Should Iván Herrera's future be at DH?

The catcher should soon return from the IL, which raises an interesting question or three about his future and the team's hopes in 2025

This is going to be one of those probably unhelpful prose excursions in which the author poses a question that he’s unable to answer at present. The question: What is the positional future of Iván Herrera?

While it’s probably going to be some time before we know how this matter plays out, it’s of acute importance right now. That’s because Herrera’s return from the injured list, where he’s been marooned since April 7 with a bone bruise in his left knee, is imminent. We already know the Cardinals have the makings of an organizational bottleneck at catcher, what with the presence of Herrera and Pedro Pagés in the majors and then the coming arrival of upper-rung minor-leaguers like Jimmy Crooks and Leonardo Bernal (further back are the promising likes of Ryan Campos and Rainiel Rodriguez).

While neither Crooks nor Bernal is presently pounding on the door of St. Louis with his 2025 performance to date, a late entry into the catching jumble has proved himself worthy of an active roster spot and a prominent role. That’s 27-year-old Yohel Pozo, whom the Cardinals inked this past offseason as depth. Herrera’s injury pressed Pozo into duty in the majors, and he’s emerged as a legitimate contributor.

It seems likely that Herrera’s activation will mean Pozo is headed back to Memphis, but there’s an opportunity here to assess Herrera’s long-term role and, by extension, Pozo’s value moving forward. I’ve advocated before for keeping Herrera at catcher for as long as feasible because his bat is truly special, and it’s – clunky descriptor forthcoming – especially special by the positional standards of catchers. However, a few developments have me not quite rethinking that stance but rather being increasingly open to a different approach. To wit:

• The Cardinals’ current relevance in the standings;

• The Cardinals’ utter lack of production from the DH spot;

• The importance of controlling the running game versus NL Central opponents in particular;

• The rise of Pozo.

Let’s grapple with these in order.

Thanks to the current five-game win streak, the Cardinals go into the weekend series in D.C. back at .500 for the first time since April 16, and that’s reinforced with a plus-7 run differential. In all, nine of their 19 losses have come in one-run games or extra-inning contests. Yes, I would still consider them solid underdogs to make the postseason, but as long as they’re within hailing distance of playoff position the club should conduct itself with contention as the guiding priority.

Speaking of which, there’s the DH sinkhole to consider. Cardinal DHs this season have combined to slash .197/.291/.250 with one home run in 132 at-bats. That slash line comes to an OPS of .541, which ranks 28th in MLB when it comes to DH production at the team level. Suffice it to say, that’s not adequate, and the DH deficit is hurting the team significantly.

A Cardinal staple in the universal-DH era has been to cycle players through the role in order to give them “soft rest” days in which they don’t play the field. In theory, I like this idea – relieve your regulars from the rigors of defense for a day here and there while keeping their bats in the lineup. However, the reality is that this approach probably hurts DH production, as Russell Carleton’s research at Baseball Prospectus strongly suggests. We’ve long known there’s a DH “penalty” in place that hurts a hitter’s true baseline of production in that role, but Carleton has found that the penalty is largely confined to those who dabble in the role, as the Cardinals’ DHs do, as opposed to being primary or full-time DHs. This is why I think the Cardinals would be well served to have a permanent DH, which means just that – an every-day presence at DH. I don’t really favor a platoon arrangement, as a DH platoon isn’t an ideal use of roster space for a team balancing long-term development and contention and also probably gets a bit too far into the “penalty territory” of which Carleton wrote.

As for Herrera, the 24-year-old is a deeply promising hitter – one whose bat is enough to carry even a non-premium role like DH. In his 349 career MLB plate appearances, which have been doled out erratically over the years, he’s put up a wOBA of .356 and, tidily enough, an xwOBA (what’s this?) of .356 with fairly balanced platoon splits. Herrera’s relative youth in tandem with his capacity to make hard contact at optimal angles while also showing bat-to-ball skills all make him a highly promising hitter long-term and one who hasn’t yet reached his ceiling as a batsman. This is to say, he has the bat for DH, and we have plenty of examples of hitters who became primary DHs at young ages and went on to have careers of notable value. (No less a hitter than Yordan Alvarez, for instance, comes immediately to mind.)

