“The Tao of the Backup Catcher:
Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game”
The author:
Tim Brown
with Erik Kratz
The publishing info:
Twelve Books/Hachette
304 pages; $30
To be released July 11, 2023
The links:
The publishers website
The authors website
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The review in 90 feet or less
At our local favorite literary browsing spot, Dave’s Olde Book Shop in Redondo Beach, we found in the vintage/collectables section something called “Complete Sports” magazine. From July, 1948. Original price: 25 cents.
The cover lures us in to find a “book-length baseball novel” inside called “Hit Away Holler Guy!” by T.W. Ford. The artwork is fabulous from the brown musty pages of newsprint numbered 6 to 42. It becomes a full experiences for all the senses.
The premise, from the table of contents: “The new backstop was a real holler guy – but he would have to be the Angel Gabriel himself before he would wake up those eight dead men on the diamond!”
The magazine cover is all taped together. It is missing not only the back cover, but it ends with a torn page 129.
It is a piece of baseball history, held together by tape and staples and love.
Just like a real catcher could appreciate.
What does this tale published 75 years ago have to do with the essence of catchers having some secret powers? Can they really will people out of their graves back on the diamond? Is this some Field of Nightmares?
The demands on any Major League Baseball backup catcher might feel as if that includes being akin to a grave digger. Who really wants to do it? But, hey, we need it done, and you’re available. Isn’t this a path to dig one’s own hole into oblivion?
(First aside: We remember once finding out on the back of a Topps baseball card that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Richie Hebner dug graves in the offseason. As a hobby? As we look for that card, check out the West Michigan White Caps minor league team (Hebner played for the Detroit Tigers for three seasons in the 1980s) as it once gave away a Hebner bobblehead about 10 years ago … it looks like this. The story goes that Hebner dug graves as part of his family business for more than 30 years. From his SABR.com bio: “He began earning $35 per grave in the off-season at home in Norwood, Massachusetts, working the nine Jewish cemeteries his father William supervised. Once, his dad criticized him for digging a grave too shallow. Hebner retorted, “I never saw one get up from it.”)
In scout parlance, the backup catcher is referenced as a “C2,” with a small No. 2. Like we’d see in a science class looking at a periodic table of elements.
Erik Kratz is the protagonist in this true-to-life assessment of his career as the “C2” no matter where he went – spending time on 14 MLB franchises during 19 seasons in organized pro baseball.
In every instance, Kratz becomes a vital part of the team’s chemistry and bonds with players, managers and bullpen throwers on a lot of important levels.
Kratz, who walked away after the 2020 season with the Yankees (his second tour), had one stop with the Angels, but don’t try to remember it – after the Houston Astros released him in May of 2016, the Angels picked him up and stored him away in Triple-A Salt Lake City, for 19 total at bats. Kratz may never know why they did that: To nurture an up-and-coming pitcher, perhaps.
Yes, like Crash Davis.
Because, at the time, the Angels had banked on 33-year-old Geovany Soto, the former Cubs All-Star, as their main catcher, but he only lasted 26 games because of injury. They pulled in 25-year-old Carlos Perez for 87 games, and 26-year-old Jett Bandy for 70 games. Juan Graterol got in for nine games as a backup. But Kratz never got a shot.
These 74-88 Angels needed all the help they could get, if only to warm up another arm. They ended up using 30 pitchers that season, from Al Alburquerque to Tim Lincecum, Jered Weaver to Huston Street and even one game from Andrew Heaney. Tyler Skaggs even threw 10 games.
As it turned out, the Angels became a bridge in Kratz making some odd history that season.
The Angels traded him to Pittsburgh in mid-June, and after a couple days in Triple-A, he came up and did something that no one in the game had since 1879. Topps baseball cards even put out a special limited edition tribute to him.
On June 21, the Pirates had Kratz throw an inning at the end of a blowout loss to save their bullpen against the San Francisco Giants. Kratz ended up with one inning of scoreless relief. He even struck out Brandon Belt on a 52-mph knuckleball.
A few months earlier, the Houston Astros had treated him with the same urgent need. He surrendered two runs and three hits in one inning “of work,” as the cliché goes in the broadcasting booth.
That made Kratz the first player in 140-some years to both pitch and catch for two different teams in the same season.
Cool enough, Kratz would end up as the Milwaukee Brewers’ starting catcher in five of their seven-game NL Championship Series games against the Dodgers in 2018 — and also pitch in three games for the team that season, one inning each. He also made two final appearances for the Yankees, in 2020, at age 40.
His career pitching line: 7 games, 7 innings, 5.14 ERA, 32 batters faced, one walk, three Ks.
