The Mets Should Use d'Arnaud and Plawecki as a Catching Tandem

What with Travis d'Arnaud's recent hand injury, Kevin Plawecki, one of the Mets' top prospects, just made his MLB debut. The typical way to think about the d'Arnaud/Plawecki relationship is that they're competing for the same job: the Mets' starting catcher. They both seem like they're probably good enough to be starting catchers in the big leagues, so presumably one of them will get traded at some point and they'll both have starting jobs, but only one of them will have it with the Mets. I don't think that's the right way for the Mets to handle things, at least not yet. Plawecki is going to get at least about a month's audition as the Mets' starting catcher now. Let's assume he plays pretty well, like someone who definitely doesn't just deserve to be sent back down to the Minors once the team has an alternative. What I think the Mets should do in that case is use d'Arnaud and Plawecki as a catching tandem, where neither is really the "backup." Probably you'd want to give d'Arnaud somewhat more playing time than Plawecki, just because he's probably a somewhat better player right now, but it should be more like 60/40 than 80/20. Hopefully the team would also have someone else on it who could function as an emergency catcher, thus allowing them to use whichever of Plawecki and d'Arnaud didn't start on a given day as a pinch-hitter without risking having no one to play catcher should the other get injured.

The advantage of a catching tandem is basically that you don't force anyone to be an everyday catcher. Being an everyday catcher is probably a pretty bad idea: Mike Piazza has said in his recent autobiography that he wishes someone had forced him to play catcher a lot less during his early years in the big leagues, because of how it wore him down over the course of his career. By giving d'Arnaud, say, four starts a week and Plawecki three, the Mets could keep them both fresh and minimize the wear and tear on them. That would probably benefit both players in the long run, and might also benefit the Mets if they get to the playoffs. Now, there are reasons why teams don't usually do this. There's a sense that it's a "waste" to use someone good enough to be a starting player as a backup, rather than trading them for pieces of equal value. You're also going to deprive your better catcher of playing time, which might be bad for their morale. Free agent catchers are unlikely to want to take a lesser salary in return for playing only 75% as often, and teams aren't likely to want to pay full starting catcher prices for someone to play just 75% of a full workload. And they certainly won't want to pay two different people decent-sized salaries for the same position.

But all of these problems don't apply to the Mets. d'Arnaud and Plawecki are roughly speaking as good as one another, with maybe Travis being slightly better due mostly to greater power potential, so you don't lose much by shifting some of his playing time to Plawecki. The team doesn't have any major holes that need plugging through trade, and the farm system is well-stocked, so there's no great harm in "wasting" these resources rather than trading them. Plawecki and d'Arnaud are both pre-arbitration playing for the league minimum, so it's not costly to have two solid catchers on the roster. Actually it might keep long-term costs down, by spreading out the counting stats between the two players rather than letting one of them accumulate more impressive numbers for arbitration. Oh, and also: d'Arnaud and Plawecki are said to be good friends, which would probably do a lot to mitigate the potential morale problems. The situation is, in other words, a perfect storm for using a tandem at catcher. And this would allow the Mets to ditch the replacement-level Anthony Recker, to keep their potentially All-Star caliber catcher d'Arnaud better rested, and to add one quality hitter to their bench (assuming the presence of an emergency catcher, possibly Eric Campbell). I don't really see much in the way of downside.

Assuming, that is, that Plawecki can hit at this level.

The 2014 Mets, Part I: Catching

So, as I've been watching the Mets lose various baseball games of late I've been musing about how the 2014 Mets will be constructed, and how I think they should be constructed. The basic headline, I think, is that I think the 2014 Mets are not very far away from being a damn good team, anchored by a potentially dominant starting rotation. So I thought I'd do a series of posts about what I think should be done over the off-season to make the team into a potential contender. Each post will focus on one aspect of the team, with this one covering the catching situation and future posts probably proceeding to the infield, the outfield, perhaps the bench, and then the starting rotation (spoiler: the correct answer here is to do nothing, sit back, and enjoy the show!) and the bullpen. First of all, though, a few notes on what I feel should be the general philosophy behind this off-season. The Mets do have money coming off the books, as they've had for the past few years, and in principle they should be able to boost their payroll going forward, so there's some money to spend. However, I don't really think that they should try to create a whole new team through free agency acquisitions, both because that seems rarely to work and because the Mets have a lot of promising young players, so if they just do nothing the team should get better over the next several years anyway. A few nice acquisitions to speed that process up so that they're competitive in 2014 rather than 2015 would be nice, but they should as much as possible be acquisitions that don't involve either giving up currently-important pieces or forcing some currently-important pieces to be neglected or kicked to the curb. So, with that said, here's a look at the Mets' catching arrangement, which is arguably the simplest position to address in principle since it involves only two roster spots but does involve, in this case, one interesting decision. The format of this post should provide a template for the next several.