Culture
Life as an MLB catcher: Violet bruises, ballooned ankles — and now, broken arms
Catching was a family tradition, so when Red Sox backstop Reese McGuire was 8 or 9, as he recalled, he tested out his new catching gear in the backyard on Christmas. As he crouched in the grass and baseballs caromed off his forearms, his grandfather told him: “It takes a tough kid to be a catcher. You have to enjoy the bruises.”
“We’re all kind of crazy, I think, to get back there,” said Diamondbacks catcher Tucker Barnhart, who has spent the last 11 seasons as a target squatting behind home plate.
Catching is not for the faint of heart — or thigh or wrist or toe or hip or knee or hand or shoulder.
Around the league, most catchers are banged up, always hovering on the edge of the injured list.
Late last month, Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe was dealing with a black-and-blue shoulder, leaving him hardly able to lift his arm after absorbing a foul ball. His backup, Matt Thaiss, had a bruised hand after catching José Soriano’s 98-mph sinkers. Then O’Hoppe left a game last week after taking a foul ball to the hand. Giants catcher Patrick Bailey took a foul ball last month on the exposed area of the toe where the foot shield doesn’t quite reach. Three days later, he landed on the concussion injured list after taking a foul ball to the face mask. Red Sox catcher Connor Wong also recently dealt with a bruise under his toenail. Wong went on to describe a previous bruise to the teardrop of his quad, which made crouching painful and, well, crouching is a key part of the job.
“It’s our duty to be that tank back there and roll with the punches,” Wong said.
And for over a century, they have, accepting the bruises and strains that have come with the long-established territory. But as the game evolves, the demands of the job are making it even more hazardous; catchers have shifted closer to the plate to aid with pitch framing, but as The Athletic’s Katie Woo wrote last week, that has caused a rise in catcher interference calls and has opened up catchers to more punishment.
Last week, Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras was struck by the swing of New York Mets’ J.D. Martinez and has a broken left arm to show for it.
“There’s always a risk being a catcher,” Contreras said after the injury. “Could have been something different. It could’ve been off my knee, it could be a concussion. That risk is always going to be there.”
Contreras is expected to miss six to eight weeks with a fractured forearm. (AP Photo / Jeff Roberson)
Add it to the list. There’s a reason Barnhart and other veteran voices, including the thick Boston accent of Cleveland bench coach Craig Albernaz, can be heard on the first day of spring training every year relaying a familiar message: It’s all downhill from here.
“The amount of excitement,” Barnhart said about the dawn of a new season, “and, ‘Man, I feel great’ — and then Day 2 happens.”
They won’t return to 100 percent until the depths of winter, after they’ve recovered from every foul tip, every achy muscle, every nick and bruise in every nook of the body. The job is unrelenting and unforgiving; the pain and danger are ever-present.
And yet, for a team to succeed, so much necessarily falls on a catcher’s sore shoulders. They build a rapport with each pitcher. They know their tendencies and what’s been clicking. They know how they’ve attacked certain hitters in the past. They see the scouting reports on every single member of the opposing roster. That’s quite the learning curve for any fill-in, and Barnhart said it’s why catchers are so motivated to avoid time off.
“You have to have, for a lack of a better term,” Barnhart said, “a ‘f— it’ mentality.”
“If you cut my arm off,” said Guardians catcher Austin Hedges, “if I can play, I’m gonna go f—ing play.”
Well, as long as it’s his left arm, he clarified. He still has to throw the ball back to the pitcher 150 times a game, a tall order if he’s limited to his non-throwing hand.
Hedges scrolled through thousands of photos on his phone one day last week in search of evidence of the gnarliest bruise he could find. He located one that occupied nearly his entire right thigh, one with rich shades of indigo, plum and mulberry. He shook his head and laughed. The culprit? One single foul tip.
Austin Hedges’ thigh bruise. (Courtesy of Austin Hedges)
“The foul balls seem to always hit you in a spot where you don’t have gear or have the least amount of gear,” Barnhart said.
In 2022, Hedges suffered a low ankle sprain while lunging toward first base. Two weeks after that healed, he suffered a high ankle sprain as he tumbled into the dugout trying to corral a pop-up. His heel turned a dark violet and his ankle ballooned in size. He struggled to rotate while batting. He couldn’t comfortably position himself behind the plate or push off his backside, which resulted in him long-hopping the ball to second when trying to nab a base-stealer.
“You’re in pain, but you never get to shut it off,” Hedges said. “If you can play, you play. There’s no hesitation. You see how people react to getting hit by pitches. It doesn’t feel a whole lot better getting a foul tip off flesh. Then you just have to come back and act like it’s not even a thing.”
