When I say, “Catcher…” You say, “Punt…” “Catcher…” “Punt…” “Catcher…” “Punt…” “Punt!” Ah, keeping you on your toes. When you punt at catcher, you’re taking your fantasy baseball life into your own hands. Drafting Geovany Soto is for either rich guys who have the butler do their drafting for them or Cubs fans (and never shall the twain meet). Punting catcher is what those do that don’t mind rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty.
When you punt catcher, you need to stay on your toes on the waiver wire to see which catchers are hot. You can’t sit back sipping brandy and watching Brian McCann hit a home run every ninth day. Nooooo…. You’re under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge waiting for some schmohawk catcher to have a 3-for-4 game. That’s right, you’re a catcher troll. And you need to troll on, troller. Sometimes for the whole season. Sometimes you get lucky. On my teams last year, I settled on Doumit or Shoppach on a few teams. Every other team shuffled between Dioner, Jesus Flores, Iannetta and a few other schmohawks. My catcher trolling is only outdone by my saves vulturing. (But that’s for another post.) You can go through the archives on this site and know I was all about trolling for catchers. It got so bad last year I was pimping Yorvit Torrealba like he was an El Dorado. For the ultimate riff on catcher trolling, I turn this post over to commenter, Knightown, who had this to say sometime during last summer:
“ -I wasted a second round pick on V-Mart.
-Now he’s taking up a DL spot for me
-Picked up Rod Barajas
-Sobered up and dropped Rod Barajas
-Picked up the “red-hot” Miguel Olivo
-He retired or something and got 10 AB’s in the 2 weeks I had him
-Picked up Jarred Salta-something-or-other
-Started him yesterday, went o-fer.
-Dropped him and picked up Ramon Hernandez…honestly, only because he was mentioned in today’s blog.
YTD summary, ZERO HR’s from catchers this year.”
Notice what he said in the first line — he drafted Victor Martinez in the 2nd round. Is there any better reason than that for punting catcher? Yeah, actually there’s a few.
1) The top three catchers for 2008 were Mauer, McCann and Martin. After that alliterative troupe, came Doumit, Soto, Fat Molina, Pierzynski, Shoppach, etc. Notice something? After the first three, the rest were all there for your picking, catcher troll.
2) No one wants a catcher as a utility guy. So if you’re without a catcher, there’s a lot fewer teams to deal with trying to snag a productive one.
3) We’ll assume you didn’t draft V-Mart or Posada last year and went with Mauer in the sixth round. Mauer’s numbers were: 97/9/83/.330/1. Bengie Molina was the sixth ranked catcher and came in 126th overall on our 2008 Player Rater. I think we can all agree that you could’ve had Molina way late in your draft if you wanted him. Molina’s numbers were: 46/16/95/.292. So you lose some value in Runs and Average and make some in HR/RBI. You don’t think you could’ve made up that value with that sixth round pick that you wasted on Mauer? Please. When I say, “Catcher…” Well, you get the picture.
