English
Español
Meet the new battery, same as the old battery.
William Contreras is locked in as the Brewers’ starter, ready for his fourth season behind the plate in Milwaukee. And after speculation throughout the fall and winter about who the backup catcher would be, whether that would be one of a slim group of free agents, a young prospect on the rise, or some other sort of acquisition, the Brewers seemingly ended that discussion by bringing back 33-year-old Gary Sánchez.
Could there be other options involved? Maybe so. Let’s check it out. For reference, here’s last year’s catcher preview.
William Contreras
To say that William Contreras’ 2025 was a disappointment would be a bit bold. Via the measure of WAR, Contreras was still the second-best catcher in the National League and the second-best position player on the Brewers. A 111 OPS+ was a step back (it was 124 in 2023 and 130 in 2024), but that’s still good production for a player who rates pretty well as a defensive catcher.
My level of concern about Contreras’ offensive game is low. There was concern last year about a fractured finger that seemed to be a long-term issue, but he reportedly got that fixed this offseason. That was blamed in part for some of Contreras’ issues driving the ball last year, and it’s true; at the All-Star Break, Contreras was hitting just .245/.351/.347 with six homers through 90 games. But he came back from the break rejuvenated, and from then until the end of the season, he hit .281/.361/.472 with 11 homers in 60 games — that batting line is nearly identical to the .281/.365/.466 line he had in 2024, when he won his second straight Silver Slugger and finished fifth in MVP voting.
This recovery bears out not just in the surface-level stats but in the Statcast data, too. Prior to the All-Star break, Contreras’ average exit velocity was 89.8 mph. After the break, it was 93 mph. A 93 average exit velocity, over the course of the full season last year, would’ve been tied for 14th in the majors.
Entering his age-28 season, Contreras should again be among the best catchers in the league. Before the 2025 season, I wondered if Contreras could work his way into the top three of the MVP discussion in 2026, and I still think there’s reason to ask that question. If the Brewers are as good as we think they can be — which would apparently be a surprise to the awards-voting media yet again — their best player is likely to get some examination for MVP, even if a pitching-again Shohei Ohtani seems destined for his fifth award. That player might be Brice Turang or Jackson Chourio, but there’s a very good chance that it’s Contreras. Also on his side here are the old-timey “narrative” elements: with the loss of Willy Adames before last season and Freddy Peralta before this one, Contreras likely takes the mantle as the obvious leader of this team, non-Christian-Yelich division.
Here’s a question: Should we start to consider William Contreras as the best catcher in franchise history? That title almost certainly belongs to Jonathan Lucroy, who caught for the Brewers from 2010 until he was sent to the Rangers at the 2016 trade deadline. The answer to this question might depend on your views on Baseball Reference’s version of catcher WAR versus FanGraphs’ version; via BRef, Lucroy earned 17.2 WAR in six-and-a-half-ish seasons. But he was also an early hero of the pitch-framing revolution, which factors into FanGraphs’ version of WAR, and that paints Lucroy as a superstar, giving him almost 35 WAR over that six-plus-year stretch.
So, maybe you don’t think Contreras can catch Lucroy if he doesn’t sign an extension. But Contreras has earned 15 fWAR and 12.4 bWAR through three seasons with the Brewers, and while Lucroy at his best was about as good an offensive player as Contreras has been, Contreras has done it more consistently. Contreras is already the second-best catcher in team history, by my estimation, despite the high profiles of Hall-of-Famer Ted Simmons and No. 1 overall pick B.J. Surhoff; a strong season in 2026 could make us at least ask the question as it relates to Lucroy.
Gary Sánchez
It’s hard for me to believe that Gary Sánchez is only 33. If you’d have asked me earlier this offseason, I probably would’ve guessed like 37. He’s in his 12th year in the majors! It feels like it’s been a long time.
As mentioned at the top, Sánchez served as Contreras’ backup in 2024. That season was a mixed bag for Sánchez: he ended up doing a lot of work as the designated hitter, and while he did hit 11 home runs, it was a disappointing season in light of what he’d done in 2023, when he hit 19 homers in just 72 games with the Padres.
Sánchez left the Brewers after 2024 and signed with the Baltimore Orioles for last season, but things went off the rails quickly; he struggled badly out of the gate, got hurt, came back in June, and went crazy, with a .353/.411/.686 batting line, five homers and 20 RBI in his first 14 games back, then went 0 for his next 10, got hurt again, and didn’t play again for the rest of the season. He finished the season with just 29 games played.
