Nationals sign Carlos Maldonado

The Nationals have resigned Carlos Maldonado, a catcher who played almost exclusively in AAA in 2011. He has played 336 AAA games, almost all of them in the International League. His offensive statistics look like this: .324 OBP, 3.05 PAPP, .76 PPG, and -.46 Simple WAR. So he is a below replacement AAA player offensively. However, he is above average at catcher according to Range Factor (a 7.95 Range Factor, league average for catchers is usually around 7.4 or 7.5). However, you would think that no matter how great defensively he is, it couldn't make up for those terrible offensive numbers. Just how terrible are his offensive numbers, according to our AAA metric, they would look like this in the Majors: .278 OBP, 3.62 PAPP, .36 PPG, and -1.95 O-WAR. So just to become a replacement player, Maldonado would need about a 2 D-WAR. In the National League, 2.1 D-WAR would have been a share for the leader in D-WAR. Now even if we assume his above average catching, it is impossible for us to project him to be the best defensive catcher in the league. This means that he will be a below replacement player. For the Nationals sake, I hope they have other serious plans at catcher.