1st Inning, April 4th, 2006. Brad Wilkerson on second, Mike Young at first, Mark Teixeira at the plate. The ball gets past Tim Wakefield’s new personal catcher, Josh Bard; Wilkerson moves to 3rd, Young to second. Each later scores. Later that inning, with Laynce Nix at the plate and Kevin Mench on 2nd, another ball squirts past Bard, sending Mench to third (though he did not score). And that wasn’t all; in the third inning, with Mench hitting and Blalock at 1st, Mench swung and missed at a high knuckler. His bat flew off toward the Sox dugout, the ball flew off toward the backstop, and Mench flew off toward 1st; it was a dropped K, PB that also sent Blalock the third.
3 innings of catching Wake, 3 passed balls. Josh Bard had a very rough night, and around the ballpark at Arlington (yes, I was there), many of the Sox fans in attendance could be heard chewing him out and begging for Dougie. That got me thinking, which is probably never a good idea. The topic of thought was this: how do catchers really do, objectively, at catching Wake? How did Mirabelli do at first, and how did he do in the long run? Using baseball-reference and retrosheet, I came up with a few potentially surprising answers.
Doug Mirabelli was traded to the Red Sox on June 12th, 2001, only days after Jason Varitek broke his elbow, sidelining him for the rest of the season. Mirabelli, however, didn’t get a chance at Wakefield immediately. His first game catching the knuckler was June 29th, and it did not proceed smoothly; he allowed his first Wakefield PB in the first inning, and added a second in the 6th. After that, the Sox kept him away from Wake for a while, letting Scott Hatteberg take most of the pounding (Hatteberg, that season, had 13 PB; we can only speculate that most were off the knuckler).
Mirabelli’s next appearance with Wake started off with a bang; in a game vs. the Orioles, Wakefield K’d Melvin Mora to open the 1st inning… but Mora reached on another passed ball – Mirabelli’s third in less than nine cumulative innings of catching the knuckler. All in all, in 52 games with the Red Sox in 2001, Doug Mirabelli had 6 passed balls; 5 came while catching Tim Wakefield. A rough average there would put Mirabelli at around 1 PB every 9 games; certainly once he got used to Wakefield, that number would improve, right?
Wrong. In 2002, Mirabelli first caught Wake on April 14th, and allowed two passed balls. All in all in 2002 – a year in which Wake made a triumphant return to the rotation and placed 4th in the AL in ERA – Mirabelli allowed 10 PB in 50 games at C for an average of one every 5 games. In 2003, after firmly settling into the role of Wakefield’s personal caddy, Mirabelli allowed 14 PB in 55 games behind the plate – 1 every 4 games. In 2004, the ratio remained at 1 in 4, and in 2005 he finally improved, with just 6 PB’s in 43 games ( 1 every 7 games).
The moral of this story? Well, there are actually two. The first is: don’t give me access to the internet – columns like this one happen. The second is this; don’t run Josh Bard out of town yet. The guy you’re clamoring for? He was just as bad when he first confronted that pitch – and even he was far from invincible in the long run. Catching a knuckleball is extremely hard; give the man more than 3 innings to master it.
