Missing Lance Parrish

I don’t remember much from when I was six years old.  But I do remember some snippets from my first season of organized baseball.  At the first practice, the coach was trying to assess who could play catcher without constantly having to run to the backstop to retrieve passed balls.  “Does anybody want to catch?” he challenged the group of little kids, most of whom had never touched a real baseball before and were wearing plastic gloves, potentially on the wrong hand.  “I can catch!” I quipped, raising my hand.  The coach thought I misunderstood the question, and that I was declaring that I had the ability to catch a ball that was tossed my way – not that I was specifically stating my willingness to play the catcher position.  So he followed up my answer with a clarifying version of the same question.  “I meant to say, is there anyone who wants to play catcher?”  I always resented that guy for that.  I knew what you meant, pal, and I was prepared to handle whatever you could throw my way when I was behind the dish.

As I grew up, catcher was probably my favorite position.  I was short and skinny, not your typical prototype catcher’s frame.  But I understood how to play it, I was quick back there, and had a serviceable enough arm to cut down would-be base stealers.  The catcher is the leader on the field, the orchestrator, and I enjoyed having a front row seat for every pitch.  I was never an everyday catcher at any level, but I was always the emergency catcher at every level.  If you needed someone who could handle the second game of a double dip, I was your guy.  And if you needed someone to hustle down to the bullpen to get somebody warmed up, I was that guy, too.

James McCann returns as the Tigers’ signal caller in 2018, and that makes me happy.  McCann is hard-nosed and plays the game the right way.  He committed only two errors last year and rebounded from his sophomore slump in ’16 to post the most productive offensive output of his 3-year career.  McCann was among the worst in the league at cutting down base stealers, nailing just 24 out of 81 attempts.  By and large, however, McCann is a legitimate Major League catcher and does his job.  If he can continue to provide a little pop at the bottom of the order and call decent games, catcher will not be the position that keeps the Tigers from contending this season.

John Hicks and Grayson Greiner are the other two catchers on the 40-man roster.  Hicks can provide a spark in spot duty, while I’m guessing Greiner will spend another year down on the farm.  I wouldn’t mind seeing a left-handed stick among our catching arsenal, but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards this season.