“You can’t have goals,” the celebrated and colorful New York Mets manager Bobby Valentine told Vance Wilson, his second-string catcher, early in the 2002 season. “I’m sorry.”
Wilson, Tim Brown recounts in The Tao of the Backup Catcher: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game, had asked Valentine what performance targets he might aim for that year, to help him focus each day, as the understudy to the Hall of Fame–bound superstar Mike Piazza. The answer was that performance targets were for other, better players. “You cannot have numbers as goals as a backup player because you may not be given any opportunity to reach them,” Valentine said. “And then you will feel like a failure. But you won’t be a failure.”
The Tao of the Backup Catcher, written by Brown in collaboration with the former catcher Erik Kratz, is an extended exploration of the space between not-quite-failure and not-quite-success—the space occupied in baseball by the essential but unwanted figure of the backup catcher. The regular catcher already sacrifices his own flexibility, foot speed, and batting numbers in the name of holding down the most grueling and important defensive job on the team. The backup catcher has sacrificed all those things, and as Brown and Kratz make clear, much more, simply to make sure there’s someone around to give the real catcher the day off.
No team can survive without someone to do that job, but almost no team has any attachment to any particular person who might do it. In one span of less than three years, Brown writes of Kratz, “Erik was traded three times, waived once, selected off waivers once, released seven times, purchased twice, and signed as a free agent seven times.”
In exchange for a thin and disposable commitment from their employers, the backup catcher has encyclopedic responsibilities. It’s their duty to know the pitch repertoire and psychological dynamics of each pitcher on staff, and the plan of attack against every opposing hitter in the majors, even if they only get to use that tactical knowledge on the diamond once a week. (A wildly disproportionate number of them, Brown notes, go on to become coaches and managers.)
All the while, they need to be vocal cheerleaders and motivators for the more stably employed, better-paid players around them—“a security blanket,” as Theo Epstein, the championship-winning Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs executive, tells Brown—without ever allowing their own anxieties and frustrations to surface. “That’s the guy, that’s the spot, that’s supposed to be worrying about everyone else,” Epstein says. “We’re not supposed to be worrying about him.”
The catcher sacrifices his flexibility, foot speed, and batting numbers in the name of holding down the most grueling defensive job on the team. The backup catcher has sacrificed all those things and much more.
The players who can live with the game on these terms are the ones who have, Brown writes, “the emotional or competitive capacity to accept something slightly less than the whole dream.” A middle-aged mood hangs over the book, an extended meditation on the way that hopes and opportunities yield to obligations. Kratz himself didn’t make it to the major leagues till he was 30 (to fill a hole on a terrible Pittsburgh Pirates team), after eight years in the minors. But he held on, or kept scrabbling back, till he was 40.
The indignities pile up. Brown describes, through Kratz’s eyes, the experience of being sent to the minors or cut loose: the clubhouse attendant ripping Kratz’s nameplate off its Velcro attachment to the locker, the trips through crowded airports hauling bags emblazoned with the logo of the team that just rejected him (passing strangers “say, ‘Hey, you play for the Phillies?’ And you say, ‘Sort of.’ Or, ‘I did’”). The way a routine roster adjustment for the team means his wife, Sarah, calling “the gas company, the phone company, the cable company, and the landlord” to uproot their family from where they’ve just settled in.
Every backup catcher (and Brown talked to dozens for the book) has their own particular setbacks or, more rarely, triumphs. Matt Treanor recounts being chewed out in Kansas City Royals camp by the former relief star Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams for using his most supple and dependable mitt, depriving the pitcher of the reassuring pop of his now faded fastball hitting stiff leather.
Bruce Bochy recalls how he went three for six, with a double and a game-winning home run, in two games for the San Diego Padres against Nolan Ryan. Brown writes that years later, Bochy asked his manager, Dick Williams, why he was in those games against the flamethrowing future Hall of Famer: “‘Well,’ Williams told him, ‘I didn’t want to get my regular catcher hurt.’”
Late in his late-blooming career, Kratz tastes his version of glory, holding a stable job with an over-achieving Milwaukee Brewers team as they rally in September to make the playoffs, then fight to the brink of a pennant against the Los Angeles Dodgers—with Kratz becoming a minor folk hero through some unexpected and timely hitting in the playoffs. The next spring, the Brewers have invested in a better catcher and are freezing Kratz out of their strategy meetings on stealing signs, to keep him from carrying off their secrets when he inevitably gets sent away.
“That’s the guy, that’s the spot, that’s supposed to be worrying about everyone else. We’re not supposed to be worrying about him.”
It’s one of the rare times—amid all the arbitrary demotions, blocked promotions, and lost chances—that Kratz allows himself to lose his temper. “There’s a chance I might play for this team,” he declares. “You’ve got to trade me if you want me to leave this meeting.” Still, in the end, he surrenders. The trade, to the San Francisco Giants, happens when management wants it to happen.
He plays 37 more games, for the Giants and two other teams, in two more years. When he’s done, there are two decades’ worth of memories and souvenirs: the $2,000 Kratz collected from teammates for a deliberate pratfall on the opening-day carpet in Houston, a two-game stint with the Red Sox at Fenway Park, after which he “asked for his jersey and was gifted one in road gray, which he’d never seen, much less worn.”
And, disgustingly yet inspirationally, the single, battered pair of Nike shower shoes Kratz kept with him at every stop along the way, forswearing countless team-provided replacements. Shower shoes, Brown writes, “are marvels of engineering, exactingly manufactured and suited to perform a single task…. Erik retired the shoes and himself with them, figuring they’d both been reliable, old, overlooked, misunderstood, simple, loyal, and valuable in their own ways for long enough.”
Tom Scocca is the former politics editor at Slate and the editor at Popula
