Cal Raleigh Leads Volatile Catcher Class for 2027 Fantasy Baseball Drafts

Ranking catchers is always tough. They take longer to develop than players at other positions, and they have shorter peaks, too. They fall off out of nowhere, and they get hurt more often, too – and those things aren't unrelated, unfortunately. It actually has more in common with pitcher than any of the other hitting positions, because of how much outcomes are determined by who avoids attrition as much as anything else.

We're going to spend the next couple of weeks taking a very, very early look at 2027 rankings before unveiling the first look at rankings the first week after the season ends. Before then, I'm going to be writing about the toughest players to rank for every position, and of course, we're talking about catcher. As you may have heard, catcher is a position that is in a bit of a renaissance.

Of course, that was more true earlier in the season. At the All-Star break, we had five different catcher-eligible players ranked among the top-100 overall players in Fantasy, with three more inside of the top 112. Things have looked a lot worse since the All-Star break, as only three catchers rank among the top 100 since then. Only Drake Baldwin , Hunter Goodman , and William Contreras were both top-120 players in both periods, with Ben Rice , Ivan Herrera and Dillon Dingler slumping and Hunter Goodman and Shea Langeliers suffering injuries that kept them off the field for long stretches.

Attrition. Things never stay the same for long at catcher, and even when it looks like things are changing for the better, you should expect things to go sideways eventually. That's just the nature of the position, and it makes it arguably the toughest to figure out.

And the stakes are going to be higher than ever in 2027 drafts, because catchers are surely going to go higher than usual, second-half, position-wide swoon or not. It's important to get it right, so let's take our first look at some of the names who will cause us the most anguish come 2027 draft season.

The toughest players to rank at catcher

Cal Raleigh, Mariners

Raleigh was the toughest catcher to rank for 2026, too, but for precisely opposite reasons as this season. This time a year ago, he was putting the finishing touches on maybe the greatest season a catcher has ever had offensively, and there was no question where he ranked among his peers at the position – first! The question was how high could you justify ranking him among everyone else? As it turned out, any reasonable ranking for Raleigh would have been way too high, as he suffered through some historically bad regression, putting together the worst full season of his MLB career.

But here's the thing: The guy who hit all those homers in 2025 is still in there. We're exceedingly unlikely to ever see a season that good from Raleigh, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think he could be a 40-homer guy again, and that would still be hugely valuable for Fantasy. His quality of contact and strikeout rate both moved in the wrong direction, but Raleigh's outlier pulled-air skills remain intact, and he has looked a lot more like himself in the second half of the season. I think recurring oblique injuries clearly limited Raleigh early on, and hey, who knows if the pressure of following up that historic season didn't play a role, too? Either way, it feels reasonable to expect a big step forward from Raleigh, and I'll definitely still rank him as a top-10 catcher for 2027. And I'll say this: I'll be much more likely to actually draft Raleigh in 2027 than I was this season.

Dillon Dingler, Tigers

At one point this season, Dingler looked like he might be playing his way into MVP consideration. He had 19 home runs by the All-Star game while playing his typically elite defense, and he had the underlying numbers to back it up. And then he homered three times in the first four games coming out of the break and seven times in the first 19 games and looked like he was establishing himself as a sure-fire top-five catcher.

But his homer Friday was his first since Aug. 6 and he has been absolutely useless in that span, hitting .123/.171/.175 with a 26% strikeout rate to a 4% walk rate. And his underlying skill set has been collapsing even longer than that – since July 1, he has just a .277 expected wOBA and 85.7 mph average exit velocity with terrible plate discipline. Dingler looked like a top-five catcher at one point, but he has barely looked like a viable No. 2 catcher for nearly as long at this point. His expected stats and average exit velocity are now worse than they were last season, and he entered this season as the No. 20 catcher in drafts. I won't rank him that low, but he definitely won't be a top-five catcher for me.

