After only one day with the squad, the Braves instantly trade their catcher
The White Sox have acquired Max Stassi and cash considerations from the Braves in exchange for a player to be named later. Both teams have announced the deal. Per Daryl Van Schouwen of the Chicago Sun Times, the Braves are expected to pay for the majority of Stassi’s $7M salary next season.
Stassi, 33 in March, spent just one day in the Braves organization after being acquired from the Angels Friday in a multi-player deal alongside infielder David Fletcher. Now, the veteran catcher is off to his third organization in two days, where he figures to have the opportunity to step into a regular role on the south side of Chicago. The White Sox lost Yasmani Grandal to free agency earlier this offseason and were in need of a veteran backstop to pair with youngster Korey Lee behind the plate in 2024.
It’s a need that Stassi is more than capable of meeting. While the veteran missed the full 2023 season, just the first half of his absence was due to the left hip ailment that kept him from being on the Opening Day roster in Anaheim last season. Stassi recovered from that ailment by midseason, but he and his wife revealed last month that the three-month premature birth of their baby required Stassi to pull aside from the game and focus on his family for the duration of the 2023 season.
That said, Stassi is expected to return to the field in 2024 and has shown himself to be a quality big league catcher over the past few seasons. Initially drafted by the A’s in the fourth round of the 2009 draft, Stassi made his big league debut back in 2013 with the Astros but did not find a regular role in the majors until the 2018 season when he split time behind the plate in Houston with Brian McCann and Martin Maldonado. Stassi did well for himself in a backup role that season, slashing a respectable .226/.316/.394 in 250 plate appearances. While Stassi struggled through 51 games in 2019, prompting the Astros to trade him to the Angels at that year’s trade deadline, Stassi was given a more prominent role upon his arrival in Anaheim.
In 118 games between the truncated 2020 season and his first full season as an Angel in 2021, Stassi paired above-average production at the plate (113 wRC+) with solid fielding to finish as the league’s ninth most valuable catcher in terms of fWAR. That excellent performance prompted the Angels to sign Stassi to an extension, a decision that would prove disastrous. As productive as Stassi was during those two seasons, he took a step back in 2022, slashing.180/.267/.363 (63 wRC+) at the plate while generating framing figures that were closer to average than the outstanding figures he had achieved earlier in his career.
While the struggles Stassi faced in 2022 and his time away from the game in 2023 make it an understandable decision for the Angels and Braves to go in another direction behind the plate in 2024, it’s easy to see why the addition of Stassi would be intriguing for the White Sox.
After all, Lee has less than 100 plate appearances of experience in the big leagues and, even if the club believes the former top-100 prospect to be their catcher of the future, will surely need time and assistant as he looks to transition into a new role as a full-time big leaguer.
The addition of a veteran catcher such as Stassi should help with that transition, while also creating a substantial bit of upside for Chicago. Stassi’s contract includes a $7M 2025 club option that features a $500K buyout; if the veteran is able to regain the form he flashed in 2020 and 2021, that $6.5M decision would be a no-brainer to pick up and make for an attractive trade chip as the White Sox retool their roster with an eye toward the future.
The deal removes a component of Stassi’s salary from the Braves’ books while also removing a superfluous piece from their roster. Atlanta already had one of the top catching tandems in the game in Sean Murphy and Travis d’Arnaud behind the plate, making Stassi essentially unnecessary.
In conjunction with the trade that brought Stassi and Fletcher to Atlanta in exchange for Evan White and the trade that sent Marco Gonzales to the Pirates, the Braves have shaved roughly $5M off their payroll since acquiring Gonzales and White as part of the Jarred Kelenic trade during the winter meetings while adding a bench piece in Fletcher who better fits the club’s roster than any of Gonzales, White, or Stassi.
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