JAWS and the 2025 Hall of Fame Ballot: Brian McCann

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

With a foundation that centered upon the Hall of Fame triumvirate of Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz, the Braves dominated the NL West and then the NL East, reaching the postseason every year from 1991–2005 save for the ’94 strike season. Nothing lasts forever, though, and as Glavine and then Maddux departed in free agency, the team inevitably had to retool. Among the centerpieces of the next wave of Braves stars was one practically grown in their own backyard, Brian McCann.

A lefty-swinging backstop with rich baseball bloodlines, a strong arm, and a powerful bat, McCann was just 21 years old when he debuted with the Braves in June 2005. Over his first eight full seasons, he made seven All-Star teams and helped Atlanta to three postseason appearances, though the team’s success wasn’t nearly on par with the preceding dynasty. While McCann’s footwork and pitch framing wasn’t initially as polished as that of Russell Martin (who debuted with the Dodgers as a 23-year-old in 2006), he too developed into one of the game’s elite framers, that while providing stronger offense than his West Coast counterpart. Along the way, he also developed a somewhat dubious reputation as an enforcer of the unwritten rules, thanks to high-profile incidents involving José Fernández and Carlos Gómez in September 2013, though both players smoothed things over with McCann.

In December 2013, Martin left the Braves to sign the largest free agent contract ever given to a catcher at that point, a five-year, $85 million deal with the Yankees. The move didn’t have quite the impact of Martin’s jumps to Pittsburgh and then Toronto (where he netted a contract just shy of McCann’s), but McCann remained productive and popular. In November 2016, he was traded to the Astros, whose director of research and development, Mike Fast, had published “Removing the Mask,” the landmark 2011 Baseball Prospectus article that built on previous research to quantify the value of pitch framing and in so doing, revolutionized the industry. McCann became the starting backstop on a team that won the World Series in 2017, though that championship was tainted by subsequent revelations regarding the team’s illegal electronic sign stealing. McCann played two more seasons, one in Houston and one in Atlanta, before calling it a career.

With the exception of Baseball Prospectus’ WARP (the original basis for JAWS), none of the major value metrics incorporated pitch framing into their calculations until FanGraphs introduced its own methodology in the spring of 2019. That update retroactively added framing to fWAR going back to 2008. While Sports Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved does track what it calls “strike zone runs” (RszC), Baseball Reference does not include them in its WAR calculations. Since framing has been shown to be so impactful — with much wider spreads from top to bottom than blocking or throwing out baserunners — I believe we’re doing 21st-century candidates a disservice if we fail to incorporate this crucial area into our analysis. Thus, for this profile and that of fellow first-year candidate Russell Martin, I’ve used a FanGraphs-based version of WAR, one that incorporates BP’s framing metric (BP Fram) for the years before 2008, as the main value metric, and frJAWS as the Hall fitness metric. As with Martin, this makes a significant difference in understanding McCann’s career, and likewise those of his framing peers:

Heading into the final year of their careers, the contemporary data showed McCann and Martin to be nearly inseparable, value-wise. Subsequent tweaks to WAR in terms of framing, blocking, and throwing have created a bit more daylight between the two, with McCann now behind a whole cluster of recent catchers in frJAWS. While I’m planning to include Martin on my ballot, I’m a bit less certain about McCann, but the reality that both may struggle to attain the 5% necessary to retain eligibility has entered into my thinking as well.

Brian Michael McCann was born on February 20, 1984 in Athens, Georgia to parents Howard and Sherry McCann. Sherry was a registered nurse at Athens Regional Hospital, while Howard (b. 1956) was a former Twins eighth-round draft pick (1974) who instead chose to play at Gulf Coast Community College, Mississippi State University (where he was friends with teammate Buck Showalter), and with the Austin Sunbursts of the New York-Penn League (1978).

At the time Brian was born, Howard was an assistant coach at the University of Georgia. After helping to recruit a team that won the 1990 College World Series, Howard moved the family to West Virginia and took over as the head coach at Marshall University. Upon his firing in 1995, the family moved to Duluth, Georgia, where Howard opened Windward Baseball Academy. Older son Brad McCann (b. 1982) was drafted by the Marlins in the sixth round out of Clemson in 2004 and played four seasons in the minors.

“We were always at the field,” Brian told the New York Times’ Tyler Kepner in 2011. “My childhood memories, a big portion of those are watching my dad coach. I just loved to be around the game. I loved everything about it.”

Though both of his sons pursued baseball, and though he was tireless when it came to helping them, Howard was not overbearing. “He never made us do anything. He never made us go out and take batting practice; he never made us go take ground balls. Dad did such a great job with letting us figure it out,” Brian told ESPN’s Chris Smith in 2007. Duluth High School coach Bobby Link told Smith that during Brian’s games, Howard stayed out of the way, sitting on a stump behind the center field fence.

Before high school, Brian mainly played second base and idolized Tony Gwynn, but he also caught as early as age eight. Via the Newark Star-Ledger’s Andy McCullough in 2013:

Howie had studied his son on the soccer field, and noted the contrast between his minimal foot speed and his prowess as a goalie. “He just took to catching like a fish to water,” Howie said.

Considered one of the top catchers ahead of the 2002 draft, Brian was chosen by the Braves in the second round; another Gwinnett County high schooler, Jeff Francoeur, was the team’s first-round pick. Though McCann had committed to play for the University of Alabama, he bypassed a scholarship to sign for a $750,000 bonus and began his pro career with the Braves’ Gulf Coast League affiliate, hitting .220/.295/.330. Though Baseball America ranked him as the league’s 20th-best prospect, the publication noted that he “reported out of shape and didn’t particularly distinguish himself either at the plate or behind it.” While lauding his offensive potential, BA was skeptical of his ability to stick behind the plate.

McCann improved greatly in 2003, hitting .290/.329/.462 with 12 homers for A-level Rome and throwing out 38% of base stealers. While praising his power potential, his arm, and his game-calling ability, BA expressed concern about the 6-foot-3, 210-pound McCann’s thick lower half and mobility behind the plate. That same year, the team drafted Jarrod Saltalamacchia as a supplemental first-round pick out of Royal Palm Beach Community College; he would follow McCann up the organizational ladder, a potential challenger for the starting catcher job.

Following McCann’s strong 2004 season at High-A Myrtle Beach (.278/.337/.494, 16 HR), BA placed him 44th on its Top 100 Prospects list in the spring of ’05, praising his sweet left-handed swing, raw power, and disciplined approach. While noting he was named the Carolina League’s best defensive catcher, the publication added that he was still in need of improvements to his footwork and agility.

McCann began the 2005 season at Double-A Mississippi and played well. When Braves starting catcher Johnny Estrada and backup Brayan Peña both suffered minor injuries, the Braves called up the 21-year-old McCann despite his lack of upper-level experience. He debuted on June 10, 2005 against the A’s, lining an RBI single off Dan Haren (who intentionally walked him with a man on second in his next plate appearance) and adding a single off Huston Street in the ninth in what was nonetheless a 6-4 loss. A day later, he hit his first homer, off Oakland’s Justin Duchscherer.

McCann made such an impression on Smoltz that he quickly became his personal catcher; by late July, he was the regular and Estrada the backup. McCann hit .278/.345/.400 (95 OPS+) with five homers in 59 games; the Braves, who were just 31-28 when he debuted, finished with 90 wins and the final NL East title of the Bobby Cox era. In Game 2 of the Division Series against the Astros, McCann clubbed a three-run homer off Roger Clemens, keying a 7-1 win. He added a solo homer off Wandy Rodriguez in the eighth inning of Game 4, giving the Braves a 6-1 lead, but they squandered it, lost an epic 18-inning game, and were eliminated.

