The day Cleveland Guardians fans have been clamoring for since pretty much the moment this season started has finally arrived: Catcher Bo Naylor — the team’s No. 3 prospect and baseball’s No. 45 overall, per MLB Pipeline — is set to join the team on its West Coast swing on Saturday, and will make his Major League debut at some point this weekend against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Bo Naylor will join Guardians on Saturday and catch Tanner Bibee on Sunday.
— paul hoynes (@hoynsie) June 16, 2023
It was a night full of much rejoicing on Guardians Twitter, and you can understand why. After last year’s magical run to within a game of the ALCS, Cleveland enters play Saturday a disappointing 32-37 — 2.5 games back of the Minnesota Twins in the AL Central and well out of AL Wild Card contention — thanks largely to an inability to score runs. The Guardians have posted MLB’s third-lowest team OPS this season (.672), and while the catcher position hasn’t been the only problem, it’s certainly been the most glaring one: Mike Zunino (who was DFA’d to make room for Naylor on the roster) and Cam Gallagher had combined to put up a putrid .166/.235/.272 slash line, easily the worst in baseball.
All of which came while Naylor was laying waste to Triple-A. The 23-year-old, who’s appeared in six big-league games over the last two years, has put up a fantastic season in Columbus, hitting .253/.393/.498 with 13 home runs and nearly as many walks as strikeouts. (He’s also the younger brother of Cleveland first baseman Josh Naylor.) A first-round pick back in 2018, the Canadian broke out in a big way in 2022, slashing .263/.392/.496 across two levels of the Minors and putting himself on prospect lists everywhere. The lefty has struggled a bit against southpaws over his career, but he’s been at least passable in 2023, with an .823 OPS.
Questions still remain — namely about his swing-and-miss, as Naylor struck out five times in eight plate appearances in Cleveland last season — but he clearly had nothing left to learn at Triple-A, and his plate skills have improved with each passing year. If everything clicks, Naylor has the ability to be a 20/25-homer bat, with strong OBPs and even a few steals thrown in for good measure (he’s swiped 22 over the last two seasons).
