Veteran catcher Yasmani Grandal has a May 1 opt-out in his minor league contract with the Red Sox. He’ll pass on that chance to return to the open market and remain in the organization despite not being selected to the big league roster today, per MassLive’s Chris Cotillo. He’ll remain in Triple-A as a depth option for Boston, at least for the time being.
Grandal is out to a nice start in his brief time with the organization. Signed to a minor league pact back on April 10, the 36-year-old has appeared in seven games and gone 6-for-24 with three doubles and a homer in 29 plate appearances. That’s a .250/.379/.500 batting line, which could put him in line for a big league look sooner than later, even if he won’t be called up immediately. Cotillo adds that the Red Sox are expected to be amenable to granting Grandal his release if a big league opportunity presents itself elsewhere.
The switch-hitting Grandal has been a consistent presence in the big leagues dating back to his 2012 debut. He spent the 2024 campaign with the Pirates — his fifth MLB club — and enjoyed a nice season in a part-time role. Appearing in 72 games and tallying 243 plate appearances, Grandal slashed .228/.304/.400 with nine home runs, a 9.9% walk rate, an 18.9% strikeout rate and his customary brand of framing-focused defense behind the plate. He only thwarted six of 72 stolen base attempts against him (8.3%), but he was excellent at manipulating the strike zone and drew positive grades for his ability to block balls in the dirt.
The Red Sox lost starting catcher Connor Wong to a broken finger early in April. That left them with the inexperienced tandem of Carlos Narvaez and Blake Sabol behind the plate. Seby Zavala, their most experienced option in Triple-A prior to signing Grandal, hit the minor league injured list with an oblique strain in mid-April as well. The subsequent results behind the plate have not been pretty. Narvaez is hitting .218/.274/.385 (81 wRC+) in 84 plate appearances. Sabol is hitting .125/.167/.188, albeit in only 18 plate appearances.
Sabol has been used as a true backup to Narvaez, in part because of concerns regarding his glovework. He’s just 1-for-21 in throwing out runners in the majors dating back to 2024 (1-for-11 this season). Narvaez opened the year with similar struggles, but he’s quieted some of the throwing concerns by following up a 1-for-8 start to catch four of the past nine runners who’ve taken off against him.
With or without Grandal, the Sox should have help on the horizon. Wong began a minor league rehab assignment in Triple-A on Sunday and has now appeared in two games. He’ll presumably need several more before he’s cleared to return, but it seems as though he might only end up missing around a month (or perhaps a slight bit more) in total with the injury.
The 28-year-old Wong slogged through an ugly start to the season, hitting just .087/.192/.087 in 26 plate appearances (2-for-23), but he hit .280/.333/.425 as Boston’s primary catcher in 2024. That’s the only season of Wong’s young career in which he’s delivered above-average offense — or even just average offense — over any meaningful sample. He’ll need to prove that wasn’t a fluke, but he’s the best option for the Red Sox for the foreseeable future. If Wong can’t get back to something close to that 2024 form, it’s easy to envision the Red Sox seeking catching help at this summer’s trade deadline. After trading Kyle Teel in the offseason Garrett Crochet blockbuster, Johanfran Garcia is the only catcher among Boston’s top 30 prospects at Baseball America or MLB.com. He’s 20 years old and has yet to play above A-ball.
Is it worth Keeping Sabol? To me Fred Kendall could replace him. I’d bring up Grandal who gives you a pinch hitter at the end of the bench.
Agreed. No idea why they haven’t called up Grandal to replace Sabol yet. Grandal can at least… catch.
Wong will be back this weekend so at this point I don’t think there’s any point, I think we’ll only have to watch Sabol start one more game
Red – Yep, that makes sense. No chance Blake or Yas would be on the active roster once Wong returns, so it doesn’t make sense to call up Yas now. The guy can hit, but he’s been awful trying to prevent stolen bases.
dewey – Marc Sullivan and Tom Satriano aren’t good enough for you?
Grandal has played in all of 7 games at Worcester. Either he really likes being in the Red Sox organization or (and much more likely) his agent put out feelers and found no Major League opportunities available to trigger the opt-out. Good piece to have in the event Wong suffers a set back or Narvaez nose dives
Rsox – I’m bullish on Narvaez, he’s got a lot of qualities that most people don’t notice. Really hope he becomes the #1 catcher, although for now it will likely be 50/50 with Wong.
So funny that both Narvaez and Agustin Ramirez were given up by the Yankees for virtually nothing, seems like they don’t know how to evaluate catchers in the Bronx. LOL!!
