Last week, I looked made another pass at the pitcher valuations, using NFBC parameters and Steamer projections, while separating out closers. Here, I'll do the same thing with hitters and catchers, respectively.

The problem with catchers is you need to roster two of them, but they can't be treated as regular hitters because the replacement level for the position (roughly 24th-30th catcher) is far lower than the replacement value at the other positions. Moreover,  people (including me) sometimes don't even draft their catchers until they've filled bench spots at other positions. In short, when someone drafts a premium catcher, you need to compare that pick to this lower catcher baseline rather than the baseline for non-catcher hitters.

As such, I took the Steamer projections for the top-30 NFBC-drafted catchers, used the 24th-30th as the baseline and figured out the value above replacement (VORP) for all of them in each category. I then divided those totals by the standard deviations in their respective categories among all hitters to get a per-category contribution (plus or minus) for each and added the five of them for a total value.

To convert that value into dollars, I needed to come up with a catcher budget, something I was able to do by adding all the catchers drafted in the top-300 by NFBC owners and using the dollar value I'd assigned to each slot in this piece. The total catcher budget came out to a meager $145.17, roughly half of the closer budget for roughly the same number of players. That $145.17 should be distributed among the drafted catcher pool, according the the Steamer projections as run through my formula, as follows:

As you can see, even when you adjust catchers for scarcity and assume a two-catcher league,  none is even a $20 value (or fourth-round pick.) Moreover, like closers, after the top-two, there's a significant drop-off to the rest, so much so that only Lucroy is even a top-10 round pick, and barely at that. If these valuations (as well as the meager budget afforded to catchers by NFBC drafters) are accurate, I feel fairly justified in not drafting a catcher unless one falls significantly below ADP until very late in the end game as I did here and especially here.

Remember, the baseline, scrub catcher you draft is not who you'll likely end up with - you'll cycle through low-end options until you find someone useful, meaning replacement value is actually slightly higher than what's represented here and even closer to catchers 12-24 than it looks. I'm punting the position all draft season unless I find an unlikely bargain.

(*For some reason, I left the 30th catcher off my catcher-only list, but he would have been worth between $-3 and $1 probably, so it's not affecting the overall numbers. )

What about the rest of the hitting pool once you remove catchers? How does it affect everyone else?

Not surprisingly, pulling out the catchers doesn't affect the order of the other hitters much, but it's interesting that Clayton Kershaw only comes out to 86 cents more than Mike Trout on this pass with closers and catchers missing, even though the pitching split is 66/34 rather than 70/30. The catcher removal helps Trout somewhat because it makes the baseline higher, and the higher the replacement level, the bigger share of the budget goes to the difference makers at the top. Moreover, because closers pull twice as much out of the pitching budget as catchers do hitting, that also tilts money away from Kershaw and toward Trout. While Kershaw is still slightly higher, I won't say it's a no brainer to take him over Trout with the number one pick, something I had been arguing earlier.

Here's the full hitting list with catchers integrated back in, sorted by dollar value: