseball? Since 2017 (the last season Buster Posey played over 114 games), Realmuto has been battling with Yasmani Grandal for the title of “BCIB”. The competition culminated in 2022, after a career year by Realmuto and a horrific year by Grandal. After alternating between “mediocre hitting with great defense” and “great hitting with mediocre defense” for five years, 2022 Realmuto paired a career-high 128 wRC+ with 18.0 Def to accumulate 6.5 fWAR, the most by a catcher since 2016 Posey. When pairing this fact with Realmuto’s incredible track record (and Rutschman’s lack thereof), it makes sense for many baseball fans to default to Realmuto.

But this isn’t comparing Realmuto to just any rookie. It’s comparing Realmuto to a rookie who beat him in wRC+ and averaged more fWAR per game in 2022. On a rate basis, Rutschman’s 2022 season was more impressive than any season of Realmuto’s career. Thus, simply stating that, “Realmuto is better because he had a better 2022 and has a better track record,” is misleading. Past statistics can be used in the analysis, but only if it helps reveal a player’s true talent level. In short, true talent level is how you expect a player to perform at their 50th-percentile outcome, so it should be their average performance over a substantial period of time.

Fielding true talent level is fairly easy to evaluate thanks to the fact that, unlike hitting, defense doesn’t significantly fluctuate upon promotion from the minor leagues to the majors. If it does, Rutschman didn’t show it. He led the MLB in Blocks Above Average in 2022, was seventh in Prospectus Framing Runs, and was top-10 in poptime. While Realmuto led the MLB in poptime for the fifth year in a row and had an incredible overall defensive season, he still trailed Rutschman in terms of Blocks Above Average and Prospectus Framing Runs despite far, far more chances. Both are elite defenders, but as long as Rutschman’s framing and blocking surpass Realmuto’s, he’ll have a higher defensive true talent level.

Evaluating true talent levels of hitting is the more difficult and more important part of this analysis. To determine this, I used each player’s wRC+s from past seasons in order to estimate their 50th-percentile outcomes in 2023. Realmuto had a wRC+ of 124 or greater in 2018, 2020, and 2022, but he also had a wRC+ of 108 or worse in 2017, 2019, and 2021. This averages out to a wRC+ of 116 over the past six years. While Realmuto’s wRC+ has repeatedly changed from year to year, his average exit velocity, plate discipline, and BABIP have stayed relatively consistent, so there is little reason to believe that his true talent level is as low as his 108 wRC+ in 2021 or as high as his 128 wRC+ in 2022. Rather than just settling with his six-year average of 116, Realmuto’s wRC+ averages out to 119 over the past three seasons and is representative of his true talent.

There are no past seasons to analyze for Rutschman. In his short 2022 season stint he had a 133 wRC+ in 470 PAs, and that actually is significant enough of a sample size to draw some conclusions from. In order to determine whether or not a sample is statistically significant for predicting future performance, the stabilization point of each hitting stat is needed. A stat is considered “stabilized” when the correlation between two samples — one from the year that’s being tested and one from the following year, has an R2 value exceeding 0.5. This indicates that the first year’s results explain at least 50% of the second year’s results, which is a large-enough portion to work with. While this doesn’t mean that the past statistic is completely reliable, it means that it’s reliable enough to be considered in an analysis.

Fangraphs has a tool where you can graph various baseball stats against their R2 values relative to their sample size, and every single hitting stat stabilizes before 470 PAs. The green line represents wOBA and wRC+. While it stabilizes last, it still passes the 0.5000-threshold before reaching 470 PAs, proving that Rutschman’s 2022 is significant enough to not be a fluke. This graph also shows that BB% and K% stabilize extremely quickly, and other graphs show similar results for ISO, O-Swing%, and Z-Contact%. Doing well in these stats typically correlates with a high wRC+, and Rutschman excelled in all five for long enough that his results appear viable.

