YORKTON - If you are a baseball fan you will know that catchers are just a little different from the other players on the team.
And among the small fraternity of catchers, even more unique are the back-ups.
It is these unique men of the game author Tim Brown writes about in his recent book The Tao of the Backup Catcher: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game.
“I think this book was maybe 30 years in the waiting,” Brown old Yorkton This Week in a recent interview.
Brown said when he was a beat writer covering baseball when he was looking to gain insights he would “invariably find myself in front of the backup catcher.
“My favourite guy in every clubhouse was almost always the backup catcher.”
Then in 2018, Brown was doing a podcast as was former MLB catcher Erik Kratz.
“I loved his stories,” said Brown. “. . . He was a very approachable guy – a great storyteller,” adding from there he began to wonder if “I could draw in all the stories about these guys (backup catchers). I think I just sort of fell into it.”
Kratz would go on to be the primary contributor to the book.
Kratz is a guy who did whatever was needed to play the game and keep the MLB dream alive.
“That he played nineteen seasons for fourteen organizations, four of them more than once, this requiring thirty-two major league transactions, not counting his being taken 866th in the 2002 draft, suggested that if he was not going to be the best at it, he was at the very least going to wear it down,” wrote Brown.
“. . . He played for sixteen different major league teams, along with one Arizona Fall League team, one Dominican winter league team, two U.S. National teams, a team in Mexico, and one alternate site team, that during the 2020 pandemic. He played for seven minor league teams more than once, three more than twice, and two more than three times. He spent parts of five different summers in Manchester, New Hampshire, and if that sounds to you like the cost of being a fringe major leaguer and therefore vulnerable to the yoyo-ing whims of a jittery general manager, Manchester is where the Toronto Blue Jays keep their Double-A franchise. Kratz lived some summers there in a barn that was actually quite nice for a barn, and while he played ball Sarah (his wife) sold costume jewelry at the May's on Â鶹ÊÓƵ Willow Street.”
What makes the book, or at least Kratz’s part in it, is his connection to the Toronto Blue Jays.
“Erik was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the twenty-ninth round. After three days in Dunedin, FL, he was assigned to a minor-league team in Medicine Hat, AL, which was OK with Erik as he'd never been to Alabama. He was next informed that AL stood for “Alberta.” The one in Canada,” wrote Brown.
Brown said the stories resonate because backup catchers are all typically “good teammates.
“They’re good solid people whose nature is to help the people around them.”
Brown said that willingness comes in part because that is part of their often tenuous job on a baseball team.
“All of these guys don’t know when it’s going to end, but they keep showing up everyday,” he said.
“There are long, commendable careers in baseball, those held far from the superstars. The large majority, on the fringes of twenty-six man rosters, forty-man rosters, and organizational depth charts, get through the day and count that as a triumph,” wrote Brown. “They live on the edge of the line-up, the roster, a career, and the manager's patience, searching for signs they've fallen into or out of favor with the men who make decisions about who's in and who's out.
“Some commit huge portions of their lives to it, only to learn that not only are they out, they were never really in. Others have only barely gotten warm when the notification comes: Not so fast, buddy, on that apartment rental in Manchester. A few squeeze through an opening so tiny, it's a wonder they have arm hairs left.
“But, man, that dream is big. And it's not just theirs. It's their dad's too. And their mom's. Their friends', ever single one of them. Every teammate ever. Every coach. There is a world where the faded name written in black Sharpie on the back of a Detroit Tigers t-shirt actually exists. Baseball cards come to life. Television heroes say hi back. It's a lot to give up on when the possibility, no matter how small, still exists.”
Brown said it helped he and Kratz come from common ground.
“Erik and I are from the same place, where the game is more interesting when it’s about the people,” he said.
In the end the charm of The Tao of the Backup Catcher is that it is a book of dreams, and the men on the razor’s edge of fulfilling the dream or returning to a normal live work and struggle to make theirs a reality.
“There is no shame in being unable to consistently hit major-league pitching. It happens every day, in every big-league ballpark, across the fast-twitch insecurities of hundreds of young men who are paid rather well to try. Today's strikeout may be tomorrow's line drive, unless it;s another strikeout. Or unless there've been nothing but line drives lately, which happens for about eight guys at a time,” wrote Brown.
“The rest hold their breaths, look for fastballs, and hope not to flinch.”
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