Samuel Basallo, Orioles

It's important to remember that Basallo is still only 22. Like, he just turned 22 almost exactly one month ago, making him just 11 months older than Vahn Lackey , the top catcher drafted in this year's MLB draft (he's going to finish this season down at High-A). He's eight months younger than Caden Bodine , a top catching prospect in the Rays ' system who might make his MLB debut sometime next season.

I don't need to belabor the point anymore, but I do think it remains an important bit of context to consider when analyzing Basallo's season. He certainly hasn't been great, but he's also been 21 for most of the season and has been a roughly average major-league hitter. That ain't nothing! The quality of contact skills are mostly well above average already, and he presumably could still have some room to grow. The plate discipline is a bigger problem than the swing-and-miss issues for Basallo, but both are certainly red flags in his profile.

And I do think it's worth noting that there is probably just some fatigue with Basallo. We heard about him for years as one of the top prospects in baseball, and even in redraft Fantasy leagues, he's been a well-known name for more than a year, and in that time, he hasn't done much of note. 21 homers in his first 137 games is nice, but a .211/.280/.390 line doesn't matter much for Fantasy. But given the age and physical tools on display, I think Basallo is probably going to get drafted higher than you'd expect based on the production, and he probably should. Even at a time of relative abundance at the position, there still aren't many catchers with 30-homer upside. Basallo has that and more.

Ivan Herrera, Cardinals

Herrera is definitely a good hitter. We've got nearly 1,500 plate appearances attesting to that fact. But is he a great Fantasy hitter? That's a little less certain. Here in his first fully healthy season, he's on pace to wind up south of 20 homers and will need a little hot streak to get to even 75 RBI or a .260 average. He might score 100 runs and the eight steals from the catcher spot are nice, but overall, nothing here feels especially impactful, and we thought he had that kind of upside coming into the season. Instead, his quality of contact metrics has regressed across the board, perhaps a function of his expanded role as an everyday hitter who also catches regularly?

I think the Cardinals are probably having the same, "Yeah, but how valuable is he, really?" conversations, especially with Leonardo Bernal establishing himself very quickly and Rainel Rodriguez looming as the top catching prospect in the game. Herrera is good enough to be a viable DH, but if he doesn't have more upside than he showed this season, that's settling for a relatively low ceiling. Herrera seems like a prime trade candidate this offseason, but if he lands in the wrong place, can we count on the everyday at-bats the Cardinals can give him? He's probably a top-12 catcher, but I don't know if anyone is going to be especially excited about drafting him anymore.

Carter Jensen, Royals

Like Herrera, Jensen is having a breakout season while also being a mild disappointment. He's shown many of the skills he flashed last season, especially the power (24 homers, .220 ISO) and patience (11.1% walk rate), but there's been a lot more swing and miss here than expected with a 28.1% strikeout rate. But when you dive into the numbers, it's not quite as bad as it seems – his 81% in-zone contact rate isn't great, but it's not far off from the 82.7% MLB average. In this instance, Jensen's patience has the drawback of putting him into a lot of two-strike counts while he's waiting for the right pitch to drive or walk on. Batting average might always be a drag on Jensen's profile, but this is one I do think it's reasonable to expect another step forward from. I might end up ahead of the consensus on Jensen.

Liam Hicks, Rays

Here's the most baffling thing about Hicks' season: Just when it looked like he was turning back into a pumpkin, he just got better. Is that because the Rays unlocked something the Marlins couldn't sustainably manage? Or are we just talking about a couple of well-timed hot streaks? The bull case for Hicks is that his expected wOBA is up to .347 since he joined the Rays, up from his .317 mark for the season and a sign that the Rays are doing something right. And it's not like there are no skills worth buying into here: Hicks doesn't hit the ball hard at all, but he has excellent plate discipline and contact skills and has a 20.2% pulled-air rate, the best way to overcome limited pop. I'm pretty skeptical about Hicks remaining a 20-homer, .290-ish hitter, but the second-half re-breakout does make it a bit harder to be skeptical. I'm not sure I'll be able to justify him as a top-12 catcher, but I'm also not confident that it'll be the right choice.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/fantasy/baseball/news/fantasy-baseball-toughest-catchers-to-rank-for-2027/)._