Written By Brandon Warne
Everything about Joe Mauer’s 2014 season was frustrating. From the fallout of the concussion, to the move down the defensive spectrum, all the way to what was ultimately a pretty ugly season, 2014 shaped up as a year Mauer would certainly like to forget.
Now, entering his age-32 season — he’s a day younger than Miguel Cabrera — there are significant questions about what Mauer can still provide to a Twins club that drastically needs him to make at least semi-good on his end of the remaining four years and $92 million left on his deal.
And the question is … can he?
The first bumpy season of Mauer’s career back in 2011 was eerily similar to 2014 statistically. Have a look:
2011 – .287/.360/.368; 102 OPS+; .321 wOBA
2014 – .277/.361/.371; 107 OPS+; .322 wOBA
In short, Mauer’s 2014 is a bit more impressive on the surface because of the depressed run environment last season. But when you adjust for position played, a .321 wOBA as a catcher in 2011 — when the average AL catcher wOBA was .310 — is markedly more impressive than a .322 mark at first base — the exact same mark the league as a whole posted at the position.
In other words, as frustrating as last year was, Mauer was basically a league-average first baseman. Of course, that’s if you strip away cost. Nobody seems to do that, and for good reason.
But when Mauer’s injury-addled 2011 took place, there was more reason for optimism regarding a rebound than there is now. After a relatively healthy 2010 season, Mauer barely played half the games the next year while missing games due to bilateral leg weakness (65 days, 57 games), neck stiffness (six games/days) and finally two separate bouts with a respiratory infection that eventually manifested itself as pneumonia (a total of 17 days, 16 games). All told, Mauer played 82 of a possible 162 games, and more or less became the butt of jokes from knuckle draggers near and far. How dare he sit out for “leg weakness” — like that would matter for a catcher — and why not tough it out like we all used to in little league and play through pneumonia for the first 90-loss iteration of this current crew.
It’s all so silly.
But even those same people criticize Mauer for missing games due to a “bump on his head,” despite all we know about concussions — still frighteningly not enough — that we have learned just in these last few years.
Between those bouts of injury, however, Mauer came back and had two nice, probably underappreciated years. Between 2012-13, Mauer got into 260 games — not terribly low for a catcher, really — and managed to hit .321/.410/.460.
In that time frame, Mauer ranked as such in these categories among his catching cohorts (800 PA minimum):
13.1% walk rate (second – Carlos Santana)
.321 batting average (first)
.410 on-base percentage (first)
.460 slugging percentage (tied for seventh – Jarrod Saltalamacchia)
So yeah, Mauer was still pretty darn awesome after that first rash of devastation, whether fans wanted to admit it or not.
But it’s fair to be skeptical of him now. He’s on the wrong side of 30 and not just by a few days. He struck out in 18.5 percent of his plate appearances last year and 17.5 percent the year before. His career worst before that stretch? Try 13.7 percent, and that was the year before that.
So Mauer’s on a five-year descent with his whiff rate, which can be particularly concerning if it signifies a loss in bat speed. For someone like Mauer, who lets the ball get very deep before deciding to swing or not — hence his amazing opposite field prowess — that can be troubling and result in more strikeouts. Mauer nearly struck out 100 times — a pittance in today’s game, but still troubling — for the first time last year with 96. He’s gone 88-89-96 in the last three years, but his career high before that was 64. SIXTY. FOUR. That’s something to think about.
The concussion throws a huge wrench into any attempt to analyze what Mauer did early last season. As we saw with Justin Morneau and Ryan Doumit, concussions have drastically different meanings to different people in terms of symptoms and return times. And let’s face it, the human brain is oddly and wonderfully complex, and that’s something we’re finding out more and more with concussion return timelines. To some players it truly can be a knock on the head where they return in a week and are itching to get back after a couple days. And then there are players like Morneau who need many months and aren’t the same for quite some time afterward.
And maybe that was the case with early-season Mauer. No person with a competitive bone in their body wants to be waylaid by an injury that they can’t always immediately feel. And sometimes with concussions and the recovery, that can be the case. There are good and bad days, as Sam Fuld noted in his brief Twins tenure last season.
Mauer absolutely sputtered out of the gates last year, hitting just .271/.342/.353 before the All Star Break. In late August, now-departed manager Ron Gardenhire suggested to Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press that the pressure of making a hometown All Star Game got to Mauer in the first half, hence the struggle. Now whether that’s a manager protecting his player, or himself, well, that isn’t really clear.
It’s impossible to pin the first-half struggles on the concussion, but it’s certainly not impossible that it could be a mitigating factor. Nevertheless, Mauer wasn’t going to play in the All Star Game in any way, shape or form. He was injured with an oblique strain that forced him from a game in early July and sidelined him until the middle of August — 40 days, 34 games.
And whether that time off did something for him from a time-off standpoint that the entire winter didn’t — and at that point in his concussion-healing process, who really knows? — Mauer came back decidedly more Mauer-like for the duration.
From his return on Aug. 11 to the end of the season — a 44-game span for Mauer — he hit .289/.397/.405. He also walked nearly as many times (26) as he struck out (32), and poked 13 extra-base hits in 179 plate appearances — or about 7.3 percent of the time. Pre-oblique, Mauer had nearly twice as many strikeouts (64) as walks (34), and was collecting extra-base hits in 5.9 percent of his plate appearances.
All in all, this second-half stretch was a marked improvement for Mauer across the board.
So what could Mauer’s 2015 look like? Could he come even close to fulfilling his contractual value? Seems crazy, right?
Let’s assume Mauer can hit like he did down the stretch. That is, still not vintage Mauer but markedly improved over the first half. It’s hard to find a comp for Mauer among his fellow first basemen based on his on-base percentage-over-power approach, but the typical WAR values for first basemen with .800-ish OPS numbers last year range anywhere from around +2.0 to as high as in the 4.0s depending on defense — something Mauer should be reasonably good at.
So it’s not exactly ultra likely that Mauer will fulfill the value of his contract, but he could come much closer than most expect. And keeping in mind it was signed with him as an All Star catcher rather than a league-average offensive first baseman, it’s still pretty amazing that he could feasibly come close.