"Tek" is the Red Sox catcher. By objective standards, Tek is mediocre to mediocre-good: his on-base percentage is a barely above average .350, his slugging has fallen to the low .400s, his arm is nothing special, and he strikes out as often as Tom Brady gets laid, which, obviously, is all the fucking time. He can't even catch Tim Wakefield's knuckleball, or refuses to, and certainly refuses to learn. This forces the Sox to retain Doug Mirabelli, who makes Varitek look like Jesus Christ himself has squatted down to catch the baseball.
But screw objective standards. Tek is beloved. Why? I put this question to Red Sox fans, even before they got plastered for the night/afternoon. They invariably gave one of two responses:
1. He is the team "captain." Why, you can see it right there on his uniform, marked by a gigantic "C"! That must mean something?!
It means he's got "C" on his uniform where a blank space ought to be.
2. He is a great pitch caller. No one calls pitches like Tek.
Isn't the pitcher mostly in charge of pitching? I've never heard of any other catcher being assessed primarily by his ability or inability to call pitches. Maybe Varitek does call pitches well, but who the hell knows? And if he's got such a great sense for fooling batters, why does he strike out as often as high school girls used to reject Dustin Pedroia?
With that preamble, I present the inaugural TekWatch. Like so many things dumb, today's TekWatch quote is brought to us by MLB.com:
So what changed that put Boston over the top this year?
One difference was that Boston's starting rotation had three pitchers with at least 15 wins this year and the club's bullpen was the best in the league. . . .The Red Sox also avoided major injuries this year, unlike last year when they lost captain Jason Varitek to knee surgery in August and had a bunch of other core players out at the same time.
Those unnamed "other core players" include Manny Ramirez. Manny Fucking God Damn Ramirez. One of the top players of all time. Wikipedia notes that Ramirez missed 28 games starting in August. Sounds close, and if I trusted Wikipedia for my college thesis, I'm trusting Wikipedia for this.
Manny FGD Ramirez is an "other core player" compared to Jason Varitek. That's like saying the war in Iraq was launched by Poland and some other core nations.
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* Update in response to reader comments:
Thanks for the kind comments. I am intrigued by the idea that people who dislike my criticism of Varitek also want me to spell his name right as I criticize him. So I've made the correction.
Let me note, in all seriousness, that Varitek, while not a great catcher, is a good one. He ranked fifth among major league catchers in VORP this year, clocking in at 23.4. I'm skeptical that his supposed "pitch calling" ability makes much of a difference, I'm highly skeptical that 99% of the people who laud Tek's pitch calling ability are in a position to know anything about the subject, and I'd love to hear evidence in support of Tek's pitch calling making a difference, but unless his pitch calling shaves a half-run off every pitcher's ERA, my point stands. Tek's reputation outstrips his ability. Given all the great players on the Red Sox, Tek t-shirts are way too popular, and Manny Ramirez shirts, for starters, too rare. The upshot is some funny remarks that make out Varitek to be the star of the Sox. These remarks TekWatch will expose and mock, invoking profanity in excess. Onward!
13 comments:
Learn how to spell his name.
This is going to be a series? You brought nothing to the table other than he apparently strikes out every night. And who overrates him. Sox fans like him, but I never hear them calling him a hitting savant. Looks like you just have an ax to grind. Please spell his name right if your going to do this again.
Hey asshole-
1) It's Jason VARITEK, not veritek
2) It'd be "Manny God Damn Fucking Ramirez" not "Many"
3) Wikipedia is never credible. Don't use it for looking up things. Using Google search for Manny's stats, citing ESPN, etc. would be a better way to make your writing "credible."
What makes Varitek valuable to the team is his preparation. He goes over each batter with the starting pitcher and has a game plan for them. That's where his pitch calling comes into play.
He's not there for hitting, but he's still better than league average at it. And having 17 homeruns and 68 RBIs while batting .255 isn't terrible and it's all that was needed apparently to win the American League.
How about you get facts straight before you blog? Like how to spell his name? Or that there's a third response to your "question to 'fans'": He's the leader of the team and works hard under the radar to help pitchers every day hours before gametime.
Yeah. Continue this. Can't WAIT.
