The Long-Term Catcher Dilemma Poll!

If you extrapolate his baserunning from last year to a full seasons worth of games, he'd easily be among the bottom 20 base runners in the game. Not that I would really do that to a 50 game sample, but just shows that he's definitely a negative on the base paths.

Swihart has 0.3 bWAR this year with a .382 BABIP in 70 games.

Vazque had 1.1 bWAR last year with a .283 BABIP (which is probably about right) in 55 games.

Neither of those include pitch framing, where Vazquez has a pretty clear edge. To be fair, that was Swihart's age 23 season and Vazquez' age 24 season.

I know someone will list fWAR and how it's the opposite, but I don't know who actually believes that Swihart is almost as good as Vazquez defensively which happens to make up most of his fWAR with the rest baserunning. And neither WAR adjusts for BABIP.

Where is Swihart's offensive improvement going to come from? He has a .382 BABIP and a 93 wRC+. He's never walked a lot and probably won't be a huge power guy either. The likely drop in his BABIP is going to be hard to overcome other than by dropping the K-rate a lot. But I don't see him hitting much higher than he is now with that profile unless he starts hitting a lot more extra base hits.

To help the argument: Don't we forget that Swihart always improved after a longer adjustment period? To my recollection both offensively and defensively.
As long as we can expect that to happen (and the scouts still seem to believe that can be expected), why would we rush and decide about an unfinished product?
Plus the written doubts about Vasquez, which are a) he'll be the hitter Eric thinks he's going to be and b) he recovers from his injury and reaches the same defensive hights he has shown.

Additionally: If both reach their ceiling: Are we really sure it would not be the best option to keep them both? Couldn't that be a win-win solution?

I'm not saying we should hold on to them no matter what. Give me those pitchers mentioned in one of the previous posts. But I as well doubt they will be given to us.

Point is: Both the expectations about either player aren't clear yet and (at least to me) the benefit of having both.

As long as both aspects are so unclear, I'd be cautious to move to soon.

Still, the dilemma is that we don't know how healthy Vazquez will be and whether he will return to his former self, defensively especially, and even if he does, how long it would take to fully recover.

It's such an important position, I don't think you can anything until you can better assess CVaz post TJ. That likely means keeping them both another year and evaluating the situation during (and likely after) the 2016 season.

i don't get why, if CV is so much more valuable as a catcher because of his pitch framing/def etc, then why would anyone think that the redsox are going to get a ton for BS if he is more of a hitting catcher as opposed to having really good catching qualities? Are the redsox the only ones in the MLB that think this way lol?

Because there aren't enough good young catchers to go around.

Why isn't my answer enough?  If Christian Vazquez' career ended, we'd be pretty damn thrilled to still have Swihart.  We're debating over two very good young catchers.  Most teams would be quite happy to have either one of them.  If we're trading one of them, teams would be interested in either.

I didn't take that from this post.

I'm just nitpicking, like everyone else so that's about enough of that for me.

Here is a scenario. What if neither get traded right away because of the same reasons we picking on catcher or the other? Neither has seen enough MLB time in order to get an accurate idea of how their skills will play out in the bigs.