The Guardians announced Wednesday morning that they’ve re-signed catcher Austin Hedges to a one-year deal. The Boras Corporation client reportedly receives a $4MM guarantee and the deal includes another $500K in performance bonuses: $125K each for 70, 75, 80 and 85 starts behind the plate.
Hedges returns to Cleveland on the same contract he has signed in each of the last two offseasons. It’s his third straight one-year deal to serve as the Guardians’ backup catcher. Cleveland continues to place enough emphasis on his receiving and game-calling ability to live with a complete dearth of offense out of that position.
Over parts of 11 seasons, Hedges is a .185/.244/.313 hitter. That includes a .157/.229/.251 mark in 326 plate appearances over the last two years. The 33-year-old isn’t going to provide anything offensively, yet he remains an elite defensive catcher. Statcast routinely grades him as one of the sport’s best pitch framers. He typically rates as high-end blocker, though this past season’s metrics were average in that regard. Hedges also cut down a third of the 45 runners who attempted to steal against him, well north of the 22.3% league mark.
While Hedges already grades very well by the quantifiable aspects of catcher defense, he’s probably even more highly-regarded for the intangibles. He has earned a fantastic reputation as a game-caller and for his rapport with pitchers. The Guardians aren’t pricing in any drop in his value with the forthcoming introduction of the challenge system to supplement the home plate umpire on balls and strikes.
There’d been speculation about the ABS being a potentially bad rule change for defense-only catchers. The Guardians seemingly don’t think that deals a hit to Hedges’ value. Catcher framing will still be a part of the game since teams are limited to two unsuccessful challenges until extra innings. The ABS obviously also doesn’t take away from a catcher’s game-calling acumen.
Cleveland catchers hit .187/.269/.344 on the season. That was almost entirely split between Bo Naylor and Hedges, with Dom Nuñez picking up the final seven plate appearances. Naylor didn’t hit at all through the end of August, though he did finish with a strong September. Unless they include Naylor in a trade package for a bigger bat behind the plate, they’ll stick with that tandem for a third straight season.
Hedges was one of three impending free agents for the Guardians. Reliever Jakob Junis and outfielder Lane Thomas are set to hit the market in a few weeks. The Guards also have a $6MM club option on lefty John Means. Hedges is their fifth player under contract for 2026, though that includes a $6MM salary for Emmanuel Clase. The former star closer is currently on administrative leave as MLB conducts a gambling investigation.
José Ramírez ($21MM), Tanner Bibee ($4MM) and outrighted reliever Trevor Stephan ($3.5MM) are the only other players on guaranteed salaries. MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz projects the team’s arbitration class to make around $20MM, nearly half of which is in Steven Kwan’s $8.8MM projection. Non-tenders of Ben Lively, Will Brennan, Nolan Jones, Matt Festa, Kolby Allard and/or Sam Hentges could knock the arb class down by $5-10MM.
The Guardians have opened the past two seasons with a player payroll right around $100MM, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts. Cleveland isn’t likely to be huge spenders in free agency, but they could make a couple mid-level acquisitions similar to last winter’s deals to bring back Carlos Santana and Shane Bieber. The Guardians will be in the outfield market and could also look for an innings eater to complement a young rotation nucleus.
Jon Heyman of The New York Post first reported that Hedges had agreed to a $4MM deal with Cleveland that contained $500K in incentives. The Associated Press reported the bonus structure. Image courtesy of Mark J. Rebilas, Imagn Images.
The Jordan Lyles of catchers
Pretty Privilege is real
Pretty Privilege??? Dude has carved a legitimate position for himself in a league slowly devaluing what he does. Get the money while your skills translate. As a Guards fan this is a productive signing. Don’t mess with the pitching staff.
It obviously works for both sides.
This is the official first free agent signing, right?
Must have clubhouse intangibles as a back up with that production should cost much less.
I can’t quit you, Austin Hedges.
And how did he walk in 10% of his PA this year?
He struck fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers and they pitched around him, duh.
He got two walks off Skubal in the first game of the Wild Card Series. Clearly he has the respect of both his and opposing pitching staffs
Ummm he’s one of if not the best defensive all around catcher in the game. Pretty sure he knows the strike zone and his own limitations. Thats a pro.
That would be a good explaination if his career BB% going into 2025 wasn’t 6%.
He’s only once gotten more than 350 plate appearances in a year and has been under 200 in recent years.
In a small sample size, even just a few extra walks can have a huge impact on his BB%.
Save this article for next year
believe it or not, hedgey is the glue that holds this guards team together. future coach / manager in the making. and i hope it’s with cleveland.