Remarkably, McCann’s first full season in the majors (2006) turned out to be his best one offensively. He hit a sizzling .333/.388/.572 (143 OPS+) with 24 homers, and while he fell 10 plate appearances short of officially qualifying for the batting title, he finished sixth in the NL by the “phantom at-bat” rule (determined in this case by where he would rank by going 0-for-10), and 10th in slugging percentage. This would be the only time he cracked his league’s top 10 in any slash-stat category. Additionally, he made his first of six consecutive All-Star teams. Where McCann was less successful was at pitch framing; by Baseball Prospectus’ retroactive estimate, he was 17.4 runs below average, the second-worst mark of any catcher and about 40 runs worse than Martin, who debuted with the Dodgers on May 5. Also disappointing was the Braves’ 79-83 finish, their first losing season since 1990, and their first of four straight outside the playoff picture.

McCann received a whole lot of security in 2007. In March, he signed a six-year, $26.8 million extension through 2012, with a club option for ’13. At the July 31 trade deadline, the team dealt Saltalamacchia — a two-time Top 100 prospect at that point — to the Rangers in a seven-player blockbuster that also sent Elvis Andrus, Neftalí Feliz and Matt Harrison to Texas and brought back Mark Teixeira and Ron Mahay. McCann’s framing improved markedly that season (4.0 runs, per BP), but he was less selective at the plate and slipped to a .270/.320/.452 line (99 OPS+). His work on offense and defense came together in 2008, as he hit a robust .301/.373/.523 (135 OPS+), led the majors in framing (34.5 runs, via FanGraphs’ methodology), and ranked second in the NL with 8.3 fWAR. The Braves, however, finished 72-90.

While McCann didn’t maintain that level, he was remarkably consistent over the next three seasons (2009–11), hitting a combined .274/.358/.468 (122 OPS+) while averaging 22 homers and 6.2 fWAR, with individual seasons that ranked fifth (6.0), sixth (6.0) and third (6.5) in the NL. The most eventful of those seasons was 2010, Cox’s final season as manager. McCann was chosen as a reserve for the All-Star Game (his lone start was a year away), and came off the bench to pinch-hit for Yadier Molina in the fifth inning. He flew out against Justin Verlander, but when he came up in the eighth with two outs, the bases loaded, and the NL trailing 1-0, he hit a three-run double off Matt Thornton. That was all the scoring the Senior Circuit needed, and McCann was voted the game’s MVP.

The 2010 Braves won 91 games and claimed the Wild Card spot. In the Division Series against the Giants, McCann went 6-for-14. He doubled off Tim Lincecum in the seventh inning of Game 1, one of just two hits the Braves collected as they were shut out while striking out 14 times. He hit an RBI single off Matt Cain in the sixth inning of Game 2, sparking a comeback from a 4-0 deficit; they won 5-4 in 11 innings. Facing Madison Bumgarner in Game 4, he plated the game’s first run with a third-inning sacrifice fly, then led off the sixth with a solo homer that gave the Braves a 2-1 lead, but they lost 3-2 and were eliminated. As for the 2011 Braves, with Fredi Gonzalez replacing Cox, the team squandered a Wild Card berth by losing their final five games.

Though he still hit 20 homers and was worth 3.6 fWAR thanks to his framing, McCann slipped to an 87 OPS+ in 2012 while playing through soreness in his right shoulders and tendinitis in his right knee. The Braves won 94 games and secured a Wild Card berth but lost the first-ever Wild Card Game to the Cardinals, 6-3. With McCann having slumped in September amid his physical woes, David Ross started and went 3-for-4 with a two-run homer off Kyle Lohse; McCann walked in a pinch-hitting appearance. In mid-October, he underwent surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right shoulder. The Braves soon picked up the going-on-29-year-old McCann’s $12 million option for 2013, and while they initially expected him to be ready for Opening Day, he didn’t debut until May 6. In 102 games — his lowest full-season total during the 2007–16 span — he rebounded to hit .256/336/.461 (112 OPS+), and made his final All-Star team, but with the industry catching on to framing, his work in that area was only 12.9 runs above average.