"I've never heard any other catcher being assessed by his ability or inability to call pitches."
There are two explanations for this: one, you're a member of the deaf community, or, two, you've never actually turned off "mute" when watching a baseball game.
Now, I understand the desire not to listen to Joe frigging Buck and Tim frigging McCarver talk, oh, ever, but if you're going to write about catchers, please do some research. For starters, you might want to take a look at just one of the 1.7 million hits you get on google for "catcher calls a good game."
While you may be skeptical about his pitch calling skills, ask the people who are affected most by it - his pitchers. His pitchers give him high accolades and praise. They frequently say that it is Tek who helps them be successful. There are pitchers who came to the Sox specifically to have him as a catcher. Josh Beckett, Curt Schilling and even Clay Buchholz have said how important he is to the pitching staff.
And it's not that he doesn't want to catch Wake - he caught him from 1998 till 2001 when he broke his elbow. His first major league game was with Wake...imagine that kind of pressure. He's had documented difficulty with Wake, though. In 2004, he caught Tim in relief, and had three passed balls in one inning during the playoffs. When Doug came over from the Rangers, Wake started doing much better. Wake trusts Doug (that's not to say he doesn't trust Tek) and they've made a really good battery. It also gives Jason a day off regularly, which as a catcher, you need to stay healthy and be able to catch throughout the whole season.
Maybe you want to do a little more research before you start posting and tearing Tek down.
Baseball Prospectus ran a study a few years ago for their book, Baseball Between the Numbers, testing for different catchers' ability to influence most of the things that good defensive catchers are said to influence. No effect was found. While their methodology was not perfect, it was not terrible either. There may well be an effect of good catchers being able to improve the performance of their pitchers, but the effect has so far eluded objective discovery; at this point, it is probably safe to say that any such effect is quite small, orders of magnitude less important than, say, catcher hitting.
There are a few things that this does not imply. It does not imply, for instance, that all catchers are equally pleasant to work with. Pitchers may, for various reasons, prefer working with some catchers rather than others. While making their pitchers happy matters to some limited extent, just because a pitcher prefers to work with a catcher does not mean his performance is thereby improved. I also don't mean to suggest that catcher defense is not important: it is, but probably the biggest aspects are controlling the running game and preventing passed balls. Varitek is ok at preventing stolen bases; he's not Ivan Rodriguez, but not Mike Piazza either.
Again, the point is not that Varitek is bad. He is not; he's a pretty good baseball player. The point is that he draws praise far beyond his relatively modest contributions; the claim that he is primarily responsible for drawing a bevy of starting pitchers to Boston is only the most recent example that comes to mind. Until then, I encourage Jack to continue this series.
Jason Varitek is lucky he's in fucking baseball.
I agree with your point. Varitek ridiculously overrated by Sox fans. But I agree with the other commenters also. You need to do a little more research, make a few more valid points, and work on your writing style before anyone even thinks about taking you serious. Talk to blackadder, the commenter above me. Sounds like he could help you make your point.
Here's a tangentially related question: anyone know if there has been research by MLB teams into using computer models to call pitches, or to predict them? I'm not the most knowledgeable fan, but on some level baseball resembles rock-paper-scissors, no?
That's a good question. I don't know if any teams have anything like that, and suspect that they don't; of course, if they did, they might not be inclined to make it public.
What I do know is that with the new pitchFx data, installed in most major league ballparks, there have been a lot of recent articles on pitch selection and pitcher tendencies on the major baseball websites. Check out the articles by Joe P. Sheehan (the other Joe Sheehan!) at Baseball Analysts, Dan Fox at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required, sadly, although it is definitely worth it) and Josh Kalk at the Hardball Times. If I were a player, I would be pretty pissed about some of these analyses!
As long as you're going after that mlb.com quote, do you think there might be some issues with their interpretation that "Boston's starting rotation [having] three pitchers with at least 15 wins this year" is what made the rest of the team successful?
Well, pitchers wins are clearly a pretty poor statistic, but I think the fact that the Sox allowed the fewest runs of any team in the AL played something of a role in their winning the pennant.
Almost one year later, I have worked on my writing style and Jason Varitek can't hit BP.
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