Guardians Deep Dive: Bo Naylor Needs To Improve At This

The biggest area Bo needs to focus on this offseason is his defense. Specifically, how he manages the running game. 

Let's look at some numbers, per Baseball Savant, to see where he excelled and where he needs to improve.

Naylor only caught six of the 45 runners attempting to steal on him, which is a success rate of just 13 percent. For reference, Cam Gallagher had a success rate of 21 percent and Mike Zunino threw out 17 percent of the runners that tried to steal on him.

Bo ranked in the 67th percentile pop time, which certainly isn't bad, but could improve before next season. The area where Naylor needs to work on the most to become a better catcher is his accuracy when throwing to second base. 

A good pop time doesn't mean a thing if the throw is offline. 

Naylor had a CS Above Average of -2 when compared to the rest of the catchers in Major League Baseball. (CS Above Average is a Baseball Savant statistic that is "designed to express the skill of catchers at throwing out runners on steal attempts, given the specifics of the opportunities they are presented with.") Gabriel Moreno had the highest run value during the 2023 regular season with a value of nine.

The biggest thing that hurt Naylor in the advanced metric was the precision of his throws, which generated a value of -1.  

Take this situation from Cleveland's July 25th matchup with the Kansas City Royals. Naylor quickly gets the ball out of his glove, but it's thrown way to the right, which allows Michael Massey to advance to third base on the error.

Here's another illustration of an inaccurate throw from Naylor that allowed Atlanta's Michael Harris II to slide in safely for a stolen base. 

There are a lot of critiques here, but Naylor is by no means a defensive liability when behind the plate. 

He made up for a lot of this by doing a good job blocking balls from getting past him. It's also worth noting that the way a pitcher holds a runner on (for better or for worse) affects the success rate of a stolen base. 

However, seeing improvement from one season to the next is expected for young players, so it's not unreasonable to anticipate Naylor's throwing accuracy to improve in 2024.