‘The Tao of the Backup Catcher’ Review: Roughing It on the Diamond

Baseball is a sport in hiding. The media celebrates the big hit, the virtuosic defensive play and the strikeout, but so much of the real action comes between all that. What pitch should we throw, now, to this hitter? It depends on who the hitter is but also on the pitcher’s arsenal, the count, the score and the situation on the bases. Not to mention whether the pitcher is tired or has his best stuff.

The catcher is the hidden center of this quietly unfolding drama. We attend, naturally, to the pitcher, standing tall on the mound. It’s easy to miss his accomplice, crouching behind the batter. To reliably handle the pitch, the catcher must know what’s coming, and that means the duo must be of one mind. They need a private language—one the batter doesn’t speak—that lets them operate as a true battery.

Tim Brown’s “The Tao of the Backup Catcher” reveals another hidden dimension of baseball. I don’t think I’ll ever view the game the same way after reading this book, written with the longtime backup catcher Erik Kratz. Mr. Brown, a veteran baseball writer, describes the grind of the comparatively mediocre players whose jobs are always in doubt and who bounce from team to team, frequently at the minor-league level.

Kratz, who survived at the fringes of the majors before a star turn for the Milwaukee Brewers during the 2018 playoffs, is a paradigm case. As Mr. Brown writes, Kratz played 19 seasons for 14 organizations. His career included stints with “sixteen different minor 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” during the pandemic. Such longevity requires grit, dedication and the ability to perform whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.

The catcher’s job is grueling. Playing a whole game means coming out of the crouch and throwing balls back to the mound more than 100 times. The bruises from foul balls off the neck, the demands of guiding your pitching staff, the burdens placed on you as a hitter and baserunner: all take a toll. If you are a No. 1 catcher, you need days off. So you need a backup who can play a couple times a week, and also be ready to substitute at a moment’s notice due to injury. More importantly, you need someone without pretensions to stardom.

Mr. Brown explores how some catchers come to accept the role of backup. Take the case of David Ross, now the manager of the Chicago Cubs. Ross only became an excellent backup after he gave up his aspiration to be a starter. The author points to a candid conversation that Ross had in 2008 with Theo Epstein, then an executive with the Boston Red Sox. Mr. Epstein convinced the frustrated Ross of his value if he could “reinvent himself and let go of the things he can’t control and just focus on the team.” As a committed backup, Ross became a beloved teammate and a winning player, a World Series champion with the Red Sox in 2013 and the Cubs in 2016.

Playing the role of backup, at catcher or any other position, often means worrying about being cut or demoted. A backup usually fields the position well, but if he hits and runs relatively poorly he will be considered, in effect, expendable. There’s always another player with marginal skills out there looking for a job. To survive, the backup needs to add value to the position. It’s a bit of a paradox: The backup, who is by definition not up to par, needs to make himself indispensable.

There are many ways for catchers to do this. Some backups secure their position through specialization—they learn to catch the knuckleball, or get paired with particular pitchers. Eddie Pérez of the Atlanta Braves, for example, was the personal catcher of the Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux. Others, Mr Brown suggests, cultivate leadership qualities. It’s no coincidence that so many catchers, like Ross, later become managers.

Consider Matt Treanor, one of many catchers struggling for a roster spot at the Kansas City Royals’ spring training camp in 1997. He was using his favorite, tried-and-true mitt in a bullpen session with an aging pitcher who was anxious about his reduced velocity. The pitcher, rather obnoxiously, demanded that Treanor get a new glove; he warned him not to show up with that old mitt again.

Treanor didn’t get angry. He understood that the pitcher was needy and wanted to hear the pop of his fastball against new leather. He appreciated that one of his job requirements was to do everything necessary to keep the pitcher in the saddle. That’s the special value required of a secondary catcher.

To survive as a backup, you have to exhibit a degree of humility and selflessness that you would neither need nor be able to cultivate if you were an everyday catcher. Mr. Brown puts it like this in the book’s opening lines: “If you will work your whole young life to become strong and clever, to see the game in ways others don’t or can’t, if you will commit wholly to yourself, the group, the win, and today, and if you then will give it all away, then you will be the backup catcher.”

This is a subordinate, unglamorous but deeply valuable baseball existence. Indeed, as the stories that fill this book suggest, baseball aside, it is a valuable kind of life.

Mr. Noë is the author of “Infinite Baseball: Notes From a Philosopher at the Ballpark” and “The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are.”