September 2013 found McCann involved in two polarizing, high-profile incidents that led to brawls. On September 11, he confronted the 21-year-old Fernández after the Marlins ace had admired his first major league homer — tame stuff by today’s standards — touching off a bench-clearing melee. Two weeks later, McCann blocked home plate as Gómez finished his home run trot, having admired his home run for for what McCann thought was too long as well; benches emptied and haymakers were thrown before the Brewers center fielder could even cross the plate. Both home run reactions were in response to previous incidents (Fernández felt that Evan Gattis had shown him up after homering earlier in the game, while Gómez felt he had been previously hit intentionally by pitcher Paul Maholm).

A contrite Fernández and a more carefree Gómez both patched things up with McCann, but even so, he was lampooned as the humorless captain of the fun police at NotGraphs and elsewhere, and the paired incidents raised more uncomfortable questions given that both targets of the catcher’s ire were Latino, celebrating in ways that reflected different cultural norms.

The incidents did not affect McCann’s free agency. The Yankees had been ahead of the curve when it came to emphasizing pitch framing, having replaced the defensively shaky Jorge Posada with Martin in 2011. After letting him walk following the 2012 season, they went cheap and got what they paid for by pairing light-hitting framing specialists Francisco Cervelli and Chris Stewart on an 85-win, third-place team, so in December, they signed McCann to a record-setting free agent contract for a catcher, five years and $85 million. It was a busy winter for general manager Brian Cashman, as the Yankees also added free agents Carlos Beltrán, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Hiroki Kuroda, but lost Robinson Canó.

Shortly after reporting to camp, McCann addressed the Gómez incident, and suggested “my instincts took over… it was something I felt like I needed to do. I didn’t like it. But I think he’s an amazing player… I’m a huge fan of Gómez, for sure.” The two would hug it out when they crossed paths the following May.

While catching 108 games and playing first base another 16 times, McCann hit a modest .232/.286/.406 (95 OPS+) for a team that won just 84 games. Spending a greater share of his time behind the plate in 2015, he improved to .232/.320/.437 (105 OPS+) while hitting a career-high 26 homers, but curiously, his framing slipped below average for the first time since ’06. The 87-win Yankees claimed a Wild Card spot but lost to the Astros as McCann went 0-for-4.

Amid a similar offensive performance (20 home runs with a 99 OPS+) in 2016, McCann began to be phased out of the Yankees’ plans. With the team meandering around .500 in late July, Cashman traded away Beltrán, Aroldis Chapman, Iván Nova, and Andrew Miller for prospects, then called up 23-year-old catching prospect Gary Sánchez in early August. He quickly caught fire and hit 20 homers in 53 games while getting most of the reps behind the plate, leaving McCann to DH. Making clear that he still wanted to catch full-time, McCann offered to waive his no-trade clause if the right deal came along. In mid-November, the Yankees accommodated him, trading McCann and $11 million to the Astros for a pair of pitching prospects.

The Astros’ controversial tank-and-rebuild process, which began in 2011, had borne its first fruit with their Wild Card berth in ’15, but they slipped to 84 wins and third in the AL West in ’16. McCann missed time due to a concussion and right knee soreness and caught just 95 games, but both his 106 OPS+ (.241/.323/.436) and 9.7 framing runs were his best showings in years. The Astros won 101 games and the AL West in 2017, then beat the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers in the postseason to secure the first championship in franchise history. This marked the first time that one of McCann’s teams won even a single playoff series; he hit just .175/.277/.263 along the way. Even so, he had a couple of big blows, notably a two-run double off the Yankees’ Tommy Kahnle in the fifth inning of ALCS Game 7, sending the score from 2-0 to 4-0, and a solo homer off the Dodgers’ Tony Cingrani in the eighth inning of the wild Game 5 of the World Series, which Houston won 13-12. The Astros won it all; by the time The Athletic reported on the team’s illegal sign stealing, McCann had played his last game.

