Guardians Deep Dive: Bo Naylor Needs To Improve At This

Cleveland Guardians catcher Bo Naylor needs to work on his throwing accuracy before the 2024 MLB season.

Cleveland Guardians fans begged throughout the first two months of last season for the front office to promote Bo Naylor to be the team's primary catcher. Finally, on June 17, fans got their wish and the youngest Naylor brother joined the Big League club.

Bo got off to a slow start behind the plate and in the batter's box, but found a lot of success in the final month of the season. This progression during his rookie season was great.

However, Naylor's game is far from perfect. 

Jul 25, 2023; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Cleveland Guardians catcher Bo Naylor (23) throws to second base between innings against the Kansas City Royals at Progressive Field. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports / © David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

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.