Dodgers catcher A.J. Ellis is one of those guys that you just naturally assume will always be there. After all, he’s been with the Dodgers organization for every one of his 13 professional seasons – including eight in the major leagues. So when the time comes for his seemingly annual contract renewal, Dodgers fans just, again, naturally assume that he’ll be back again next season.

…or will he?

There is no one, absolutely no one, loved more by his teammates than Andrew James Ellis. Not only is he considered by many to be the unofficial captain of the Dodgers, he is their go-to spokesperson and the team’s rock. He is as solid as the come and there is no one on the team who wants to be a Dodger more than the 34-year-old Cape Girardeau, Missouri native.

A.J. Ellis is, hands down, the media’s favorite Dodger player to interview.
(Photo credit – Jon SooHoo)

But therein lies the problem – Ellis will be 35 years old on April 9, just five days after the start of the 2016 regular season.

For the past three seasons, the extremely popular Dodgers backstop has accepted one-year contracts to avoid arbitration and he is arbitration-eligible once again in 2016 for a third and final time. The question is, are the Dodgers willing to tender a contract to a guy who played a grand total of 62 games (55 starts) last season in which he hit .238 with seven home runs and 21 RBIs while being paid $4.25 million – an amount that the Dodgers would be forced to increase should Ellis elect an arbitration hearing?

Granted, the Dodgers could non-tender Ellis a contract and then re-sign him for a lesser amount (which he would probably accept), but is this the prudent thing to do when they already have 27-year-old Yasmani Grandal and soon-to-be 26-year-old Austin Barnes on their 40-man roster and 25-year-old catching prospect Kyle Farmer down on the farm and close to being MLB-ready? Probably not.

Even though Grandal is now himself arbitration-eligible for the first time this off-season and under team control through 2018, it is safe to assume that the Dodgers will tender him a contract for 2016 and he will probably end up accepting something in the $4 to $5 million range to avoid arbitration – a rather hefty raise from the $693,000 that he made in 2015. But here again, do the Dodgers really want to pay two platooning catchers $4 to $5 million next season when they would only have to pay one that amount and pay Barnes the MLB minimum of (around) $508,000? Here again, probably not.

Although Barnes struggled offensively after his September 1 call-up in 2015 (.207 / .362 / .276 for an OPS of .637), he absolutely tore it up last season at Triple-A Oklahoma City (.315 / .389 / .479 / .869) with nine home runs and 42 RBIs. And while he never hit his groove in the 20 games in which he appeared with the Dodgers this past season, it’s clear to see that the potential is there to become a very good offensive catcher – something that the Dodgers have sorely missed for over two decades. That being said, the National League catcher with the best caught-stealing percentage in 2015 who appeared in 60 or more games was (wait for it) A.J. Ellis at .450. This was better than Yadier Molina (.410), Buster Posey (.361) and Yasmani Grandal (.291).

With all of these factors in mind, one of the most difficult decisions that Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman and general manager Farhan Zaidi will have to make this off-season is what to do with A.J. Ellis. But one thing that A.J. has going for him – perhaps the biggest – is that his number one supporter and chief lobbyist is some guy named Clayton Kershaw – and it never hurts to have him in your corner.

There is no bigger fan of A.J. Ellis than Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw.
(Photo credit – Ron Cervenka)