When looking at James McCann’s numbers over the past few seasons, his improvements in 2019 and 2020 jump out at you as rather odd. McCann had been, in five seasons with the Tigers, a borderline replacement-level catcher, who would eventually be non-tendered by the Tigers after 2018. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, McCann turned himself into a good hitter in 2019 with the White Sox, and an elite all-around catcher in 2020.
Now, many would look at this and say that this profile is littered with red flags. And on the surface, it may very well be. McCann was a player who had amassed over 1600 plate appearances from 2014-2018 and had a career 75 wRC+ to that point and wasn’t adding much defensively, grading out one of the worst framers in the game most years by Baseball Prospectus’s CSAA stat.