Y2K 2008 Mets Preview: Catcher

[Baseball can't start soon enough, and to get you ready for a full season of action, Y2K wants to help you meet the 2008 Mets. We'll break down a roster position each day heading into the opener. We begin by donning the tools of ignorance in loving tribute to Steve Phillips. Just kidding. It's the catchers preview. Although Steve Phillips is really dumb.]


Projected starter: Brian Schneider

Age: 31

2007 line: .241/.335/.352, 2.4 VORP

2008 PECOTA: 351 PA, .242/.319/.344, 3.9 VORP


Backup: Ramon Castro

Age: 32

2007 line: 157 PA, .285/.331/.556, 13.1 VORP

2008 PECOTA: 287 PA, .249/.323/.463, 15.0 VORP

Discussion
Here you have a situation where a team addressed a perceived weakness -- poor catcher defense and leadership, one of the many legacies of Paul LoDuca -- by overcompensating like Tom Cruise at a Maxim party. Schneider has a reputation as a very solid catch-and-throw guy, even if that reputation isn't backed up exactly by the numbers. He has a reputation of working well with pitchers, although to find any evidence for that whatsoever you'd need to give him basically all the credit for last year's surprising showing by the Nats' makeshift staff. I tend to throw a lot of love Manny Acta's way, and it's singularly tough to find any statistically significant markers of a catcher's influence, so consider me unpersuaded.

But let's say for the sake of argument that Schneider is, in fact, the fundamentally sound, respectable, workmanlike backstop of legend. So what? You have to really give a lot of weight to the fact that the Mets were the fourth-worst team in the NL last year in stolen bases allowed. LoDuca/Castro/DeFelice/Alomar weren't great, to be sure, allowing 105 steals against 29 CS (29 CS%, 10th out of 16 teams). But again, there's not tons of difference between 12th and 6th (Cincy and Arizona, tied with 88 SB allowed). If the Mets had done something crazy like San Diego and given up 185 SB, then there might be a real problem to address. But being a middle-of-the-pack team when you'd talking about something like 15 bases a year isn't so bad. As for other catcher stats, the Mets recorded the second-fewest wild pitches in the NL last year. LoDuca had two passed balls; Schneider had five.

Now, Paulie had a down year at the plate last year, but we can feel confident that Schneider will be, at best, much worse. The guy just can't hit his way out of a paper bag. He's 31, which all but guarantees that his best years are behind him. So, essentially, even if he were a great defensive catcher, he'd be a sizable drag on the lineup. Great.

Whether due to his size, his previous usage patterns, his injury tendencies or whatever, Castro is widely thought of as a guy who can't play catcher every day. Now that Schneider is on board, we'll never know, but 2008 would have been a perfectly reasonable occasion to see if he could handle the everyday gig. Good defensive backup catchers grow on trees, so Omar could have had some cover in a No. 2 for basically no cost at all. And it's worth mentioning that Johnny Estrada, who the Mets had on their roster for about 20 minutes, was an offensive asset as recently as 2006, and also would have cost nothing at all. Well, he cost Guillermo Mota, but that's like getting paid for your trouble.

All in all, a very disappointing set of moves. We should hope for Castro to stay hot and get as much PT as possible, and Schneider to have a late-career offensive surge. Not bloody likely.

[Note relating to the above photo: Ramon Castro looks exactly like the father from "Dinosaurs." I will not argue about this. It is simply a fact. If you have a problem with this, take it up with ABC, the makers of a show so awful it haunts my dreams decades later.]