To Boldly Stay: Alejandro Kirk Signs Five-Year Extension With Blue Jays

It might not be long before Captain Kirk is the captain of the Starship Blue Jays. Alejandro Kirk made his MLB debut in September 2020. The only players who have been with the team for longer are Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, both of whom could leave in free agency next winter. If that were to happen, Kirk would become the longest-tenured Blue Jay just days before his 27th birthday. He could end up holding that title for quite some time, too. On Saturday, Kirk and the Blue Jays reportedly agreed to a five-year, $58 million extension. The deal, which begins in 2026, buys out the backstop’s final arbitration season and his first four free agent years, running through his age-31 campaign.

A 23-year-old Kirk burst onto the scene in the first half of 2022. He hit .315, slugged 11 home runs, and walked more often than he struck out over 83 games. His 155 wRC+ ranked sixth among qualified AL batters, far ahead of the next-best catcher. The fact that he was splitting catching duties, and thus DHing on the regular, cut into his overall defensive value, but still, Kirk ranked among the top-10 AL players in WAR. Fans voted him to be the starting catcher for the AL All-Stars, and the honor was well deserved.

Yet, Kirk has never looked like that middle-of-the-order threat since. He produced a 95 wRC+ in the second half of 2022. He followed that up with a 96 wRC+ in 2023 and a 94 wRC+ in 2024. To save you some strenuous mental math, I can tell you that averages out to a 95 wRC+ since the 2022 All-Star break. That means Kirk has been about 5% less productive at the plate than the average hitter, but, to his credit, still 5% more productive than the average catcher. His 10.3% walk rate is great, while his 12.0% strikeout rate is elite. Only seven batters (min. 1,000 PA) have a lower strikeout rate in that span, and none of them boasts a walk rate in the double digits. Unfortunately, the plus power that made Kirk such a complete hitter in the first half of 2022 has vanished:

In his prospect days, Kirk looked like a bat-first catcher. He raked throughout the minors, showing off plate discipline, power, and, most of all, terrific bat-to-ball skills. Conversely, neither his framing, his blocking, nor his throwing skills were anything to write home about. If that were still the case, his 95 wRC+ over the past two and a half seasons would be a lot more disappointing. However, Kirk’s 2022 wasn’t just a breakout year offensively. After making adjustments to improve his framing and blocking over the 2021-22 offseason, he established himself as a premium defensive catcher. The plus power he showed off early that season is starting to look more and more like a flash in the pan, but there is genuine gold in his glove.

Over the last three years, Kirk leads all catchers with 39 DRS, while his 35 FRV ranks third. His framing has been consistently excellent; his 26.4 framing runs make him the fifth-most-valuable strike stealer since 2022. Blocking was arguably his strongest defensive skill in both 2022 and ’23, with only Sean Murphy racking up more Statcast blocking runs across those two years. Kirk’s blocking numbers weren’t quite as impressive in 2024, but that might have been due to the adjustments he made to become one of the best throwing catchers in the league. Kirk spent the 2023-24 offseason working on his arm, telling Sportsnet’s David Singh that although he wasn’t necessarily throwing any harder, his new program helped improve his consistency. Lo and behold, Kirk ranked third in Statcast caught stealing runs and second in the stolen base runs component of DRS – a major improvement. If he did, in fact, sacrifice some blocking value for throwing value, there’s little doubt the trade-off was worth it. According to Statcast FRV, he was a top-10 defender in baseball last season:

Even if Kirk never again comes close to hitting the way he did in the first half of 2022, he has proven he can be a first-division regular behind the dish. His 6.0 WAR since his All-Star appearance ranks ninth among primary catchers, and one of those primary catchers, Willson Contreras, is no longer a primary catcher. As long as Kirk maintains something close to this level of production through his age-31 season, his $11.6 million salary will be an absolute bargain for the Blue Jays.

With that said, there also exists a strong possibility that Kirk will be more valuable in 2025 (and beyond) than he’s been for the last two-plus years. For one thing, he is likely going to catch more often this coming year than ever before. His career high in defensive innings is 775. That’s barely half the innings in a season. Now that Danny Jansen is completely out of the picture, Kirk should get more starts, which means more opportunities to provide value with his glove.

It is also worth considering that Kirk could be a more productive hitter in 2025 than he’s been for the last little while. Just 26 years old, he’s at an age when plenty of players are still adjusting to the majors. Although his last 1,000 or so big league plate appearances have been mediocre, it would be foolish to forget just how well he swung the bat at the beginning of his career. From his MLB debut in 2020 to his All-Star debut in 2022, he produced a 138 wRC+ in 520 plate appearances. That’s no small sample size; that’s the first third of his career. It’s also a qualified season’s worth of reps, and across that stretch, Kirk had the same wRC+ as Corey Seager and Mookie Betts. Besides, it’s not as if his batting line looked all that unsustainable. His .294 BABIP might have been a little high, given his slow footspeed, but you can’t give his BABIP any credit for the 20 long balls he socked over the fence. A .374 xwOBA (compared to a .366 wOBA) is further evidence that his success in that span was earned. If Kirk could do all that from ages 21-23 across his first 152 games, it’s not absurd to suggest he could tap back into some of that offense in his mid-20s.

