Atlanta Braves: Catching platoon just keeps on producing

Flower Power

We’re 34 games into the 2019 season – not an outstanding sample size, but big enough to garner an idea for how the production is shaping out so far.

Both Tyler Flowers and Brian McCann’s early stat lines show that April was a very good month to them, and that their ages are not the only increasing numbers that we can attach to them.

Let’s start with Tyler Flowers, who has appeared in just over half (18-of-34) of Atlanta’s games thus far.

Per Fangraphs, in 63 plate appearances (coming into Sunday), Flowers has:

• .316/.381/.509 triple slash line (BA/OBP/SLG)
• .889 OPS (on-base plus slugging)
• 136 wRC+
• 0.9 fWAR
• 3 HR (and a solid .191 ISO)

Beyond the traditional and advanced stats, Baseball Savant’s Statcast indicates in Flowers’ batted ball profile that the veteran is hitting the ball harder here in the early goings than he did even in the last two years.

Flowers’ groundball percentage is down to 31.6% (his average since 2015 is 43.7%), while he is “barreling” 13.2% of his batted balls.

Those offensive metrics look real good no matter how you slice them, and let’s not gloss over the fact that Flowers’ greatest strength as a catcher comes with the glove: his pitch-framing.

Statcast also illustrates Flowers well into the red (“great”) of his framing rankings, specifically pegging him in the 87th percentile among catchers.

This is nothing new for Tyler Flowers, who has long been one of baseball’s best framing catchers: in 2018, he accounted for 13.7 “framing runs”, according to Baseball Prospectus, good for third in all of baseball.

You could make a strong argument that Flowers has been easily the most underrated player on the Atlanta Braves the last few years, and perhaps one of the better catchers (when combining offense + defense) in the majors since 2017.

He is showing, so far in 2019 that those trends could continue.