Mitch Garver returns to Seattle

On Wednesday, catcher Mitch Garver agreed to one minor league deal to stay with the Mariners through 2026. On Thursday, he reported having to camp out for a physical, and should he make the Major League roster, he will earn a prorated $2.55 million for any time spent with the big club. Because of his veteran status, Garver will have the opportunity to opt out and find a job elsewhere at the end of March, May 1 or June 1, if he remains in the minority. We don’t often devote entire articles to minor league deals, but I wanted to highlight this article because the 35-year-old Garver has had such an interesting career and such a dramatic turnaround over the past two years.

Just over two years ago, Garver signed a very different contract with Seattle. It was a two-year deal for $24 million, almost five times more per year than his new one. He was coming off a 2023 season in which he launched 19 home runs and finished with a 142 wRC+ despite a knee sprain in April that knocked him out for more than two months. It was only the 18th time this century that a catcher had put together such a good offensive line over at least 300 at-bats, and it wasn’t even Garver’s best season. He made his debut at age 26 in 2017 and through the first seven years of his career led a 124 wRC+. If you go to our rankings and rank catchers over their age-32 seasons, that brand ties him to Hall of Famer Gary Carter And Mickey Tettleton for 32nd all-time (just behind his teammate Cal Raleigh’126).

That’s not to say Garver was on his way to becoming one of the best catchers ever. Thanks to a wide variety of injuries, he had only played 80 games in a season three times. And because of both the injuries and his very poor defense, he had spent more than 40% of his time at first base or DH. Despite being one of the best hitting catchers in the game, he only had 8.3 WAR to his name. Yet the bat was so unmistakable that he became the first non-pitcher Jerry was photographed had once signed a multi-year contract while managing the Mariners. The move came with risks, but that risk centered on whether Garver would stay healthy, whether his bat would play adequately if he spent the vast majority of his time as a DH, as expected.

You know what happened next. Garver stayed healthy and avoided the IL in both 2024 and 2025. He played in 201 games and tied for the majority of all two seasons in his entire career. But the bat disappeared completely. This wasn’t necessarily the risk we were concerned about. Garver hit a combined .187 and put up an 88 wRC+ and -0.4 WAR. In particular, his ability to throw right-handed simply evaporated. He posted a 66 wRC+ against righties over those two seasons and was demoted to platoon duty in mid-July 2024.

So what on earth went wrong? Garver’s 90th percentile exit velocity dropped from 107.6 mph in 2023 to 104.4 over the past two seasons. He started chasing a bit more and his contact ability took a nosedive, driving his strikeout rate up. Sounds like it could just be a man getting older, right? The point is, this has all happened before. Garver’s EV90 posted a career-worst 166.9 km/h in 2022. His pursuit rate was the same or worse in 2021 and 2022. His zone contact rate was lower in the two seasons of 2020 and 2021 than the last two years. So while these are all bad things, they are also bad things that Garver has successfully fought through before and put up good numbers anyway.

Let me throw in one more theory, and I must admit up front that I cannot prove it. We all remember how Teoscar Hernández struggled with T-Mobile Park. Garver didn’t enter the 2024 season with a tremendous track record in Seattle. He had only made 33 at-bats there. Within those 33 times, however, he was terrible. He had a .042 wOBA and .129 xwOBA, his worst numbers ever. His exit velocity and heavy hit rate were his third-lowest among ballparks (above only Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and Nationals Park, where he had totaled 15 at-bats). Is it possible that Garver is just really struggling at T-Mobile and that messed him up?

The argument I have not-so-subtly constructed here is simple enough. Maybe Garver just had a few bad years. Maybe he was out of sorts and had some bad luck or whatever, but he’s been pretty much the same guy through it all, and given the chance, maybe he’ll strike again in 2026.

As much as I would like to, I don’t think I really buy this argument. Two bad years say a lot more than one, and Garver’s production has dipped especially against fastballs, which is always concerning. When you combine that with worse swing decisions, poorer contact ability and weaker contact, it certainly starts to sound like he’s just struggling to keep up. Besides, even if all of that were true and Garver was basically the same guy underneath, he’s still a 35-year-old catcher who has suffered enough injuries to last two entire careers. He was going to slow down now anyway.

That brings us to bat speed. About a year ago, Tom Tango published some preliminary data on the aging curve indicating that swing speed begins to decline at age 32. At first glance, Garver’s data on bat tracking doesn’t seem particularly damning. Statcast started collecting it in the second half of 2023, and the overall numbers say Garver’s bat has actually gotten faster over the past two years: 72.28 mph in 2023, 71.2 in 2024, and 71.8 in 2025. That’s certainly encouraging! It’s a bit better than league average, and if you compare apples to apples, like if you look at just fastballs over the center of the plate, or just hard-hit balls, the numbers are virtually identical. But before we conclude that Garver didn’t suddenly lose his bat speed when he hit his mid-30s, we need to look at his average point of contact. As you probably know by now, the bat’s speed increases during the swing, and Statcast measures this at the point of contact.

The graph above shows Garver’s bat speed and interception point (relative to his center of mass) only on hard-hit fastballs above the center of the plate. In short, it shows its numbers when everything goes well. Over the past two years, Garver’s interception point has moved forward two inches. To put that in perspective, if you go from an intercept of 28.2 to 31.2 in 2025, you go from the 51st percentile to the 80th percentile. It’s a very large shift, and if his actual swing speed stayed the same, we would have seen a proportionate increase in measured swing speed. That didn’t happen, so we have to conclude that the swing is slowing down. In addition, to meet the ball far forward, he must start his swing earlier. Combine that with the issues hitting fastballs, the higher chase rate, and the lower contact rate in the zone, and we have a neat, depressing story.

Garver’s bat is slowing, so he’s doing what older players do: hitting the ball early to compensate. Normally, those older players start to pull the ball more when they perform this motion, compensating for the extra whiffs with extra force. But that doesn’t happen for Garver. He was already pulling the ball around as much as possible. From 2019 to 2022, his 54% pull rate was the highest in baseball. So even though he starts earlier and hits the ball further forward, his draw speed has dropped a bit. And because he can’t afford to stay behind any longer, his already low opposite field rate has fallen even further. He hits more balls to the middle of the field, where they are less valuable, which is one of the reasons he has low BABIPs and performs slightly below his expected stats.

Despite all this, Garver was still useful against lefties, and it’s not entirely out of the question that he’ll bounce back in 2026. Even the projections, which take age-related decline into account, expect a very modest recovery to a wRC+ around 90. This contract doesn’t carry much risk for the Mariners. In fact, because they have Andreas Knizner signed to a Major League deal for just $1 million, less than half of what they would pay Garver if he made it to the big leagues, Knizner has an edge at the backup catcher spot anyway. I will make sure Garver gets another chance in Seattle or elsewhere and makes the most of it. His defensive shortcomings and problems staying on the pitch made it a little too easy to look past his attacking capabilities, but he had serious talent and was too rarely able to take full advantage of it.