After 17 seasons as a professional baseball player – very nearly half his life – Kyle Higashioka has signed his first major league free agent contract. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Higashioka entered a thin catching market coming off the most productive offensive season of his career, and he cashed in to the tune of a slightly back-loaded two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Rangers. The deal also has a $7 million mutual option for 2027 with a $1 million buyout, which means Higashioka is guaranteed to make $13.5 million.
One very disappointing year removed from a World Series championship, the Rangers are hoping that the 34-year-old’s consistency can help them bounce back into contention. Higashioka has now strung together three consecutive seasons in which he’s played at least 83 games and put up at least 1.3 WAR. Texas would love to see him make it four.
Don’t let Higashioka’s overall consistency fool you, though. He actually looked quite different in 2024. For starters, he ran an 80 wRC+ from 2021 to 2023, then jumped to 105 in 2024. Before last season, all of his value came from his glove, but his big offensive year was slightly complicated too. Higashioka has always been able to hit the ball hard, but in 2024, he put up the best power numbers of his career. He hit a career-high 17 homers, and his .256 ISO was by a very wide margin the highest mark he’d put up since he started getting serious playing time in 2021. At the same time, his .301 xwOBA was actually his worst mark since 2019, and it fell mostly because of tumbling exit velocities. That’s puzzling on the surface: Higashioka hit the ball softer than ever, but put up the best power numbers of his career. However, more than batted ball luck was behind his ability to outperform his expected stats.
In 2024, Higashioka optimized his contact by going full-on Isaac Paredes: 29.3% of his balls in play were fly balls or line drives to the pull side. Among the 343 players who put at least 150 balls in play, that was the second-highest mark in baseball. (He trailed Jake Bauers by 0.04 percentage points, while Paredes was all the way down at fifth.) Higashioka has always hit those pulled air balls at a high rate – from 2020 to 2023, he was at 21.8%, which put him in the 91st percentile. Still, adding another 8.5 percentage points to that total is an extreme jump. He has said that as early as 2015, he was attempting to model his swing after Josh Donaldson’s, and in 2024 he reached the ultimate expression of the form. Higashioka’s hard-hit rate fell from 48.3% in 2023 all the way to 37.4% in 2024. That’s an enormous drop-off, but because he hit so many balls in the air, his barrel rate stayed nearly identical, and because he pulled so many of them, his home run rate on fly balls jumped from 14.3% to 18.9%.
So what should we expect from Higashioka in 2025? His hard-hit rate seems primed to bounce back a bit. His contact rate outside the strike zone was much higher than usual, and O-Contact tends to be fluky and can depress a player’s power numbers. On the other hand, Higashioka’s max and 90th-percentile exit velocities dropped off significantly in 2024. As we’re talking about a 34-year-old catcher, it would be fair to assume that his top-end power has peaked.
Higashioka’s defense has also taken a step back lately. Every framing metric indicated that this was the worst season of his career, leaving him just a bit above average. Statcast rated him below average in terms of blocking and controlling the running game, but Baseball Prospectus still gave him solid marks in both categories. In all, Higashioka is looking like he should provide league-average defense behind the plate, with the possibility of a bounce back in his framing. However he does it, if he can manage to keep hitting at or above the league average, then that makes him an attractive backup piece, especially when you consider the needs of his new team.
To say that Rangers catchers struggled mightily last season would be a Texas-sized understatement. Their 0.1 WAR ranked 26th in baseball, and their 67 wRC+ ranked 27th. Andrew Knizner, who started the season backing up Jonah Heim, somehow put up -0.6 WAR over just 91 plate appearances, which sounds like it should be impossible until you see that he ran a wRC+ of 9. Any time your wRC+ is small enough that I need to consult our style guide to make sure I’m not supposed to write it out, you’re in trouble. (Editor’s note: We always use numerals for wRC+, but we usually spell out single-digit numbers for counting stats, such as home runs.) The Rangers traded for Carson Kelly at the deadline, but Kelly promptly turned into a pumpkin, his wRC+ dropping from 108 with the Tigers to 81 wRC+ with Texas.
The bigger concern is incumbent starter Heim, who has now played in at least 128 games in each of the last three seasons. Over that span, he ranks third in games caught and fourth in innings caught. He could use a break, and Higashioka is much more qualified than Knizner to give him a spell. The switch-hitting Heim had a breakout season in 2022, pairing league-average offense with excellent framing to put up 2.7 WAR. In 2023, he planted his flag as one of the best catchers in the game, only to see it torn down in an instant.
Through July 26, 2023, Heim combined a 122 wRC+ with elite defense, and his 3.5 WAR ranked second among all catchers. That day, he tore a tendon sheath in his wrist during a swing. He returned less than three weeks later, but he wasn’t the same player. His ability to hit left-handed, the final puzzle piece that had vaulted him into the upper echelon, vanished: He ran a wRC+ of 46 from the left side from that point on. In 2024, 106 players made at least 300 PAs batting left-handed against right-handed pitchers, and Heim’s 64 wRC+ ranked dead last among them. His framing value also tumbled. He ended the season with a 70 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR. If Heim can’t figure things out, Higashioka could conceivably be asked to take on a larger role. Even if Heim does return to form, the Rangers should be excited to have a catcher who can handle a heavier load. Heim’s punishing workload is likely to grind him into dust eventually, if it hasn’t started doing so already.
For Higashioka, signing a free agent deal is, in some ways, the high point of a remarkable career. The Yankees drafted him in the seventh round of the draft in 2008, and then he spent nine years in their farm system. He reached minor league free agency in 2015, signing a minor league deal to return to the Yankees, and made his big league debut in 2017. Even then, Higashioka didn’t play more than 30 games in New York until 2021. Following the 2023 season, after 16 years in the organization, the Yankees included the 33-year-old Higashioka in their trade with the Padres for Juan Soto. Persisting to this point really is an achievement.
As for what this means for the free agent market as a whole, solid catchers are getting even more scarce. Our Top 50 Free Agents list featured just one catcher: Danny Jansen, who was all the way down at 43. He wasn’t even the highest-ranked Jansen available. With Higashioka off the board, the remaining available catchers consist of former-Ranger Kelly, Yasmani Grandal, and a passel of players who accrued somewhere between 0.6 and -1.2 WAR during the 2024 season. If you’re a contender who wants a catcher, act now.
