The Brewers made their first swing of the trade deadline season by acquiring a backup catcher
The Milwaukee Brewers have made their first swing of trade-deadline season.
The Brewers are acquiring catcher Danny Jansen from the Tampa Bay Rays, as first reported by ESPN's Jeff Passan.
A graduate of Appleton West High School, Jansen is batting .204 with a .314 on-base and .389 slugging percentage. He's slugged 11 home runs in 73 games.
Jansen, 30, has been worth two defensive runs saved under the DRS metric, but different catcher metric valuate him quite differently; Statcast's fielding run value has him at -8 runs.
William Contreras, Milwaukee's primary catcher, has been battling a fractured finger on his left hand throughout the season while catching nearly every day. Since June 1, Contreras is batting just .229 with a paltry .312 slugging percentage.
As the primary backup all season, 32-year-old Eric Haase has a .229 average and .647 OPS.
Jansen's strengths are his swing decisions (he chases out of the zone less than 20% of the time) and ability to pull the ball in the air, but he has also graded out as a poor framer this year.
Jansen made MLB history last year when he became the first player to appear for both teams in the same game, first for the Blue Jays in a rain-suspended game and then for the Boston Red Sox when the game was continued later in the season; in the meantime, Jansen had been traded to Boston from the Blue Jays, the organization that drafted him out of Appleton West in 2013. He signed as a free agent with the Rays in December of 2024.
He'll join Brewers infield coach Matt Erickson as Appleton West alumni on the Brewers' payroll.
Jansen has a $12 million mutual option with a $500,000 buyout for 2026.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Brewers trade for catcher, Appleton native Danny Jansen from Rays
Category: Baseball
