Bailey is probably the most misunderstood player on the Giants roster, now that Mike Yastrzemski is no longer on the team. Players with good defense but only okay offense gets maligned because their defensive value isn’t recognized (like JT Snow). Many fans want him gone, mainly because of his bat. Many also think his framing skills advantage will disappear with the new ABS system.
ogc thoughts
Andrew Bailey is not going anywhere. With his elite catching skills (not just framing, but he has a great arm too, and handles the pitching staff), he is one of the top position players (not just among catchers) per StatCast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV) metric. Fangraphs includes his framing value (Baseball Reference does not) and Bailey was over 4 fWAR in 2024, and still above average in 2025 (down because of his poor hitting to start the season, but 3.2 fWAR is still good). And in three seasons, he has 10.2 fWAR, over half way to being a good player.
And Posey has been effusive about Bailey, who is likely to be winning the Gold Glove again, second in a row (he's a finalist again), and he likely would be at three if he had started the 2023 season as the starting catcher. And even though he started late, he still led the NL in advanced defensive metrics anyway!
Posey, being so good defensively that the NCAA changed the name for their best catcher award from Johnny Bench to Buster Posey, must be prioritizing catching defense. He should recognize a catcher’s defensive value better than most baseball executives. Or all baseball fans.
ABS Challenge System
Many fans think that the ABS system will take away Bailey’s elite defense, which is clearly the best in the majors per FRV. With this new system, the assumption by these fans is that the other team will catch Bailey stealing strikes by challenging them and changing them back to balls. This would, in their thinking, take away his huge framing advantage.
Firstly, these fans don’t understand how this system works. Each team gets only two challenges, and lose them when their challenge fails, and out of roughly 100-200 pitches, that is not a high percentage of the pitches will be changed.
And only the batter gets to do the challenge. If hitters have such a hard time knowing the strike zone that they swing at pitches out of the strike zone, why do people think that they will catch all of strikes Bailey steals? I expect, over time, that most batters will not be allowed by their teams to challenge pitches until late in the game, to catch obvious misses where the pitch is clearly out of the strike zone, because they will make so many mistakes that teams will clamp down on when and where they can be used.
Secondly, there are two aspects of framing value: stealing strikes (that should be balls) but also getting strikes to be called strikes. Amazingly, there are catchers so bad at framing that umpires would actually call strike pitches balls. Bailey is among the best in doing both, per the article linked above, and half his FRV is from keeping strikes as strikes, as well as stealing balls as strikes.
ABS would not change that, because if other catchers are so bad at framing, they likely aren’t that sure when to challenge these borderline calls. If anything, Bailey being so good, he will generate even more strikes because he knows the zone so well, as well as challenge the obvious mistakenly called balls which should be strikes.
Most importantly, Posey believes that catchers who are good at knowing where the edge of the strike zone is, top and bottom, left and right, should benefit from this system. He said this in response to a question by Kerry Crowley in the inaugural podcast of the new podcast by SF Standard, Section 415 (Spotify or search on your favorite streaming app for Section 415). And the article I linked to above noted that Bailey is equally good at all the edges, top and bottom, left and right, in getting strikes, whereas some catchers are good in specific edges, not all.
Bailey is an Elite Catcher
Fans just don’t understand how elite Bailey is as a catcher. He’s so elite that he would still be a valuable player batting in the .500 OPS range. Bailey had the highest FRV for catchers in 2025, with 31 FRV, and second place had 22 FRV, and the tie for third place had 12 FRV, This means that Bailey was roughly one win better than second place and two wins better than third place, and three wins better than the average catcher.
And Bailey is so elite that he’s not only the best catcher, he’s the best defensive position player in the majors per StatCast. He’s first with 31 FRV, and there’s a tie for second with 22 FRV, by an OF and the catcher above. Giants fans are simply not understanding the magnitude of how good he is defensively, both as a catcher and overall. He’s like the Kevin Pillar of catchers, beyond what the others can do.
Hitting Might be Improving
I get that his hitting has been a roller coaster. There was actually good news from his poor 2025 season. He started the season experimenting with the new torpedo bat, and that screwed him up royally. He gave up using it and then had a better but still poor performance, and from May to the end of the season, he batted .238/.294/.348/.641, which matched what he hit in 2023-24. That’s still isn’t good for a catcher, but it’s doable for an elite defensive catcher like he is.
But he also did something he hasn’t ever done so far in his career in the second half, he hit great. In September 2025, he hit .288/.321/.493/.814, which is more in line with his first half performances of prior seasons. Now he needs to hit well early in the season, as well as late, and give a full season performance. A catcher’s bat is usually the last to develop, and especially for switch hitters like Bailey. And he’s entering his prime physical years, at 27 YO next season, that’s roughly when baseball players reach their peak career years, 27 to 29 years old.
2026 Season
Next season will be his 27 YO season, and, as just noted, that means he's entering the period where many players produce their peak seasons. He has already averaged 3.5 fWAR per season, after prorating his first season, which is already pretty good, and hopefully can be at his best in the coming seasons.
Clearly, his defense is unlikely to get better, and could be diluted some by ABS, so the leap we have to hope for is in his hitting. The potential is there: he hit .322/.347/.557/.904 to June 2023 and .284/.353/.433/.786 to June 2024. Then he hit a huge decline in the late months of the season, which was attributed to his lack of conditioning for a full MLB season in 2023. As noted above, he hit .814 OPS in September 2025, which is more like his early success of the prior two seasons.
As long as he can hit at least .700 OPS, which is about what the average MLB hitter hits, along with his elite defense, he would be an extremely valuable player. Even as is, he's very valuable, and not a problem spot on the roster. Because he reached the majors in mid-May, he was just short of reaching arbitration eligibility, so the Giants gain an extra year of pre-arbitration, so he won't reach free agency until 2030, until he turns 31 YO. I expect the Giants to try to extend him after next season, to cover his arbitration years, if not his offseason, in order to get him at a lower value due to his up and down hitting up to now.
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