Yea thats what he needs to be… A coach or manager. Not taking up a roster spot and making 4mil
Amen to that, he’s especially laughably useless at bat in the postseason (despite 2 walks this year when the pitcher lost his concentration he’s 3 for 30 overall .404 ops). Texas had the right idea and didn’t give him an AB through the playoffs in their World Series win until they put the last game on ice and they gave him one AB. He struck out of course.
In all those seasons with Cleveland he has a -1.3 bWAR. It’s an organization filled with great catching know how — Vogt, Sandy Alomar and Clemente award winner Bo Naylor. They need a bat who can hit lefties more than another mouth.
This seems short sighted. The man is a catcher first, with batter a very distant second.
He obviously has value in his skills, rapport with his pitchers, and influence in the clubhouse. Those things are much more important from your backup catcher than bwar can ever quantify.
Those who didn’t watch the Dodgers over the years always said the same about Austin Barnes. The scope of what he did for the club on many levels was much more important than being Kershaws personal catcher, as most assumed was the guys only role.
Exactly. I’ve split my life between Cleveland and Dallas so I was hyped for thag WS run. Do I think the guy is a great clubhouse guy – yea he seemed like he was the life of the party and glad he won a ring… But as you said there’s a reason he didn’t play in the post season. I mean you can’t even say this is a Carlos Santana type deal because at least Santana has moments of being able to hit.
When your main starting catcher is a left hand hitter who has problems facing same sided pitching (Bo’s career splits are .700/.558) then get yourself a guy who can hit LHP. Since it’s the weak side of the arrangement then some should be available at reasonable rent as Carson Kelly was the last couple years. He now goes for 6 million and has a career .810 ops vs lhp and has rated well defensively, the Cubs hit him 4th vs lhp where he delivered a .808 ops. Cleveland got a .687 ops out of 4th in the order overall and .647 vs lhp overall. Hedges doesn’t help in that regard, he’s a black hole.
If the aim is truly to get to the World Series as their GM says then you’ve got to get through some great LH starters to get there. Gift of gab Cle has plenty but not this very real thing.
You still need a backup catcher
Sigh. Welcome to Cleveland free agency. Sign jt realmuto… Nah let’s bring back the hitless wonder instead
That is just modern baseball.. all the top free agents going to large market clubs.
I suppose that’s true but they didn’t even try to sign a better catcher. I doubt anyone is gonna line up to sign hedges the second free agency hits. And if they offered enough money people would sign. They just want to be cheap.
It just seems unlikely that a team is going to get a major upgrade in a backup catcher in free agency. All backup catchers are going to have some flaw that keeps them from being a starter. In the case of Hedges, obviously it is his bat. You can get a better bat, but you are likely going to suffer on game planning, defense and clubhouse precense.
Granted, signing Hedges is not a move fans should get excited about.. but I would bet every player and coach is glad to see this happen.
White martin maldonado
When I have a kid, I’m teaching him how to be an elite defensive catcher and developing his communicating skills.
$500,000 available in incentives? For what? Hitting over 200
Wow! The Indians retain a top 10 catcher based on DRS. Also put up a nice 1.2 fWAR. For $4M, that’s a bargain.
Pitch framing is worthless with ABS.
@James Midway
Not yet. If the batter doesn’t know the strike zone, it’s still effective. Plus, each team gets 2 challenges. Teams can lose challenges as well, so once the two are gone, framing comes in handy again.
Once you remove the umpire completely and have the fully automated system to call the strikes and balls without challenges then it becomes worthless.
Headline should have been “Guardians Hedges their bets”…
Dude sat in the Rangers dugout looking like he was high on Ecstasy throughout the WS. Think they got him for a sack of Halloween candy, and now he’s worth 4MM? Why?
Guardian for life and the hereafter.
Who says Cleveland doesn’t sign top notch free agents? Dolan checking the sofa seats for extra change to cover this
Many fans simply do not place much value on defense, and most fans do not place any value on intangibles.
By most overall metrics, Hedges and Patrick Bailey are the two best defensive catchers in baseball.
And Hedges value in the pitchers room and the locker room is off the charts. Jose Ramirez is obviously the straw that stirs the drink, but Hedges is the one that holds it all together. Jose, himself, lobbied the FO to bring him back after his time in Texas.
Hedges is fine. What matters is the other 12 who will actually play.
Not sure what this means for Cooper Engle. They now have three catchers on the 26 man roster.
More importantly, what does it mean for Bo.
