With incumbent catcher Victor Martinez at risk of fleeing Boston via free agency, Toronto backstop John Buck has begun drawing mention as a potential replacement.
And in this weak free agent market, it should come as no surprise — even for an incomplete one-year wonder like Buck.
By most standards, John Buck’s game is fairly simple to describe: His primary tool is power. He is a liability behind the plate. He lacks any semblanceof plate discipline and contact hitting ability, contributing little to an offense other than launching balls into the fences.
With Buck, what you see is what you get: low batting averages, few walks, good power. Not much else. In a lineup like Boston’s, he would likely fit in around 7 or 8.
Perhaps the real question is whether or not the team should buy into Buck’s career year in 2010. After having wallowed in mediocrity with the Royals for six seasons, where he posted career high in WAR and OPS in 2007 at 1.2 and .738, respectively, Buck finally fulfilled some of the potential scouts saw in him. Upping the ante in 2010, he registered a 2.9 WAR and .802 OPS, largely on the strength of career-highs in home runs (20), OPS (.802), and batting average (.281). Unfortunately, his paltry .314 OBP was a new high-water mark as well, exhibiting his poor command of the strike zone.
And that command is about as poor as it gets, as his career .301 OBP can attest.
Though he was never terribly disciplined at any point in his career, his O-Swing percentage shot through the roof this past season to 40.2 percent — culminating an alarming 15 percent increase in the last two years.
Unfortunately, those increases did not coincide with any other improvements in his plate approach. Oftentimes, a player who exhibits a large increase in their O-Swing rate will show an improvement in O-Contact as well, a result of choosing better pitches to swing at. Buck realized no such gains, continuing to whiff at large scores of pitches with his porous bat. The numbers say it all, as the rest of his indiactors went largely unchanged, including a 71.1 contact percentage.
Nevertheless, such flaws, though frustrating, are perfectly acceptable and quite common when discussing catchers. There is no flawless catcher in the MLB, and nearly all have some major drawback. Mike Napoli would find a way to whiff at a beach ball. Victor Martinez can’t play defense. Joe Mauer is tragically injury prone.
John Buck? He has no sense of the strike zone and, even in a career year, he is far from a complete player.
But at catcher, he doesn’t need to be. If he can find a happy-medium between 2010 and his better days with the Royals, he’s a worthwhile addition. Though he’s more of a second-division starter than befitting a championship-caliber team, he can hold his own as a patchwork solution for a team as esteemed as the Red Sox.
As many consider Buck to be the second-best option available on the free agent market, his availability underscores Victor Martinez’ increasing value. With Buck as a possible Plan B, the importance of the Martinez negotiations goes way up. Though Buck would probably be nothing more than a bridge, there is no doubt that Boston fans would cringe at the thought of another “bridge year” so soon after 2010’s disappointment.
If VMart asks for too many years, or if Theo decides he’s blown too many free agent contracts in recent years (i.e. John Lackey, Julio Lugo, Daisuke Matsuzaka, et al) to make another splash, Sox fans should get ready for the potential of a John Buck signing. It won’t be pretty, but there are far worse options the Sox could be stuck with.