Alejandro Kirk was snubbed in Gold Glove nominations

Toronto Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk is coming off a subpar 2024 season, where he posted a 2.1 bWAR and was 6% below MLB average with an OPS of .677. That’s well below his career average of .735 over 1563 plate appearances and 434 games since his MLB debut in the pandemic shortened 2020 season.

But one area of his game surely didn’t suffer this year: with a dWAR of 1.4, fielding percentage of .991 and only 7 errors in 776 innings played at catcher, he again provided solid defence behind the plate. In fact, he threw out 31% of the 87 runners who tried to steal a base on him, up from his career average of 20% entering this season.

Other defensive metrics flatter his work as well: among the 34 catchers to play at least 650 innings at catcher this year, Kirk had a Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) of +14, which ranked 4th overall behind Patrick Bailey of the Giants (20), and Cal Raleigh of the Mariners and Freddy Fermin of the Royals, who were tied at +16. Kirk led the American League in 2023 with a DRS of +17.

In terms of pitch-framing, the art of a catcher receiving a pitch in a way that makes it more likely for an umpire to call it a strike, Kirk was also elite at +10 based on Baseball Savant’s measure of runs saved through his catcher framing, which tied him for 4th overall behind Bailey, Raleigh and Austin Wells of the Yankees. In terms of caught stealing rates above average, Kirk was 4th overall at +7, trailing only Fermin’s +8 amongst AL catchers.

However, when the 2024 Gold Glove Award finalists were announced on Tuesday, Kirk’s name was conspicuously absent from the American League nominees at catcher, who included Fermin of the Royals, Raleigh of the Mariners and Jake Rogers of Tigers. As the MLB blurb from Thomas Harrigan and Theo DeRosa noted, “For the fourth straight year, the AL will have a first-time Gold Glove Award winner behind the plate.”

To qualify for Gold Glove consideration as a catcher, a player must have played in at least half of his team’s games by his team’s 138th game (a minimum of 69 games); Kirk qualified after playing in his 77th game in game 138 for the Blue Jays this year on August 31st. He was a Gold Glove finalist last year after leading AL catchers in DRS with 17.

The only metric where Tigers’ catcher Rogers ranked higher than Kirk was on catcher blocking, which measures the skill of catchers at preventing wild pitches (WP) or passed balls (PB). On that measure, Danny Jansen led MLB at +16, Fermin was at +10 and Rogers was +9. Kirk ranked 22nd at +3.

There’s no question that Cal Raleigh and Freddy Fermin both should be finalists for the Gold Glove at catcher in the American League. However, with Alejandro Kirk better than Jake Rogers on DRS, pitch-framing and CS rates above average, could the Tigers inspiring run to the playoffs — from only 0.2% playoff odds after trading away their veterans on expiring contracts at the Trade Deadline — have helped their player more than Kirk’s team, which struggled to a 5th place finish in the AL East?