re young catchers mss netcom com mark singer said most catchers need to be solid defensively players to help their clubs in the bigs those are the arguments against lopez for the braves for this year now the braves have two catchers who have demonstrated solid abilities to call games to work with the pitchers to throw out runners this is the crux of the argument to me at least both the sdcn and the non sdcn camps seem to agree on the fact that a catcher s defense is basically nonmeasurable at present you can talk about how important calling a game is or framing the pitches or blocking balls in the dirt but there is little or no way to tell exactly how various catcher s rank in defense looking at lopez specifically is there any reason to suspect that he is a bad defensive catcher other then the fact that the braves or the media has labeled him a bad defensive catcher as far as i can tell he doesn t have any particular problem in his mechanics such as sasser he might be a little rough around the edges in blocking the ball or framing the pitch to get a good call but all he needs to clear that up is playing and practice time i can t see how repetitions at aaa are any better then reps in the majors all we re left with is the calling the game aspect olsen and berryhill at always given credit for calling good games and helping the pitchering staff but this is a reputation that is given to almost all veteran catchers how is catching at aaa going to help lopez learn the major league pitching staff the only way any catcher is going to learn tom glavine s pitches is to catch tom glavine similarly i wouldn t be supprised if the pitcher s claimed to prefer pitching to olsen over pitching to lopez because they are used to pitching to olsen but given time they will say they are comfortable with lopez now since lopez can t learn how to handle the major league pitcher s while he s in aaa and since he doesn t have any glaring problem in his mechanics what is he going to learn in aaa that he can t learn just as well while in the majors dave dave bonar mebonar lsuvax sncc lsu edu