Before that, McCann spent one more year with the Astros, but he played just 63 games and missed two months due to in-season surgery on his bothersome right knee. The late July acquisition of Martín Maldonado relegated him to backup duty once he was healthy; he took just eight plate appearances during the Astros’ eight-game postseason run. After they declined his $15 million option, he inked a one-year, $2 million deal to return to the Braves, now managed by Brian Snitker — who had briefly managed McCann at Mississippi in 2005 — and fresh off their first division title in five years. Sharing catching duties with Tyler Flowers, he did solid work as the team won 97 games and another NL East title. He went 3-for-16 as the team lost to the Cardinals in the Division Series, but he collected a big ovation from the Atlanta fans with a fifth-inning single off Jack Flaherty in what was already a 13-1 rout.

“It’s time to go,” McCann said after the game, announcing his retirement. “Fifteen years of catching — it’s sad, but it’s time. I knew about a month and a half ago… I wanted to be a part of this again — put this uniform back on, play in front of my family every night.”

In November, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich broke the story of the Astros’ illegal sign stealing. Two months later, commissioner Rob Manfred published a report detailing MLB’s investigation and suspended both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for the 2020 season. McCann didn’t publicly comment on the scandal, but in a February follow-up, Rosenthal and Drellich reported that two Astros told them the catcher had approached Beltrán, who had been painted as the ringleader of the scheme, and asked him to stop, but to no avail.

…

Though he finished his career with seven All-Star appearances and the eighth-highest home run total for a catcher (269, with the other 13 coming at DH, first base, or as a pinch-hitter), McCann is in a similar boat to Martin in that neither his traditional nor his basic advanced stats scan as Hallworthy. He finished with just 1,590 hits, fewer than any BBWAA-elected catcher besides Roy Campanella (1,422 including his Negro Leagues hits). His 110 OPS+ is lower than all but two of the 17 non-Negro Leagues enshrinees, namely Rick Ferrell and Ray Schalk, the two lowest-ranked catchers in terms of JAWS. McCann’s 28.3 JAWS is higher than only that of Ferrell (25.9). In only one of his eight trips to the playoffs did his team win at least one series — and after winning it all, that team wound up at the center of a scandal. He received MVP votes in just one season, mainly because the electorate generally wasn’t aware of how valuable his receiving was.

Indeed, McCann’s framing made him exceptionally valuable, and as with Martin, we simply can’t take a proper measure of his candidacy without incorporating that data. So as with relievers, the off-the-shelf version of JAWS won’t suffice. Baseball Reference’s version of WAR (which is used in JAWS) has no framing component, and there are no framing numbers anyway for 13 of the 17 enshrined catchers. BP’s pre-PITCHf/x stats only cover the last few years of Carlton Fisk’s career, which ended in 1993, though between that version and the PITCHf/x, FanGraphs, and Statcast numbers, we have the full careers of Ivan Rodriguez and Mike Piazza covered. Rodriguez, while known for his all-around defensive excellence, was not much of a framer, whereas Piazza, often derided as a poor defender for his low caught stealing percentages, was tremendous at framing.

Martin and McCann are approximately one eyelash apart atop the leaderboard in FanGraphs’ version of pitch framing runs, which was introduced and incorporated into WAR in 2019 and applied retroactively to WAR going back to ’08, the start of the PITCHf/x era. In introducing it, Jared Cross noted that the pair gained more value by doing so than any other players. The methodology has since been tweaked, and time has passed, but here are the top 10 framers according to our data:

McCann has a slight edge over Martin on a rate basis, ranking third behind José Molina and Grandal; both are well ahead of Yadier Molina in that respect. It should be noted teams’ awareness of framing significantly decreased the spread between the best and worst at the skill, as the bottom-of-the-barrel ones were weeded out and the rest were trained with an eye towards improving their receiving.

Those framing runs helped McCann rate among the most valuable players in the league by our version of WAR. From 2008–11, via his four finishes in the NL’s top six, his 26.7 WAR was second in the majors behind Albert Pujols‘ 27.8, with Chase Utley (25.7) the only other player within five wins. From 2006–16, McCann’s 47.9 WAR ranks seventh, with Martin fifth at 50.6.

