You already know everything in this post. But just take a moment to pause and consider it all.
You hire a catcher for his defense, not for his bat. Even when you’re willing to tolerate worse defense from your catcher because his bat is just that good, the bar for catcher defense is so high that he’s still essentially a defense-first player. It’s so demanding that even the ones who play the absolute most still get an extra day off per week or more: In the past decade, just one catcher has started more than 131 games behind the dish. The baseline demands of the position are so substantial that when calculating wins above replacement, FanGraphs grants catchers a starting point of ~1.25 fWAR per season just for getting into the crouch at all, no matter how good they are at it.
But that’s just meant to be illustrative because this is not a post about value. One thing I regret about what Cal Raleigh is doing is that, especially online, the conversation about him so frequently quickly devolves into a debate about the MVP award. And I get why, and it matters. But that’s not what this post is about, and I’d encourage you not to turn it into one in the comments. Let us for a moment step back and admire what he is doing on its own terms.
Taken together, they call the chest protector, the shin guards, the helmet, and the mask “the tools of ignorance.” A macabre joke. You have to resort to gallows humor when it sucks that much. Catchers take a baseball off some part of their body multiple times per night, every night they’re back there. Off the inner thigh. Off the hand. Off the foot. Off the groin. Off the throat. Right back into the mask. Things that would have you laid up in bed for a week. A catcher might take a minute, but then he squats back down and puts just a thin piece of leather between the meat of his hand and a baseball travelling a hundred miles per hour.
When a catcher spends 1,000 innings on defense, they receive about 17,000 individual pitches. Baseballs coming in at ungodly speeds with freakish movement and then, with only a blink’s worth of time, have to slam it into the strike zone. The strength this takes on its own is remarkable, but consider how much exhaustion those muscles take from doing this repeatedly. What a toll on the forearm and the wrist. Don’t worry though, it’s not like he’ll need those for hitting.
How could this not wear all you down. Even if you took away the pain of the foul balls and the muscular demands of receiving pitches, they still have to wear ten pounds of gear and squat outdoors in the summer. If the game is in hundred-degree, 90-percent-humidity heat, they just have to keep changing into fresh jerseys.
I’ll let others question how to account for the value of that. What I’m saying is that value aside, even just as a baseline, being a catcher is undeniably harder. Imagine the exhaustion after six months, still having to perform even as the season winds down.
To achieve at an elite level with the physical demands would be impressive on its own. But on top of that, catchers have so many other demands on their time. Like every defender, they work on their defense. Like every hitter, they work on their baserunning and their hitting. (Of course, if the catcher happens to be a switch hitter, they have a whole second swing to work on.) But unlike every other defender or hitter, catchers then have to go do more. While a third baseman goes back to the cage or studies an opposing pitcher’s slider or takes a few swings or plays a video game to unwind and stay mentally fresh, a catcher’s work isn’t done. He has to go to the pitchers’ meetings and plan for the entire other half of the game. Every hitter plans for the pitchers they’ll face. Every pitcher plans for the hitters they’ll face. Catchers have to do both.
Catchers have to learn the repertoire for their own staffs, with both the number of pitchers and the number of pitch-types-per-pitcher constantly growing in the modern game. The catcher has to participate in the game planning, and beyond the analytical work involved, that takes a whole other skill set because it’s a collaborative project. The catcher works with his pitchers on their pitches. But that’s not all. He’s a catcher, how could it be? He works with his pitchers on the mental side of the game. Every hitter has to battle his own demons, but a catcher can’t just be a patient, he has to be a doctor too. He doesn’t merely have to know his pitchers’ pitches and how to get the most out of them against every other hitter in baseball. He has to know the pitchers as people, so he can command them on his mound visits. You’d think the physical demands of catching would mean you’d get more time to rest, but it’s the opposite.
And then–and then–beyond all of that, he has to be a hitter himself.
When you consider all this, it makes so much sense that it’s simply a fact: A catcher cannot hit 60 home runs in a season. It just isn’t possible.
Category: General Sports