The other part of this calculus is Herrera’s defense. He’s been perfectly fine at framing and blocking pitches, but he’s thus far been unable to control the running game. For his career, he’s extinguished just 8.2% of aspiring base-stealers, and that’s versus a league-average figure of 20.5% over that same span. Since the start of the 2024 season, opposing runners are 62 for 66 against Herrera. To his credit, he spent the winter improving his arm strength. However, his pop times this season have been slightly worse than in prior years. Relatively new to Herrera is the “knees down” style of throwing, and it’s reasonable to think he hasn’t had time to groove those movements fully. Maybe once he does, he’ll see improvement. The current reality, though, is that Herrera hasn’t thrown out any of the seven runners who have attempted thefts on him this season (although the “clear and convincing” standard of evidence on replay reviews probably cost Herrera one caught stealing), while Pagés and Pozo have combined to throw out nine of the 31 runners who have tried to steal on them. Oli Marmol had even taken the step of replacing Herrera in the late innings in an effort to protect leads.

All of this is relevant to the NL Central. Here are MLB’s six divisions ranked by stolen bases this season:

1: NL Central: 203 steals

T-2: AL East, NL East: 153 steals

4: NL West: 130 steals

5. AL West: 128 steals

6. AL Central: 124 steals

That, obviously, is a huge lead for the NL Central. The Cardinals are presently tied for 17th in MLB with 27 stolen bases. Remove them from the numbers, and the NL Central still leads all divisions by a comfy margin. This is relevant because the Cardinals still have yet to play 39 total games against the Cubs, Brewers, Reds, and Pirates, who rank, respectively, first, second, fifth, and eighth in MLB in steals. Another 21 games come against other teams that rank in the top 10 in steals. All of this is to say that the Cardinals face a challenging docket the rest of the way when it comes to parrying the opposing run game. That’s of note when it comes to considering the Cardinals’ designs on contention and Herrera’s place within those designs.

This, finally, brings us to Pozo. Pozo has logged 39 plate appearances in St. Louis since Herrera went down, and over that span he’s batted .316/.333/.474 (124 OPS+) with a homer and only one strikeout. In some ways, Pozo is “Herrera Lite” at the plate, given his propensity to make hard contact and put the ball in air while strongly limiting strikeouts and whiffs. To be sure, Herrera is the better hitter both now and moving forward, but Pozo profiles as an offensive asset at the catcher position. He’s hit at every level, and in 2021 he popped 23 homers in just 77 games at the Triple-A level. Since that 2021 season, Pozo has batted .321 and slugged .545 across more than 1,300 plate appearances at Triple-A. All you need to do is watch him at the plate to see that he blends max-intent swings with a knack for making contact.

Based on what we’ve seen from Pozo this season and what he’s done in recent years, optioning Luken Baker to make room for Herrera’s return strikes me as a defensible alternative to sending Pozo back to Memphis. Yes, that would leave you with three rostered catchers, but that’s where the possible transition of Herrera to DH comes in.

On a certain level, this is more about giving a hitter like Herrera consistent exposure to DH and thus, one hopes, negating the offensive penalties associated with the role than it is about moving him off of catcher. If the Cardinals are going to matter this season, then they’ll likely need more production from DH. Herrera as the primary gives them the best shot at that.

Am I saying that this fairly drastic change needs to be made here in early May? I’m . . . not entirely sure? It’s something I’m much more open to than I was when Herrera first sustained that scary looking knee injury barely a month ago. I think it merits serious consideration in light of the current competitive realities and in light of Pozo’s seeming usefulness. Doing so would give you a bat-glove combo behind the plate with Pagés and Pozo, and it would give you a heart-of-the-order-caliber bat as the permanent DH in Herrera. This would also allow Herrera to focus his out-of-game efforts solely on wrecking pitched baseballs as opposed to catching and throwing them, which could theoretically unlock a still higher level of offensive performance.

Obviously, I’m of two minds about this – and remain open to the idea that Herrera can develop into a viable defensive catcher – but the more I mull it over, the more I think this is the path the Cardinals should take sooner rather than later.

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