Through the quick prose quotes of Kratz, channeled through seasoned sportswriter and author Tim Brown, who already has two New York Times’ bestsellers on the market in helping tell the stories of former MLB pitcher Rick Ankiel and Jim Abbott, the story flows from chapter to chapter in a way that’s as much enlightening as it is entertaining. As Brown says in the intro: “They are not merely backup catchers, but front-line people.”
Kratz won’t be known as the guy who had 881 MLB at bats and only had a -0.1 WAR. He’ll now be known as someone who channeled his Souderton Mennonite Church believes into someone who knew what the job entailed, and did it, to support his wife and three kids. It’s where he learned his resilience, team-over-individual mentality, endurance, wisdom, patience, common decency, focus and following his heart.
In a story that ran in the Sporting News in September of 2020, just before he walked away, the reporters noted that Kratz had teared up when talking about how what he’s been as a mentor to Hispanic teammates with the New York Yankees. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and Brown also documents it. Kratz could also likely see the end of his pro career at that moment. It all caught up with him.
Brown manages to includes many recognizable names who’ve spent much of their career in that “C2” role – the Dodgers’ A.J. Ellis and Drew Butera (now an Angels’ bullpen coach), one-time Johnny Bench backup Bill Plummer and what it was like to spend his career behind a Hall of Famer never to get an inning in during all those playoff and championship runs, current Angels manager Phil Nevin (who converted to a backup catcher just to stay in the game at one point), plus Bobby Wilson, Jake Paul and even the poetry of Dodgers’ backup Austin Barnes stuffing the last ball used in the 2020 World Series into his back pocket for safe keeping after Julio Urias’ strike out. Rewards come far and few between, and the back up catcher must seize them when they happen.
There’s also a splendid discussion with former Angels manager Mike Scioscia (at one time, briefly the back up to Steve Yeager with the Dodgers) and the closed-door strategy sessions he put all Angels catchers through with his tutelage that only made them smarter and better at their position.
This books also makes us appreciate more what the Dodgers had for a brief time earlier this season in Austin Wynns.
The 32 year old was needed when Will Smith went out with a concussion. They designated him for assignment on May 1. Wynns got into six games, hit .154 but had an RBI double. The Dodgers were his third team in five seasons, including two stops in Baltimore and one in San Francisco. He has nine minor-league seasons logged already. Expect him to be on speed dial by any MLB team that finds itself up to their hips in alligators some day.
It can’t be an everyone Wynns-win situation for everyone. But it’s a necessary role.
They live the life, as Brown writes in the introduction, “with a grim sense of humor, a prorated paycheck and a handshake for understanding.” They are the “unlicensed therapists and hard-knock lifers whose careers wander off in unexpected directions, just like their fingers.”
“I always joke,” says Chris Gimenez, who had 10 seasons in the big leagues with six teams, “that backup catchers are three-quarters psychologist and one-quarter actual baseball player.”
Maybe someday Wynns gets into the MLB manager ranks, following Nevin, Bruce Bochy, Joe Madden, A.J. Hinch and David Ross. And he can write his own book.
It’s a smart move.
Author Q&A
We caught up with an email exchange with author Tim Brown, our former L.A. Daily News colleague who recently moved from many years in Southern California to South Carolina with his wife:
Q When in your sports writing career did you figure out that not only are the best baseball stories found in the corner of the locker room, but that the backup catchers were really the most front-line people?
A I think backup catchers are so good at reading people they recognized right away I was probably in need of some guidance. Major league clubhouses can be difficult, intimidating places, especially if you’re new to the job and aren’t finding a lot of friendly faces. So when somebody takes the time to help you through your dumb questions, educate you on the game, confide in you that he, too, sometimes feels unsure of himself, that resonates.
And, yes, maybe because those guys were in the literal corners of locker rooms, that there would be other players in the figurative corners, where big, strong athletes had all the doubts and vulnerabilities and life traumas of the cab driver who dropped me off in front of the stadium. I did a book with Jim Abbott. When he wasn’t pitching well and was feeling pressure from under performing, he would sit on the team bus, look out the window at the people in their cars and wonder what it would like to have a regular job. In those moments, he’d sometimes wish he were them. And he was a New York Yankee making millions of dollars.
These players, the famous ones whose names you know, they suffer the same insecurities the rest of us are hiding too. Or trying. As I thought about a book that might make the game feel real again, outside the analytical models, statistical tangles and revenue counts that now reach the tens of billions, I kept coming back to the backup catchers. Their honesty about themselves. Their fight to stay with it. The role they play in helping others live with those insecurities and turn them into competitive advantages. Hell, just a guy to share a beer with, who’s been there. Who lives with it every day.
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