Why Do the Projections Still Love Alejandro Kirk?

From 2020 to 2022, Alejandro Kirk put up a 124 wRC+, meaning that he was 24% better than the average hitter. Only three catchers put up better offensive numbers: future Hall of Famer Buster Posey, number one overall draft pick Adley Rutschman, and Will Smith. That is rarefied air. Kirk started out as one of the best-hitting catchers in baseball, period. Then 2023 happened.

Over the past two seasons, Kirk has a 95 wRC+. That’s above average for a catcher, but not by much, and it’s a radical drop-off for someone who started his career so hot. Deep into January, we now find ourselves in projection season, the time when sites like FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus inform us of how advanced algorithms with adorable names think that each player will perform in 2025. Here’s a quick roundup of the projections for Kirk’s 2025 batting line.

FGDC: 120 wRC+
Steamer: 120 wRC+
OOPSY: 118 wRC+
ATC: 112 wRC+
PECOTA: 110 DRC+
ZiPS: 105 OPS+

That’s a whole lot of projection systems, and they’re all predicting that Kirk will go back to being an above-average hitter and one of the best on the team in 2025. That’s our topic for the day. Why do the projection systems think that Kirk is going to bounce back, and should we trust them?

For an in-depth look at how projection systems work, I’d recommend reading Jordan Rosenblum’s introduction to OOPSY, which FanGraphs just added to its stable of projections. The quick and dirty explanation is that projection systems use a player’s recent performance and underlying metrics to predict what they’ll do next season. They weight recent seasons more heavily, they adjust the predictions based on an aging curve, and they regress performance to the mean. Based on all of that, it makes sense that the projections systems would expect Bo Bichette to bounce right back after one bad season. But Kirk has now had two in a row; in his first three seasons, when he ran the 124 wRC+, he had 755 PAs, while in his last two seasons, he had 808 PAs. He's spent more time as a below-average hitter than an above-average hitter.  I expected his 2025 projections to be way worse. Let me show you what I mean. This table shows Kirk’s preseason projections for each of the last three seasons, along with his actual wRC+.

After Kirk put up a 129 wRC+ in 2022, his 2023 projections shot up. After he put up a 96 wRC+ in 2023, his 2024 projections fell back to earth. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But after he ran the exact same numbers in 2024, Steamer, FGDC, and OOPSY, still see him as basically the same player, while ZiPS, PECOTA, and ATC have fairly small drop-offs. Once again: Why do the projection systems still see Kirk as such a good hitter?

I don’t really know the answer to this question. For starters, just looking at Kirk’s raw wRC+ betrays the fact that he got pretty unlucky in 2024, as his .324 xwOBA and 112 DRC+ indicated that he deserved to end up as an above-average hitter. There were a few encouraging trends in his numbers: He hit fewer groundballs. After falling off hard in 2023, his contact quality improved. His hard-hit rate and both his average and 90th percentile exit velocities ticked back up in 2024; not all the way to their 2022 levels, but still better than 2023. He chased a little bit more, but he also got much more aggressive on pitches inside the strike zone. That led to more strikeouts and fewer walks, but it also meant that he was swinging at better pitches, which is a good sign in the long run.

None of this is a slam dunk, but it helps explain why the projection systems still see Kirk as a solidly above-average hitter. Because he’s also an excellent defender, even in his down 2023 and 2024 seasons, Kirk put up a total of 5.1 fWAR, making him the ninth-most valuable catcher in baseball. If he’s able to put the offense and defense together once again, he could be a huge part of getting the Blue Jays back to the playoffs. As for whether or not to believe the projections, that’s up to you.