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=== Looks Better the Closer You Are ===
From the Larry Stone article:
Butch Wynegar, a former major-league catcher who has worked extensively with Montero as a Yankees instructor, dismisses the comparison to Piazza.
"Monty is not Mike Piazza," he told the New York Post last spring. "He is not going to be a hitter-only as a catcher. He is going to be an everyday catcher in the big leagues who can handle the catching. I truly believe that."
Law's focus on the running game is, am sorry to say, not on point. The difference between the best and worst catchers in the game, on SB's, is +8 to -8 runs per season. SB's will not play heavily into this issue.
Now, it could be that Montero is poor at EVERYTHING - pitch framing, pitch blocking, throwing - adding up to a -2.0 WAR scenario. But the biggest question is still CERA.
Butch Wynegar, unlike bloggers like me and Law, has (1) been an ML catcher and (2) been on the field with Jesus Montero. If there is one common thread in this debate, it's that the more distant people are from Montero, the less they like his catching. The closer they are to him, and the more authoritative they are, the better they like his catching.
Did you notice this? The less people have been around Montero personally, the more dogmatic they are about his not catching? And the people who have worked with him, those people say, "Hey, there is no problem here."
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=== CERA ===
Now, if Jack Zduriencik, Brian Cashman and Butch Wynegar tell us that Jesus Montero can catch, I'm not going to take a blogger's word that Montero can't. That's their call.
But there is one aspect of the catching game that does play in seriously. Gassko zeroed right in on this as his reconcilation to "Why does catching only mean a few runs a year?" and "Why do all baseball people consider catcher defense important?"
That aspect is CERA -- the very aspect of the game that sabermetricians hate, because they can't measure it.
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We pointed out last year that
Chris Gimenez was killing the M's,
not because of the running game, but because pitchers were getting lit up with him behind the plate. I think the M's wound up 4-and-16 in Gimenez' starts, or something.
THESE are your only two questions on Jesus Montero. You get to spring training, you want to ask Eric Wedge. "Do the pitchers like throwing to him?"
That's all. That's what will drive the decision. One of three things will occur:
- Montero will be bad in every single area of the game, this will add to -25 runs or something, and he'll move off C.
- Montero will be Gimenez-like in his pitcher management, and he'll move off C.
- Montero will be neither, and he'll add to maybe -5 or -10 runs defensively, and he'll SLG .500 from C.
A catcher or shortstop of CF who gives away 5-10 runs with his glove, but who is one of the ten or twenty best hitters in baseball? That's probably the most common type of player in baseball's Hall of Fame.
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=== Dr's Prognosis ===
If Montero were going to be -10 runs in each aspect of the game, I think that Zduriencik and Cashman and Wynegar would not be telling us that he can catch. You can gingerly rule that out.
Pitchers are likely to be quite fond of Montero. He's a humble, mature kid, coachable, self-effacing. You're not talking about Ben Davis here. Montero is a lot closer to Tim Tebow, personality-wise, than he is to Michael Irvin. Or at least he's closer to Edgar than to Ben Davis. ;- )
Maybe pitch sequences will be his Achilles' heel. Could well be. That was precisely Gimenez' problem: predictable fastballs, and blizzards of them. Will Montero do that? I don't know, and I don't think Keith Law knows, either.
And maybe you want to just let him hit, anyway. That was the way with Carlos Delgado. In any case, you know the drill. The CERA's the thing. Whether the M's got Miguel Cabrera or Mike Piazza, they're looking at more than 513 runs this year.
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BABVA,
Dr D