It's been a productive spring at the plate for 26-year-old Nationals catcher Keibert Ruiz. Through 29 plate appearances, he's hit three home runs and is slugging .615. He's still hitting .269, even despite a brutal .182 BABIP. These are all good signs for Ruiz's future, as he looks to rebound from what was easily the worst offensive season of his career. Even still, there's question marks for the man who was assigned a 55/80 future value by FanGraphs aggregators upon his graduation from prospect status. With little to no immediate threat behind him to take his job, including perhaps the most uninspiring backup catcher battle ever between Riley Adams, Drew Millas, and Andrew Knizner, Ruiz must bounce back in 2025.
A lot of things went wrong for Keibert last year. For one, he was sidelined right at the start of the season with a nasty bout of influenza that kept him out for two weeks and caused him to lose nearly twenty pounds. Baseball players, especially catchers, place extensive focus on their conditioning, and that suddenly being derailed at the onset of the season can put a huge strain on any player intending to play the rest of the season. Keibert's a trooper--he's stayed in the game after suffering swollen testicles--so he will fight to play whenever he can, but the quality of that play is in question. Over the course of the season, the already free-swinging Ruiz swung at everything (a career high 39.1 O-Swing%, or chase rate) and while he made contact with most of it, that wasn't necessarily a good thing. His rate of hard contact was the lowest it had ever been in a full season by a sizeable margin, so even with an increased pull and fly ball rate, he wasn't able to hit the ball hard enough to do any real damage. Among batters with at least 450 PA, he had the second-lowest average on batted balls in 2024 at .232.
Now, that's not entirely a bad thing when we're talking about his outlook for 2025 and beyond. Yes, Ruiz hit .229, which is shocking for someone who was assigned a 55 hit tool by both MLB Pipeline and FanGraphs aggregators, but there's expected room for positive regression, especially when he hit .308 that spring. Statisticians generally regard any BABIP below .250 as unsustainable.
Another issue that needs attention is his performance versus fastballs of all types. Ruiz performed well against four-seam fastballs in 2023, hitting to a +6.3 run value against the pitch. That slipped 10 full runs to -3.7 in 2024, and his performance against both sinkers and cutters tumbled as well. If this trend continues, major league pitchers are going to begin to exploit that hole in his game, especially on the cutter, which he slashed .133/.235/.233 against.
Ruiz also regressed against sliders, dropping over 5 runs in value to -3.6 from 2023 to '24. Both in and out of the zone, he swung at more of them, made contact against them at a lower rate, and his OPS against them dropped over 120 points. Between sliders and general fastballs, Ruiz combined for an abysmal -16.4 run value in 2024. One can only hope that the coaching staff knows this, though, and is working with him to identify pitches better and make adjustments to produce firmer contact. Again, his pull rate climbed to over 50% in 2024 for the first time in his career. If the team can add even just a tick or two to his bat speed, more of those fly balls he's been hitting will turn into home runs, and his 3 bombs so far this spring are an encouraging sign.
That leaves us with Ruiz behind the plate. We're a couple years removed now from Keibert's disastrous fielding of 2023, when he was worth anywhere from -8 to -13 framing runs, but he's still not really receiving the ball well enough to make up for the sub-80 wRC+ he was running last year. Depending on who you ask, framing contributes in the range of 60 to as much as 90 percent of the value provided defensively by a catcher, and year after year the team has stressed this in spring training to little real outcome. The Nationals were in the bottom 10 of framing value last year, and ranked in the bottom 5 of FanGraphs defensive runs at the catching position. Ruiz's pop time is also pretty brutal; he's combined for -12 throwing runs over the last two seasons.
In fairness, there are signs of progression in Keibert's defensive game. His framing jumped to just below average in 2024, and he cut his losses on stolen bases in half. His blocking improved, too, even if it's still in the 20th percentile league-wide. Projection models are actually seemingly bullish on his performance behind the dish going into 2025, even if it's still underwhelming (his projection of +3.0 defensive runs by ZiPS would still be well below the median for catchers with 800 innings in 2024). If he can help out the pitching staff, which figures to be improved in 2025, he will regain some of his previous shine.
What is there to expect from Keibert Ruiz in 2025, then? Projection models expect his average to return to about in line with his career norms of about .250. We know he's not going to walk very much, so the rest will mostly have to come in the form of power when he does make contact. The general expectation by these models seems to be in the range of a 90 to 95 wRC+, which is acceptable for a catcher but still falls short of what the team hoped for from him when they acquired him in 2021. Of course, these are just projections, and there is still upside in Ruiz; either way, he will be the primary starting catcher for the Nats, and is under contract until at least 2030, so playing time will not be hard to come by. Ruiz needs to start with a return to middling production before he can begin to shoot much higher.