Oh Captain, My Captain

By Blaidd Drwg

With a teary farewell, Jason Varitek finally hung up his gear and called it a career. You will get the few idiots in Boston saying he was a Hall of Fame player (not even close), the same way you had them in NY when Posada retired earlier this off season, but generally he did have a pretty good career …with the bat.

Varitek produced an oWAR of 23.7 according to baseball-reference.com. That is a pretty good number for a catcher. He had 3 pretty good seasons from 2003-2005, but generally he was league average or worse. The nice thing about the Red Sox lineup for the first decade of this century is that league average production out of your catcher made him look great in the runs and RBI departments. His post season numbers were pretty much in line with his regular season ones, so he was nothing special in that arena.

Varitek gets a great deal of credit for how he handled the pitching staff. There is no real evidence to suggest that a catcher has any impact on the performance of a pitcher, so I won’t say that he was or wasn’t a great handler of pitchers. Defensively though, he was atrocious at throwing out baserunners – at 23% for his career. In his last 2 seasons, baserunners were successful in 107 out of 128 attempts, or 84% of the time. The league average success rate is somewhere around 73%. That really doesn’t tell the whole story. Varitek was behind the plate for 850 inning in 2010-2011, or roughly 94 full games. Runners attempting over 1 steal per game against him is extremely high.

I don’t blame this all on Varitek; for years the Red Sox pitching coaches had an aversion to holding on runners, which lead to more steal attempts against the Sox then probably should have been attempted. Still, some of the blame falls on the catcher, and Varitek was really bad at throwing runners out.