The first two years of that stretch are pre-PITCHf/x, and as noted, McCann was subpar at framing when he reached the majors, based on the Retroframing methodology of Baseball Prospectus‘ Max Marchi, which uses called strikes above average while going back to 1988, the start of the pitch count era. As I explained in the Martin piece, for the seven catchers with at least 50 WAR by our existing methodology, I have used BP’s numbers to fill in the pre-2008 blanks, and used our runs-to-wins converter to adjust their individual WARs for 1991-2007. From there, I’ve calculated seven-year peak totals along with revised career totals in order to generate a FanGraphs WAR-based version of JAWS (frJAWS) for this group:

The pre-2008 framing numbers create about an 11-WAR swing for Piazza relative to Rodriguez. Rodriguez, Posey, Mauer, Martin, and Molina are all close in frJAWS despite careers that greatly varied in length. As I wrote in my previous installment, the fact that Hall of Famers Rodriguez and Mauer are clustered with the highly regarded Posey and Molina, both likely to join them — and that Martin is right there in the mix — suggests that they’re all reasonable choices for Cooperstown.

The same pre-2008 numbers that boost Martin take a bite out of McCann; the difference between the two is a net of 63.3 runs. What’s more, our 2024 switch to Statcast’s catcher blocking and throwing components, and from Ultimate Base Running (UBR) to Statcast’s baserunning metric (labeled XBR), reduced Martin’s fWAR from 55.0 to 54.5, and McCann’s from 54.5 to 52.1. Thus McCann’s frJAWS is down to 43.9; he’s about the same distance from Molina as Molina is from Rodriguez. McCann is still closer to Molina than to the next-ranked Grandal (36.8 frJAWS), but far enough behind the pack that I have to think twice, whereas I’m already convinced Martin is Hallworthy and belongs on my ballot.

One additional point applicable not only to McCann and Martin but also Mauer and Posey is that they’re perceived as having short careers. Relative to Rodriguez and Molina — and further back Fisk, Ted Simmons and others — that’s true. The M&M boys each retired with fewer than 7,000 PA (as did Posey), but both rank among the top 30 all-time with over 1,500 games caught, still ahead of six of the 17 enshrined non-Negro Leagues catchers. These “short-timers” each missed time due to documented concussions; the notion their careers aren’t Cooperstown-worthy simply because they didn’t risk additional traumatic brain injuries strikes me as toxic. As with starting pitcher career lengths, the times are a-changin’.

On that note, as with Félix Hernández, another first-year candidate who’s short in S-JAWS, I’m inclined to vote for McCann in hopes that he generates enough support to stay on the ballot, so I — and other voters — can have at least another year to deliberate. Martin is not off to a flying start, but on Thursday he received his public first vote from among the 30 ballots in the Tracker via The Athletic’s Meghan Montemurro. “How to evaluate and value catcher defense/framing has evolved and will likely continue to, which adds [a] challenging element,” she wrote on Bluesky. “But if defense can and has been valued at other positions when determining HOF vote, I don’t think catchers should be excluded from that. Warrants more time on ballot to consider imo.”

I’ll apply that logic to McCann. So long as players who go one-and-done on the writers’ ballot continue to get frozen out of the Era Committee process, I prefer erring on the side of inclusion. Simmons is the only one-and-done candidate to be elected, and it took 32 years; Lou Whitaker is the only other one of note even to get placement on a ballot, while Bill Freehan, Bobby Grich, Dave Stieb and others have been continually bypassed. Johan Santana won’t even be eligible for such treatment until the 2029 ballot, after his BBWAA eligibility would have lapsed. We have more to gain by seeing what the next few years of innovation in analytics bring regarding catcher defense than we do to lose by casting quality candidates into oblivion. Even if it’s more for strategic purposes than a strong conviction McCann is Hallworthy, I think it’s the right move.