BTW – Just as I expected, Rafaela is benched tonight. Good for Cora sending the message after Rafaela’s horrific fielding last night on the Vladdy third base heist!
That may be true of Ramirez but it’s certainly not true of Narvaez. The Yankees got ERC in that trade a really nice pitching prospect who throws upper 90’s with a nice starters pitch mix. He might be the Yankees best pitching prospect after this season. It was a mutually beneficial trade the Red Sox needed catching help but they gave up a really nice pitching prospect to get that help.
Bruin – Double dose of bad news.
Mayer scratched with back issues again.
Buehler sent back to Boston for testing on the shoulder.
Neither surprising, hopefully both are very minor.
Saw both of those. Worried about Buehler and his shoulder. Brutal loss today but good news in the minors Hayden Mullins made his Portland debut and dazzled with 5 and 2/3 with 10ks and one earned. He did give up 4 walks but mostly when he got tired he would reach back for that 95 mph ghost fastball with huge spin when he needed to get out of an inning. Drohan pitched well for Worcester as well, only having one bad inning but still good. The pitching in the Red Sox farm is coming along nicely.
Bruin – There’s two pitchers you should try to watch if you can, Brandon Clarke and Juan Valera. These guys have a ton of talent and are better than Chapman,
Valera is only 18 and has been throwing 99 MPH since he was 17.
Clarke is old at 22, but already throwing 100 MPH.
If they can stay healthy they could be HOF-caliber MLB players.
FPG watched them both all starts. They are the known guys. Both have big arms Clarke’s slider is nasty to go along with 98-100 mph heat. Valera is struggling a bit right now but certainly has the raw stuff. These are the kind of guys that the prognosticators are all over. I like to point out the Mullins of the farm.
Hayden Mullins is a real interesting arm. He doesn’t have the velocity of Clarke, Valera, and Sandlin but his fastball has incredible spin characteristics. I think he could help a big league bullpen now. His 94 to 95 mph fastball gets a ton of swing and miss and has been nicknamed the ghost fastball. He gets swing and miss in it like it’s a 100 mph fastball. The big change is the secondaries are looking really good might have something. Connelly Early is another guy 5 velo is up but yea Clark and Valera are arms.
They were going to sign Wong’s brother, but then they realized 2 Wongs don’t make a ri………..
Ill show myself out now.
As an ex Catcher myself, I like Narvaez a lot. Maybe more than Wong, especially if he can produce similar to Wongs short track record with the bat.
cdr – I’ve watched Narvaez closely and he’s impressive, far better defensively than what was reported before the season.
Standing right over him as Narvaez was warming up in the BP in Tampa, one of the things he does is take off his glove and extend each arm outward and take a couple fastballs in the chest. It was pretty cool to see.
Red Sox are still a joke. Cora is ridiculous. Losing so many games to the 7 win White Sox. Red Sox ain’t going anywhere
It’s hard to argue that they’re contenders with their middling results against a weak schedule. Losing yesterday was ridiculous. Sure, you could chalk it up to ish happens, but ish happens all too often in Boston.
Every time Cora pulls a starter when they should have pitched another inning is going to contribute to the bullpen being gassed in August
They’re the little engine that couldn’t. They have the pieces but can’t put it together. Notice how good teams beat up on the worse teams and get long streaks. Sox will get a streak of 4 wins, then lose 4. They beat both good and bad teams but never show consistency in who they beat and it all ends up at .500. It’s deja vu all over again. And Cora’s handling of the pitching costs them at least 10 games.
The results right now just feel so much like 2019 all over again.
Once you got past the brutal start in ’19, it was this same inconsistency, they won at a clip among the top teams in the league overall for the bulk of the season, but just couldn’t get everything firing. Then DD got canned morale tanked, and they crashed the rest of the season.
To me it exposes cora… it seems like when there’s team with the pieces there he can’t get the results.
I wonder Grandal didn’t just go to Asia to play.
Not everyone wants to play on another continent…
…maybe if I was single, but if I had a family, especially with young kids, no way
Fair enough, but it’s just an 8 month commitment and plenty of players inconvenience their families with their careers. Plus, the family could relocate to Asia for the summer.
Then again, I’m an expat in Asia who gets MLB baseball at 8am. So, I’m biased.
He’s probably also generally content with the money he’s made so far, and, happy to play where he wants, or, stick around an org with at least a shot at a ring
Although a small sample, Grandall has experience at 1B. Thoughts?