Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweed
I tend to agree but think, at least some teams, are moving away from this. Cubs with Gomes and Contreras, DHing 30 of his 81 games, shows a shift in thinking. Yes, Higgins has been up and down some so at times they may have had 3 C's but, to my knowledge not often. I would think the plan, if injury occurs, would be to move Contreras to C, enter the P in the lineup, PH as necessary. Their second choice is Schwindel as the emergency C. I'll take the former over the later.  |
Good example with the Cubs. And there are a few teams out there that do roster 3 catchers. The roster size jumping to 26 recently makes that a little more doable I guess.
Going to the "emergency catcher" I would imagine you'd want to avoid at all cost. I might be wrong, but something tells me you can run on Frank Schwindel with ease and your pitchers can't be bouncing in breaking pitches or they're going to be rolling to the backstop all game long. So putting the P into the batting order and forfeiting the DH spot would definitely be the preferred choice there.... and that's not the best choice either given that your bench is already 1 pinch hitter short due to that injury.
Before the NL implemented the DH, you'd almost never see the #2 catcher as a pinch hitter for that same reason. That starting catch gets hurt mid-game at that point and it's Frank Schwindel time