To that point, Kirk has notably underperformed his xwOBA since his All-Star first half in 2022. While his .302 wOBA is 11 ticks below league average, his .321 xwOBA is seven ticks better than that of the average hitter. Nearly 150 players have taken as many or more plate appearances as Kirk in that time, and only 10 have a larger gap between their wOBA and xwOBA. That could indicate he is due for some positive regression. Then again, the longer a player continues to underperform his xwOBA, the less it seems like “bad luck” and the more it starts to seem like there must be something about his offensive profile that xwOBA can’t properly capture.

Since the 2022 All-Star break, Kirk has been a much worse hitter. That’s no secret. He has made less contact, and the contact he has made has been weaker and more likely to go straight into the ground. All of that is reflected in his expected stats. However, what xwOBA can’t see is that just 22.1% of Kirk’s batted balls in the air were pulled (per Sports Info Solutions). Moreover, Kirk was never a pull merchant. From 2020 through the first half of 2022, he pulled 29.4% of batted air balls. That’s right in line with league average. Yet, his air ball pull rate since then puts him among the bottom 10% of hitters (min. 400 fly balls/line drives).

The good thing for Kirk is that none of this necessarily means he will continue to underperform his xwOBA. For one thing, xwOBA intentionally excludes spray angle, because it’s not always very helpful for predicting performance. What’s more, the 13 hitters (min. 400 balls in the air) with a lower air pull rate than Kirk since the 2022 All-Star break have a combined .328 wOBA and a matching .328 xwOBA in that time. In other words, running a low pull rate on balls in the air isn’t a sure sign that a hitter will underperform his xwOBA. That might seem counterintuitive – pulled air balls tend to overperform their xwOBA, while non-pulled fly balls tend to underperform their xwOBA – but the combined data from those 13 players is illuminating. None of this is to say that Kirk’s decreased pull rate isn’t a cause for concern. Pulling the ball is a good thing! Even so, the wide gap between his wOBA and xwOBA might still be evidence that better days are yet to come.

Kirk’s early-career success and underlying data help explain why just about every projection system envisions him to be a good hitter in 2025 – and not just good for a catcher. There is certainly a range of expectations, from relatively optimistic (ZiPS, 109 wRC+) to shockingly so (Steamer, 122 wRC+), but even the least-encouraging projection on Kirk’s player page (THE BAT X, 104 wRC+) seems bullish, considering his 95 wRC+ over his last thousand trips to the plate. That’s a great sign for Kirk and the Blue Jays. He has already proven to be more than worthy of his new contract as a 95 wRC+ hitter. The more he hits, the more surplus value he’ll provide.

Blue Jays catchers came in at no. 4 on our positional power rankings last week. Kirk himself ranks sixth among catchers with 4.0 projected WAR, according to our Depth Charts. ZiPS is lower on his bat than Steamer, but both projection models envision a 3-4 WAR season. So do OOPSY and PECOTA, with all four systems ranking him somewhere between fifth and seventh among primary catchers. If Kirk were to play at that level for the next two years and then reach free agency just before his 28th birthday, he surely would have secured a tidier sum than $58 million. Indeed, ZiPS thinks he could have reasonably commanded almost twice as much:

So, there’s no doubt Kirk’s deal is team friendly. The only question is just how team friendly it will turn out to be. He has an above-average baseline and an All-Star ceiling, yet he only needs to be a passable starting catcher for Toronto to get its money’s worth out of his contract. The Blue Jays will pay Kirk a few million more than they would have had to in his final arbitration season, but in return, they’re getting his first four free agent years for $11.6 million a pop. That’s a Black Friday kind of bargain. Just look at how much the Jays are paying Anthony Santander. Like Kirk, Santander is a one-time All-Star and Silver Slugger winner with close to 10 WAR for his career. Yet, Kirk compiled that WAR in about half as many plate appearances, and he’ll be three years younger than Santander when his contract begins. Even so, Santander will earn $13.6 million more (in present-day value) over the lifetime of his deal.

If I were Kirk’s agent, I couldn’t have advised him to take this offer. I would’ve told him he should hold out for more. Rogers Communications could afford it. That being said, it’s impossible to blame a young player for choosing lifelong financial security for himself, his children, and his children’s children, especially when the only thing he’s sacrificing is the possibility that he could also obtain lifelong financial security for his great-grandchildren if he waited another two years. A lot can happen in two seasons to derail a promising baseball career. On top of that, the free agent market is always unpredictable. Barring a serious injury or decline, Kirk would have been one of the better free agents in a relatively weak position player class two winters from now. Still, teams might have been hesitant to offer him a multi-year deal, knowing that Raleigh, Adley Rutschman, and William Contreras could all be available in another 12 months.

The Blue Jays expressed their faith in Kirk when they traded Gabriel Moreno to the Diamondbacks after the 2022 season. They showed that faith again when they flipped Jansen at the trade deadline last summer. This extension is the latest demonstration that the Blue Jays see Kirk as a key cog on their roster. He is their catcher of the present, and now their catcher of the foreseeable future – which is good, because they don’t have much in the way of catching prospects who could take his place any time soon. Kirk might not be the 26-year-old All-Star the Blue Jays were most hoping to extend this winter. Nonetheless, there’s no way to view this deal as anything other than a win for Toronto.

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