Sánchez hasn’t played 100 games in a season since 2022 in Minnesota, and he hasn’t had an OPS+ above 100 in a season in which he played 100 games since 2019. Sánchez can still get into a baseball — his 93.3 average exit velocity in 2025, while in a tiny sample, would’ve ranked tied for ninth in the league, and even in his poorer seasons over the last several years, he’s had pretty solid Statcast numbers. The Sánchez of the last few years has had a walk percentage of 8.2%, which is fine — it was a little higher earlier in his career, so we shouldn’t worry about Sánchez as a free swinger.
The Brewers have seemingly prioritized offense over defense the last few years with their backup catchers, which is a bit of a “zag” from traditional norms; but Sánchez, Eric Haase, and Danny Jansen are all — to some degree — offensive options. (Jansen has traditionally been a good defensive catcher, but the numbers over the last few years aren’t as good.) Sánchez is not likely to be a great asset behind the plate, but the Brewers aren’t going to ask him to catch all that much — in the scenario in which Contreras were to get injured for any length of time, and the Brewers needed a long-term backup, Jeferson Quero would likely figure to take a large amount of the playing time.
Sánchez on defense should be good enough to not really harm the team, and the team doesn’t have him around for defense, really; they have him as a veteran presence to work well with all their young pitchers and to occasionally hit a baseball very far. He can do both of those things.
Jeferson Quero
Speaking of Quero!
The Brewers’ 23-year-old catcher was, as we all know, a consensus top-40 prospect prior to the 2024 season, then injured his throwing shoulder on the first day of the season and missed basically a year and a half. He made it back in the second half of last season and performed reasonably well at Triple-A Nashville for 58 games.
But there is some real concern over that throwing arm: by all accounts, both quantitative and otherwise, Quero is not throwing nearly as well as he was before the injury. That is a big deal: Quero’s arm was touted as perhaps his strongest tool, the thing that made him special as a defensive catcher, and the reason he was in the top 40 on prospect lists.
Part of me wonders if a catcher in 2026 should be able to become a top-40 prospect based almost solely on the strength of their arm, so if it is the case that Quero is now far less heralded as a prospect because of concerns over the arm, maybe he was too high to begin with. But even if he isn’t going to be Pudge Rodríguez back there, there’s still a future for Quero with the Brewers. Maybe he won’t become a star, but he projects as a guy who can be about league-average offensively, and pre-injury scouting reports also praise his receiving and rapport with pitchers.
There is perhaps less confidence that the Brewers have their long-term, post-Contreras catcher in Quero, but he should still be able to be a solid player. If Contreras or Gary Sánchez spend any extended amount of time on the injured list this year, it’s likely that we’ll get a look at Quero in the big leagues.
Reese McGuire
For a couple of weeks, it looked like the 2025 Cub, who was signed to a minor league deal with an invite to big-league camp, would start the season as the Brewers’ backup catcher. But Sánchez’s signing likely means that only a spring-training injury to either of the more-established options will give McGuire a shot.
McGuire isn’t a good hitter, but he can hit a homer every now and then, and he has a good defensive reputation. It was somewhat surprising that he wasn’t able to find a major-league deal this offseason, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t at least some demand for him somewhere in the league at the end of spring training, assuming he doesn’t make the Brewers.
It is not clear whether there are opt-outs — which are pretty common for veterans on minor league contracts — in McGuire’s minor-league deal. So there is a chance that even if he doesn’t make the Brewers’ 40-man roster, he could go to Triple-A Nashville as insurance for Contreras and/or Sánchez. But the Brewers will certainly want Quero to be getting reps there, so if McGuire has an end-of-spring-training opt-out, I’d expect him to use it if, as expected, he doesn’t make the team.
Marco Dinges
Marco Dinges isn’t going to play for the Brewers this year, but I just wanted to add him to the end of this post. Dinges, who hasn’t played above High-A, has some work to do defensively, but in 2025, he hit .300/.416/.514 with 13 homers in 77 games across two levels — a 161 wRC+. He’s an extremely patient hitter with real power. If he can fine-tune his defense and gain more experience as a catcher in 2026, it’s not out of the question that he could vault himself ahead of Quero as the presumed “catcher of the future,” in much the same way Lucroy once vaulted past the more highly touted Ángel Salomé.