Over the first weekend of 2024, the Colorado Rockies made their first foray into the major league free agent market. And heavens to Betsy, they are loaded for bear.

Catcher Jacob Stallings signed a one-year deal for $1.5 million, which will count as $2 million for CBT purposes thanks to a potential $500,000 buyout of his 2025 mutual option. (Not that anyone cares; the Rockies are close to $75 million short of hitting the lowest tax threshold.) Dakota Hudson will also make $1.5 million in base salary, with the potential to double his money with innings-based incentives. The former Mississippi State right-hander is due one more season in arbitration after this.

Both players had been non-tendered by their previous clubs in November.

Stallings was a bit of a hipster favorite a couple seasons ago, when he combined slightly below-average offense with excellent defense late in his tenure with the Pirates. Stallings posted a wRC+ of 92 in both 2020 and 2021, and across those two seasons, he was tied for second in total defensive runs above average among catchers. DRS had him out in front by an enormous margin: 28 runs above average to 12 for second-place Austin Hedges.

Catching is hard, catching every day even more so, which is why players like Hedges — who do the defensive part of the game well — keep getting major league jobs. High-end defensive catchers who can fake even one above-average offensive tool will make the odd All-Star team.

At his peak, Stallings exhibited a combination of receiving and blocking skills that would’ve impressed most NFL tight ends. He never hit for much average or power, but he could draw a walk.

Two offseasons ago, Miami was convinced enough to trade three players for the former Tar Heel, and the only way this trip to South Florida could’ve gone any worse is if Stallings had been eaten by an alligator. Stallings hit .210/.287/.290 in 202 games as a Marlin, ultimately falling into a time share with third-year man Nick Fortes, who himself did not have a single triple slash number that started with a three last season.

I don’t think that kind of offensive production is survivable for a starting catcher, even if he fields his position like prime Ivan Rodriguez. Unfortunately, Stallings’ defense also fell off a cliff during that time:

In 2021, Stallings was the best blocker in baseball. In 2023, he was merely 12th out of 68 qualified backstops. He was also near the bottom of the league in framing. Between that and the horrendous offense, the Stallings-Fortes double act put Miami 29th out of 30 in terms of catcher WAR last season.

Allowing for the possibility that the Marlins did something to screw Stallings up and the Rockies think they can correct it, Stallings is a replacement-level catcher. And the data on 6-foot-5 34-year-olds who squat for a living isn’t promising.

My first inclination was to say that this doesn’t matter. It’s a cheap one-year deal for a backup catcher, and he’s better than Brian Serven, who got waived to make room for Stallings. After all, the Rockies have reigning All-Star MVP Elias Díaz, who appeared in 141 games last season. (It’s a real shame Stump the Schwab isn’t around anymore, because Díaz’s All-Star MVP is going to make him a killer trivia answer for the next 20 years.)

Unfortunately (I apologize in advance for overusing that word in this blog post about the Rockies’ depth signings), Díaz was just as bad as Stallings defensively in 2023, and by season’s end his own wRC+ had floated down to 81, leaving him bang-on at replacement level. This from a catcher who is himself only 11 months younger than Stallings.

You think you know the meaning of “bleak” and then you find yourself staring at a sentence like “The Drew Romo Era can’t come quickly enough.”

Hudson is a more encouraging signing, if only in relative terms. A tip of the cap is due to R.J. Anderson of CBS, who called this signing way back in November. He called Hudson “a below-average starter who doesn’t miss bats or manage contact well enough to ascend beyond the back of the rotation… Hudson can fulfill his destiny by becoming a tenured member of the Colorado Rockies.” If R.J. weren’t just about the nicest guy in the business, I might accuse him of being mean-spirited there, but turns out he was only predicting the future.

The Colorado Rockies: Where an accurate description of reality sounds like a cruel joke.

Four years ago, an optimistic person might have looked at Hudson and seen a future mid-rotation workhorse, even better. The big right-hander won 16 games and threw 174.2 innings in his first full season in the majors, with a 3.35 ERA; he followed that up with a 2.77 ERA in eight starts during 2020. Unfortunately (places a quarter in the swear jar), Hudson developed elbow discomfort that turned into Tommy John surgery, and he hasn’t gotten the same results since he came back.

You might look at Hudson’s 4.55 ERA and 13.1% strikeout rate post-TJ and think something went wrong, that a pair of forceps was somehow mislaid and left within the surgical cavity or something. The truth is that this regression was always coming.

I mentioned optimism just now regarding the young Hudson; I was one of those unfortunates who saw a young Cardinals sinkerballer and figured the strikeout rate didn’t have to match the ERA. But there’s counting on weak contact, and there’s closing your eyes and ignoring the K-BB% column so hard you accidentally bring Tinkerbell back to life.

Unfortunately (picks up swear jar, looking for a QR code, because at this point it’d be more convenient if this thing had Venmo), the concerns about missing bats were always there.

From 2018 to 2020 — Hudson’s salad days — 129 starters threw at least 200 innings. Hudson had a K-BB% of 7.4, 125th out of 129 pitchers. He had an ERA of 3.25, but the other five guys in the bottom six all had ERAs over 5.00. He had the highest groundball rate among starters during this time, but his hard-hit rate was 25th-highest among starters. Here, a groundball could be an easy out, or it could be one of those bouncing bombs the RAF used to blow up dams during World War II.

If all of this is starting to sound suspiciously like a taller, American Antonio Senzatela, there’s a reason: The Rockies need innings with two key starters — Senzatela and Germán Márquez — recovering from Tommy John surgery themselves.

Can Hudson go out there and throw a ton of sinkers and eat innings for Colorado? Sure. I make no promises about how many baserunners he’ll allow along the way, but Hudson should eat plenty of innings. And considering that he’ll make only $1.5 million, while pitchers who aren’t a whole lot better are looking at six times as much pay, maybe the Rockies have made a smart play here.

Unfortunately (sigh), the Rockies are still several moves away from being anything more than a participant in this coming season.

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