{"id":12122,"date":"2018-03-24T14:50:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-24T18:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/\/?p=12122"},"modified":"2018-03-24T14:51:51","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T18:51:51","slug":"red-sox-ink-christian-vazquez-three-year-extension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/2018\/03\/24\/red-sox-ink-christian-vazquez-three-year-extension\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Sox Ink Christian Vazquez to Three-Year Extension"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Early Saturday morning, the <a href=\"lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/\/mlb-teams\/boston-red-sox\/\" target=\"_self\">Boston Red Sox<\/a> made a move to lock up one of their young stars for the foreseeable future. The club and starting catcher <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/v\/vazquch01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&amp;utm_source=direct&amp;utm_medium=linker-\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Christian Vazquez<\/a><\/strong> agreed on a three-year deal that will keep the backstop in Boston through at least 2021. The contract will pay Vazquez $13.55 million in guaranteed money, and includes a club option for 2022.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">In addition, V\u00e1zquez has offered to make an annual donation to the Red Sox Foundation. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/lSYPbEMAOQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pic.twitter.com\/lSYPbEMAOQ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Red Sox (@RedSox) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RedSox\/status\/977551666185678850?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">March 24, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h2>Red Sox Ink Christian Vazquez to Three-Year Extension<\/h2>\n<p>Vazquez, 27, is entering the prime years of his career, and put that fact on full display in 2017. Known previously as a defensive wizard but an offensive liability, Vazquez returned to the team, after <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/j\/johnto01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&amp;utm_source=direct&amp;utm_medium=linker-\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tommy John<\/a><\/strong> surgery stole his 2016 season, and put on a show at the plate. On the year, Vazquez hit .290 and recorded a .734 OPS, while adding five home runs and 18 doubles. While he only notched 32 RBI, he seemed to come up clutch in big moments often.<\/p>\n<p>Vazquez is a career .261 batter and hadn&#8217;t hit better than .240 in the majors prior to last season. The Red Sox and their fans remain optimistic that 2017 wasn&#8217;t a fluke. Vazquez is known as a confident player and hard worker, and will remain the team&#8217;s starting catcher even if his batting average dips a bit.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his improvement with a bat in his hands, Vazquez&#8217;s calling card has always been and will always be his defense. An excellent game-caller who quickly earned the trust of the staff, Vazquez owns a cannon for a throwing arm and isn&#8217;t afraid to use it. Across a span of 211 major league games, 100 runners have attempted to steal on Vazquez. He&#8217;s gunned down a mind-blowing 42% of the would-be thieves, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mlb\/story\/_\/id\/22896998\/boston-red-sox-sign-christian-vazquez-three-year-extension\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the best number of any catcher since 1987<\/a>. He made just eight errors in 849 total chances last season, good for a .991 fielding percentage.<\/p>\n<p>Vazquez&#8217;s defense and steady presence were essential to the Red Sox success last season, as injuries forced a rotating stable of pitchers in and out of the rotation and bullpen. It&#8217;s safe to say that Boston has found in Vazquez the natural successor to <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/v\/varitja01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&amp;utm_source=direct&amp;utm_medium=linker-\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jason Varitek<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Main Photo:<\/p>\n<p><a id=\"xtkukjVnSnpbypqkC9AnHg\" class=\"gie-single\" style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/927951074\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'xtkukjVnSnpbypqkC9AnHg',sig:'aby2PARrBTsS0o513GMf7hINWT4V49AFTSoRn6zq9bU=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'927951074',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Early Saturday morning, the Boston Red Sox made a move to lock up one of their young stars for the foreseeable future. The club and starting catcher Christian Vazquez agreed on a three-year deal that will keep the backstop in Boston through at least 2021. The contract will pay Vazquez $13.55 million in guaranteed money, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":807,"featured_media":12123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1071,35],"tags":[68,240,1170,69],"class_list":["post-12122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-redsox","category-mlb","category-news","tag-baseball","tag-boston-red-sox","tag-christian-vazquez","tag-mlb"],"modified_by":"Josh Greenberg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/807"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}