Dude has not gotten better. He would be the sacrifice if Engle is ready come spring…
This signing means absolutely nothing for either Bo or Ingle. Ingle has lots to work on in the minors yet (he’s still iffy as a major league catcher) and Bo isn’t going anywhere, nor will his workload decrease.
Austin knows what the score is. He knows that Fry is coming back and will be ready to be a fully functioning catcher again. Austin remembers, hell, the whole team remembers how dynamic and flexible the catching situation was in the first half of 2024 until Fry got hurt. We’re simply returning to a situation where Vogt has plenty of options at catcher which allows him to effectively counter what other teams do to us in a way he’s lacked over the last year and a half. Few teams–if any–will be versatile as Cleveland will be at catcher in 2026.
David Fry will often pinch hit for Hedges and catch limited innings. At least that is the hope.
while it’s true that the CLE front office definitely prioritizes defense (and pitch framing in particular – they hired max marchi away from baseball prosectus in 2014 where he’d spent the previous year compiling pitch framing stats on all minor league catchers – more on this later), the author of this article clearly is unaware that the intangibles hedges offers includes his impact in the clubhouse. it’s no coincidence that CLE had their only sub .500 season since 2014 when they let hedges leave in free agency in 2023. many players commented on how the clubhouse was different when hedges was gone. this feedback from the players played a large part in the decision to bring hedges back after 2023.
most fans don’t even notice, much less appreciate how CLE has had only ONE losing season since 2013. (they’ve actually won the FOURTH most games in MLB over that period with a quarter of the payroll the top three teams have had to play with). all the fans do is continue to bleat how the dolans are cheap because they were naive enough to state their business plan to compete in cycles – just like ALL OTHER smaller markets do because you need to lose enough games to draft high enough to rebuild your core that usually leaves for big money.
instead of responding about how childish the fans’ expectations are the FO found ways to do soft bootstraps by extending their core players early to get them to stay a few extra years under market in exchange for guaranteed financial security, then trading those players away to get prospects that allow the FO get talent they’d normally have to draft higher than their winning seasons would allow them to. you’d hope that the fans might show more respect for how they’ve done it by thinking outside the box. by improving run differential by focusing on pitching and defense because their lousy attendance makes it impossible to field the kind of offense jacobs could afford to field during the 90’s when he paid all their salaries out of attendance revenue. jacobs sold out for top dollar when salaries (the most jacobs ever paid a player was $8mil a year – thome – were going to exceed revenue which was already maxxed out. but then CLE has become a football town given how they’ve gone from SIXTH in the US in population down to something like 54th.
but back to the catching. the pitch framing meshes with the emphasis on command; the FO focuses on drafting starting pitching that throws strikes because they believe (and time has proven this to be true) that they can tweak a pitcher’s motion and gain 2-4 MPH on their velocity. to be fair, the FO also places high value on spin rate, which facilitates movement (and how it can change despite the same throwing mechanics.
hedges is the backup catcher, but his primary value to the roster is how he contributes to morale and team attitude. it’s a shame that most folks can’t even conceive how this could be. their primary mode of thinking seems to be: “HOME RUNS GOOD.” even though their pitching shut down the tigers’ offense (which lives and dies by the HR) at the end of the season.
when you are consistently 13th/14th out of 15th in attendance, your payroll is going to suffer. and please, let’s not hear the idiotic argument that owners are obligated to lose money by paying more than what they take in in revenue. if they ran all their businesses like that, they wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy the teams. they took a serious revenue hit when the cable contracts were all up in the air.
Damn good post, bee, I’d quibble only on minor points.
The central thesis is sound. And I’d find it amusing if it weren’t so infuriating, that fans don’t understand this is the smallest market with the three major sports and Cleveland wouldn’t even get a major league franchise if the league started fresh today. Or that there’s no white knight gonna come to town–certainly isn’t going to be Blitzer!–to spend money out of his own pocket on ballplayers for our enjoyment. Just ain’t happening.
Nobody is going to run this team any differently from a financial perspective, that much is clear. Expecting “our” owners to be deviate from the general approach around the league is delusional in the extreme. What we DON’T KNOW is if the incoming regime will be as protective of the franchise as the Dolans were, both on and off the field. Can I be guaranteed we’ll have an owner who instills the proper culture and hires good people and leaves them alone to do their jobs? Expecting a small market to excel is wishful thinking unless the owners are very good at it. Few are, even in big markets…why do we assume things are going to actually be BETTER than they are now? The path of least resistance is down, not up, but don’t try and tell THAT segment of our fanbase which is bitter, whiny, and self-entitled as well as lacking any perspective whatsoever.
Be careful what you wish for, all you haters who can’t wait for regime change.