This time of the year there’s a lot of speculation. Much of it is who will sign where. For fans of individual teams, there’s a lot of debate as to whether or not the team will be able to get in a position to compete next year. But before you can figure out whether an Albert Pujols or a Prince Fielder is enough to put you over the top, you have to figure out where you are already. I’m going to spend the next few articles taking an in-depth look at a few players who have shown some large variances in their value the last few years in an attempt to determine the real talent level of this team. First up, we’re going to take a look at our catcher, Geovany Soto.

I have a love-hate relationship with Geovany Soto. I began to champion his cause in the 2004 offseason. Soto had just finished up his first and only go at Double A and I was buying into him as a perfectly acceptable option to back up Michael Barrett while only making the league minimum. He wasn’t much of a hitter at the time, striking out too much and showing very little power… but he would take his walks and the reports on his defense at the time were glowing. However, in what was to become a very typical move, Jim Hendry instead outbid nobody else for the services of Henry Blanco. Geovany Soto would spend the next two years putting up similar seasons in AAA: high strikeouts, okay batting average, low power, plenty of walks, and good defense. He profiled as a pretty standard backup catcher.

Soto broke out in a big way with his 2007 campaign in Iowa. The PCL is a hitters league, but a .349/.422/.640 line is impressive no matter where it’s done. He hit even better than that in a short stint in the bigs. The strange thing was how little his strikeout and walk rates changed. The breakout was essentially a function of just two factors. Power and BABIP. His ISO increased from  .114 to .291, which is patently absurd. He was also floating a .399 BABIP through the season, so expecting him to hit over .300 after an adjustment to the big leagues was almost certainly expecting too much.

Soto followed up his masterful 2007 beautifully in 2008. He hit .285/.364/.504 en route to winning the NL Rookie of the Year award. Once again, his strikeout and walk rates remained mostly unchanged. The power took a not unexpected dip with the full-time transition to the bigs, bringing it to a more reasonable .219 while his BABIP fell back to a .332. That BABIP was still quite high for a slow catcher and gave me a bit of pause. I still liked Soto for 2009, but cautioned that he would need to make real progress to repeat his performance.

The wheels seemingly fell off in 2009. Soto stumbled out the gate with a .109 batting average through April and never really managed to get his season back on course. He posted a .218/.321/.381 line while dealing with rumors about his weight, criticisms of his defense, and Lou Piniella’s mancrush on Koyie Hill. Most were worried, but I really wasn’t. Soto had actually walked more and struck out less than his 2008 season. It was just that his BABIP was a pretty low .246. I ran his numbers through a formula similar to the one I did for you a couple weeks ago and it spit out an expected .269/.365/.450 line. His power had taken a bit of a hit, but as I said at the time “his sophomore slump is grossly overstated. He's a fine young catcher who just had terrible luck this year.”

Soto would prove me right in 2010, rebounding with an excellent .280/.393/.497 line. His power had returned to 2008 levels, he somehow managed to walk even more (his 16% walk rate would have been tied for best in baseball if he had enough PA to qualify), and he did it all with just a moderate bump in his strikeouts (returning to his 2008 level). But this season wasn’t without its issues. Once again, Lou Piniella spent a good chunk of the season trying out Koyie Hill as a starter. I don’t know if it was some bizarre satire directed at Mike Scioscia and Jeff Mathis or what, but eventually Lou gave it up when the joke wasn’t landing… or maybe it was when Soto got on a hot streak, who knows? At any rate, while it slipped mostly under the radar after the season Soto had sported a .324 BABIP, once again too high for a player so slow to reasonably keep up.  He still would have been very valuable with a more reasonable BABIP.

In 2009 I said the wheels seemingly fell off. In 2011, they actually did. Soto never really got going this year on his way to posting a .228/.310/.411 line. His walk rate dropped all the way down to 9.5% and his strikeout rate was the highest of his career by a large margin. The power is still there, but with the uptick in strikeouts you can’t really point at BABIP as the sole reason his season was so poor. He actually earned most of that poor line. That said, the average catcher hit .245/.313/.389 last year, so Soto still compares pretty favorably.

So what the hell do Theo and Jed inherit with Geovany Soto? He’s a 28 year old catcher with two more years of club control. His peripherals would have made him a 3-4 win player in full time duty from 2008-2010, and even in his one truly “bad” year by his standards he was still average. I see no physical reason not to expect Soto to recover somewhat from his substandard 2011. For 2012 I would expect a bounceback into the .250/.350/.450 range. That’s good enough to make him an above-average regular, but probably not a star… probably in the ~3 WAR range. He provides surplus value on his contract and could be a valuable contributor to the Cubs 2012 chances, but with the emergence of Welington Castillo in the minors and a potential 2013 free agent class that could include the likes of Brian McCann, Miguel Montero, Mike Napoli, Russell Martin, Chris Iannetta, and Carlos Ruiz – the Cubs should be willing to listen to offers around the trade deadline.