The Plight of Tim Lincecum's Personal Catcher - Beyond the Box Score

For the life of me, I can't understand the whole "personal catcher" thing generally and specifically how it plays out on the Giants. I get the part of coddling a star pitchers delicate psyche and pampering him somewhat on days that he starts. What coach doesn't do this?

But let's face facts here:
On your 2013 Giants, replacing Buster Posey with Hector Sanchez (even writing that down made me throw up in my mouth) really means moving Posey to 1B where he is somewhat less than average defensively. Sorry Buster.

Hector Sanchez, regardless of how highly Timmy thinks of him, is a comedown defensively from one Gerald Posey and what moving Buster to first invariably means is you might move Brandon Belt to LF in place of Gregor Blanco to keep Belt's bat in the lineup.

Soooooo......unless I'm mistaken, you still have to out-score the other team, lest you play to a 0-0 tie, and Timmy ain't exactly holding teams down to zero lately. So where does that leave us?

Let's review:
--- lesser defensively at C
--- lesser defensively at 1B
--- lesser defensively in LF
--- slightly more emotionally stable on the hill
--- maybe a slight (ever so slight) net positive exchange of bats Sanchez for Blanco

I'm not liking the math here guys. Time to put a stop to this nonsense right now.

Plus, you coddle Timmy, you have to coddle a suddenly resurgent Barry "Freaking" Zito. So now, this exercise of musical defensive charts plays itself out twice a week. It's nonsense. Cut it out!!!

Plus, as the numbers seem to show, Gerald is not that bad a defensive catcher, Timmy.

from Beyond the Box Score:
The Plight of Tim Lincecum's Personal Catcher - Beyond the Box Score:

In an attempt to gain some insight into how much worse Giants pitchers had it with Sanchez behind the plate, I took a quick glace at the 2012 CERA's of the Giants' catchers. (via ESPN)

Catcher         Games  CERA 

Buster Posey     114 3.52
Hector Sanchez   56 4.04
Eli Whiteside       11 4.93

As you can see, pitchers surrendered about a half run more with Hector Sanchez behind the plate as opposed to Buster Posey. However, using CERA can only provide a very crude picture of how a catcher affected pitcher performance, if at all.

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