MLB Network's 2025 catcher rankings emphasize Blue Jays' past trade mistake

It was widely viewed as a head scratcher when it first happened. On Dec. 23, 2022, the Toronto Blue Jays acquired outfielder Daulton Varsho from the Diamondbacks in exchange for outfielder and fan favourite Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and perceived ‘catcher of the future’ Gabriel Moreno.  

Over the last two seasons, while Varsho has had mixed success, the trade still feels like an overpay. It didn’t help that in the very first season following the trade, the Diamondbacks went to the World Series.

Moreno hit .284/.339.408 in 111 games in the regular season that year, then hit three home runs and had an OPS of .852 in the National League playoffs. As if shining in October wasn't enough, he also won a Gold Glove following the season. Gurriel Jr. hit 24 home runs with an OPS+ of 107, played above average defense, and was selected to the All-Star Game.

Varsho, conversely, hit .220/.285/.389 with 20 home runs in 2023. He had strikeout percentage of 23.2 and a .256 BAbip, all numbers that were below-average offensively and helped counteract his sterling defense.

Last year, both Moreno and Varsho’s regular season numbers stayed relatively the same, but Varsho was the only one who walked away with a Gold Glove award and 5.0+ WAR at the end of the season. Moreno was worth just 2.6 WAR – but injuries held him to only 97 games.  

Now, thanks to MLB Network's latest rankings, that deal has been placed back under the microscope. Moreno finished 2024 as the league's seventh-best catcher in the game right now, one spot ahead of current Blue Jay Alejandro Kirk. Based on the trajectory of events, this trade certainly feels like a mistake right now.

MLB Network's 2025 catcher rankings emphasize Blue Jays' past trade mistake with Gabriel Moreno

The Blue Jays, a team that is staunch and steadfast in their own evaluations of players, even when those metrics get called out by the media, somehow undervalued what they had at the catcher position in the winter of 2022.

Between Moreno, Kirk and Danny Jansen (traded to the Red Sox at the 2024 deadline), the Blue Jays had three potential No. 1 catchers, and could have leveraged that surplus for a lot more than what they have now.

Since 2022, Kirk, Moreno, and Jansen are ranked seventh, 13th and 15th, respectively, in WAR among all catchers in the league. The only guys who rank ahead of all three of them in that category that have changed teams in the same time frame are: William Contreras (ranked third in WAR at 13.3), his brother Willson Contreras (ranked eight in WAR at 8.9), and Sean Murphy (ranked fourth in WAR at 13.2).

 In a three-team trade, William went from the Atlanta Braves to the Milwaukee Brewers, and through some other moving parts, the Oakland Athletics sent Sean Murphy to Atlanta. Willson came up with the Chicago Cubs, helped them win a World Series in his first year, accumulated a 20.7 WAR in seven seasons, then signed a five-year, $87.5 million contract with the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2023 offseason. While the Cardinals haven’t been great the last two years, Willson hasn’t been part of the problem, producing better than his career averages over the last two years.

The other catchers listed on that WAR graph around Moreno, Kirk and Jansen are either elite young players who are seen as core pieces of their future (such as No. 2 Adley Rutschman), or guys that signed big money deals on the market (No. 6 J.T. Realmuto). MLB Network's "The Shredder" ranks Realmuto No. 5.

It just makes it puzzling to understand why the Blue Jays didn’t feel like they could get more in a deal for Moreno (and Gurriel). It wasn’t as if Moreno was still a prospect with unseen potential at the MLB level, either. The Jays called him up at the end of 2022 and he produced a 0.7 WAR in just 25 games with a .319/.356/.733 slash line. Yes, it was a small sample size, but he showed he was ready to compete at this level, or at least be given some runway to see if he could make it work long-term.

It's hard to fault the Blue Jays for wanting to move one of their catchers to help in another area where they were lacking. It's also hard to criticize Varsho because he has come in and given the Blue Jays pretty much what they’ve asked of him; Gold Glove-winning defence.

It's Toronto's philosophy of over-evaluating the measure of how much defence equates to wins that has hurt them in this trade.

They also banked on Varsho's upside in his bat, and the saving grace may be in the fact that Varsho will be entering his age-29 season in 2025. We’ve seen plenty of players who come into their own and find that power stroke going into their early 30’s, and fix their chase rate concurrently to cut down on their strikeouts.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the Blue Jays not getting a better return in value for what they gave up, and Moreno's continued rise has helped underscore that.