While Rutschman has yet to play a full season from Game 1 to Game 162, it’s safe to say that his 133 wRC+ in 2022 was no fluke. Despite being a rookie, there was no major flaw in Rutschman’s hitting profile. The closest he had to a major issue was that he hit poorly against changeups and curveballs, and out of the 226 hitters who saw at least 300 of those pitches in 2022, Rutschman was 93rd-percentile in whiff% and 92nd-percentile in swing%. The only players who had a lower whiff% and swing% than Rutschman against changeups and curveballs were Juan Soto, Alex Bregman, and Will Smith. He had no observable, damaging flaws. Conservatively, this makes Rutschman’s true talent level that of a 130-wRC+ hitter, and that makes him a better hitter and defender than Realmuto, cementing him as the best catcher in baseball.

Going a step further, through this true-talent analysis can Rutschman be called a top-10 player in baseball? He’s a 130-wRC+ player with elite defense at a premium position, but is that the skillset of a top-10 player? Rather than answering this question directly by determining the true talent levels of every elite player and comparing them to Rutschman’s, it helps to work backward. If there were a player who had strikingly similar offensive and defensive true talent levels to Rutschman, then one could take their most common placement in player rankings and plug Rutschman into that relative spot. Luckily, there’s one player that’s a perfect match.

Nolan Arenado had the best season of his career in 2022. After having a measly 104 wRC+ in 854 PAs in 2020-2021, he had an incredible rebound. His 151 wRC+ was a career-best by a good margin, giving him a well-deserved third-place finish in NL MVP voting. While Arenado produced his usual level of defensive excellence (placing top-25 in Def for the 6th time in his career), this level of hitting is new territory for him. After having a wRC+ between 121 and 133 in each of his five full seasons with the Rockies, one wouldn’t predict that Arenado would have a 113 wRC+ in 2021 or a 151 wRC+ in 2022. It would be more reasonable if there was a significant change in plate approach, batted ball profile, or average exit velocity, but that simply wasn’t the case.

Since neither season saw a notable change in any underlying hitting factors, it’s reasonable to say that Arenado underperformed in 2021 and overperformed by a similar magnitude in 2022. After all, combining Arenado’s 113 wRC+ in 653 PAs in 2021 with his 151 wRC+ in 620 PAs in 2022 gives him a 132 wRC+ over his last 1273 PAs, perfectly in-line with his true talent level from Colorado. If Arenado and Rutshcman are both players with a 50th-percentile result of a 130 wRC+ and elite defense at a premium position, what’s stopping them from being considered the same tier of player? 

Going even further, there’s an argument that Rutshcman has a higher upside than Arenado in all facets. Hitting-wise, Rutshcman only had a 15-game period where he wasn’t a 150-wRC+ hitter. Considering the typical adjustment period for rookies, it’s very likely that his most-recent 408 PAs of a 150 wRC+, 15.0% BB%, 17.4% K%, .213 ISO, and 16.6% Whiff% are closer to his true talent level than his first 62 PAs of a 24 wRC+, 6.5% BB%, 24.2% K%, .054 ISO, and 24.6% Whiff%. Defensively, Rutshcman arguably has the clear edge over Arenado. Rutschman’s 13.1 Def in 113 games last year was almost equal to Arenado’s 13.5 Def in 148 games. Extrapolating Rutschman’s Def over a full season projects a 17.4 Def, which would beat Arenado’s career-high of 17.3 Def in 2019. Rutschman even has the baserunning advantage, with his 5.0 BsR being 22nd in the MLB this season and 12th in the MLB from his debut on, while Arenado is a consistently-negative baserunner.

Nolan Arenado is a near-unanimous top-10 player in baseball and has had that status for years due to being a player who consistently puts up a 130 wRC+ with elite defense and mediocre baserunning. Adley Rutschman’s true talent level is a 130 wRC+ with elite defense and above-average baserunning. After two seasons of underperformance, Arenado rebounded with a 151 wRC+. After two weeks of underperformance, Rutschman rebounded with a 150 wRC+. Arenado is an elite defender at one of the most important positions, while Rutschman is an elite defender at the most important position. If MLB fans and analysts agree that Arenado is a top-10, top-8, or even top-5 player, there’s no reason that Rutschman shouldn’t be placed in the same tier. Adley Rutschman is already the best catcher in baseball, a top-10 player in baseball, and still has room to get even better. With the preseason AL MVP conversation being dominated by Judge, Ohtani, Trout, and Alvarez, don’t be surprised if Rutschman makes a surprise run for the trophy.