J.C. Escarra has this backup catcher job secured; I would be stunned if the Yankees went with anyone else to fill the role after the Spring he’s had. With three home runs and a 145 wRC+, Escarra has shined in camp, but as a 29-year-old turning 30 in April, he has zero experience above the Triple-A level. In fact, he has just 110 games of experience at the highest level Minor League Baseball has to offer, and yet the Yankees are blown away by the player.
When I visited Tampa this past week, any conversations had with people in the know regarding J.C. Escarra were overwhelmingly positive, not in the way that makes you think they’re floating him as a trade chip either. It comes off as a genuinely high evaluation of the player, someone who I was told earlier in the offseason drew trade interest from other teams before the Yankees decided to place him on their 40-man roster.
A brilliant defender whose bat has really come into its own with the Yankees, Escarra could be one of their biggest player development wins in recent memory.
The Yankees See More Than Just a Glove With J.C. Escarra
Everyone knows that J.C Escarra can field at this point; the Yankees have raved about his glove behind the plate and their track record indicates that they can develop catcher defense better than most. Austin Wells went from someone evaluators pegged to play first base or left field to a Gold Glove-caliber catcher while having Jose Trevino and Kyle Higashioka take massive strides under Tanner Swanson.
The Yankees value framing a lot as it’s a way to steal strikes and gain count leverage, which helps their pitchers a lot, especially in high-leverage situations. Gone are the days of the team having a primary catcher who can’t frame, and while the ABS may challenge the way we value framing right now, I doubt the effects of its seemingly inevitable implementation will be enough to completely devalue that skill.
Where the Yankees have more confidence than most regarding J.C. Escarra is with his bat, which has been quietly very impressive throughout Spring Training. The results are great, but the underlying data suggests he could be a hitter capable of launching to right field consistently, which will certainly result in home runs at Yankee Stadium. It’s hard to deduce what’s real and what’s fake in Spring Training, but Escarra’s batted ball data has been very encouraging.
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Now, will any of these data points hold in the regular season? I have no idea, but I do know that Escarra has shown an ability to have tight groupings of solid exit velocities at the Minor League level as well. In Scranton, the lefty-hitting catcher was in the 59th Percentile in 90th Percentile Exit Velocity among Triple-A hitters and had an 89.3 MPH average exit velocity, which isn’t too dissimilar to what we’ve seen in Spring.
He does that while hitting the ball in the air at a high clip and pulling it as well, resulting in hard contact to right field which will almost always leave the yard at Yankee Stadium. This is where the Yankees have fallen in love with the offensive profile; there’s a good feel for contact combined with an ability to put the ball in the seats, and it’s why they aren’t scared to have him DH if need be for some games.
Ben Rice in my opinion is best optimized as the team’s 1B/DH with J.C. Escarra playing almost exclusively catcher when he does play, but if the bat translates to the big leagues I’d get letting him DH every now and then. The Yankees have shown a lot of improvements in camp in regard to hitting the ball harder, it’s not just Ben Rice crushing the ball at a clip higher than the years before.
Cody Bellinger, Anthony Volpe, Brendan Jones, and Alexander Vargas are among the players in camp rocketing the baseball more than we’ve seen in their recent pro seasons. Could be Spring Training fluff, or it could be real progress, but in the case of J.C. Escarra, I think it’s a continuation of the strides he made with the Yankees last year.
This isn’t just a feel-good story; while the route for J.C. Escarra getting to this point is amazing, as he’s played in almost every pro league you could imagine in the Americas, he’s carrying himself as if he belongs. You don’t get the sense that Escarra is just happy to be here, he is playing to win a spot and win games for this team. The Yankees aren’t a team just hoping to tread water in 2025, they’re a squad trying to overcome a wave of injuries to get back to the World Series and win it after a crushing defeat last season against the Dodgers.
Maybe this is wishful thinking, but the influx of players with chips on their shoulders strikes an eerie similarity to the 2019 Yankees, who were considered dead on arrival after a brutal Spring injury-wise. It wasn’t the Aaron Judge or Luis Severino show; it was journeymen with dying pro careers such as Mike Tauchman and Gio Urshela coupled with a young Gleyber Torres who kept them in first place when their big boppers returned to the lineup. It was a hungry team that had numerous players who most scoffed at acquired that Spring and J.C. Escarra fits that mold perfectly.
I think we could get some real production at the plate from J.C. Escarra, and while I get that the median outcome here is a below-average bat, this is a player and a person who has beaten the odds time and time again. Why start betting against him now?