Austin Hedges’ swollen ankle. (Courtesy of Austin Hedges)
In June 2011, Chris Gimenez was scheduled to catch Mariners ace Félix Hernández one afternoon, but during batting practice the day before, Gimenez strained his left oblique. Seattle’s starting catcher, Miguel Olivo, experienced leg cramping that night, so Gimenez, who could barely inhale without cringing in pain, had to fill in for the final six innings.
For Gimenez, there was no dodging the pain in his side, especially when trying to corral Michael Pineda’s upper-90s heaters and when applying a tag at the plate on an assist from Ichiro. Gimenez tried to drop down a bunt when he batted since swinging proved unbearable. Chipper Jones shouted at him from third base, asking why he was bunting with two outs, but Mariners manager Eric Wedge had instructed Gimenez to do whatever caused him the least suffering. Seattle just wanted to keep Gimenez physically able to crouch behind the plate. He headed to the injured list the next day.
Albernaz was listed at 5-foot-8 and 185 pounds as a player, small stature for a catcher.
“I got plowed over a lot,” he said.
He also knew he couldn’t afford to sit out when granted a chance to play since he was an undrafted free agent who waited nine years for a big-league opportunity.
At one point, he thought his playing career had ended early, thanks to loose bodies in his knee getting wedged in his joint and leaving him unable to crouch.
Albernaz’s fellow coach in Cleveland, Sandy Alomar Jr., lasted 20 years as a major-league catcher. He has the battle scars to prove it. He underwent six surgeries on his left knee and three on his right.
“If you want to be a catcher,” Alomar said, “you’re never going to be 100 percent. Ever.”
Even now, he has a bone spur in his left foot from years of absorbing foul tips.
Even with all that catchers of Alomar’s generation had to deal with, it was rare for them to be struck by the hitter’s backswing. That has become an increasing problem for the modern catcher, as was highlighted by the Contreras injury.
Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said that teams are trying to walk the line between asking their catchers to steal strikes via closer-to-the-plate pitch framing, and putting them in dangerous situations by inching a bit too close.
“We do want our guys close enough to be impactful with the low strike but not walking into harm’s way,” Hinch said. “It’s a tough balance when the incentive to do it is real and the risk is extreme.”
GO DEEPER
Catcher’s interference calls are skyrocketing in MLB. It’s putting players at risk
Even as the risks become more intense, there are teams and individuals trying to find ways to make catching less of a burden on the human body. Hinch noted teams are searching for methods intended to “chip away at some of the physical responsibilities” of catching, whether altering their stances or adding bullpen catchers to lighten their to-do list. Giants manager Bob Melvin suggested everyday catchers like J.T. Realmuto are an endangered species.
With that in mind, some catchers have dropped one knee to the dirt to save the wear and tear on their knees, but several catchers and coaches stressed it’s not a cure-all. Hedges said it places more of a burden on his ankles, and it makes his inner thighs more vulnerable to foul tips.
“There’s nowhere for it to miss you,” said Jerry Narron, the Angels’ catching coach, who suggested catchers need “a football mentality.”
“It just seems like there’s always something that’s hurting,” Barnhart said.
“You feel like if you play a guy two out of three,” Melvin said, “that’s about as far as you can go with it.”
Most appearances at catcher, by season
| 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
J.T. Realmuto, 130 |
J.T. Realmuto, 132 |
Christian Vázquez, 125 |
Jason Kendall, 146 |
|
Cal Raleigh, 121 |
Sean Murphy, 116 |
Salvador Perez, 123 |
Ramón Hernández, 137 |
|
Elías Díaz, 120 |
Martín Maldonado, 110 |
Martín Maldonado, 119 |
Iván Rodriguez, 135 |
|
Jonah Heim, 120 |
Will Smith, 108 |
Yadier Molina, 118 |
Brad Ausmus/A.J. Pierzynski/Jorge Posada, 133 |
|
Shea Langeliers, 118 |
Cal Raleigh, 107 |
Will Smith, 115 |
Mike Matheny, 132 |
On Sept. 9, 2021, after socking a pair of solo homers against the Nationals, then-Braves catcher Stephen Vogt blocked a ball in the dirt, twisted his body and attempted an off-balance throw to third, where Juan Soto was trying to advance 90 feet. During his throwing motion, Vogt felt a pop in his hip. He couldn’t squat. Two muscles had ripped off his pelvis and he had a sports hernia. He needed season-ending surgery, which had him contemplating retirement after his team marched to a World Series title.
“You get beat up every single night as a catcher,” said Vogt, who now manages the Guardians. “It’s just part of the job.”
When Vogt made a mound visit during a recent series in Houston, he told catcher Bo Naylor: “Man, you’re getting your butt kicked tonight.’”
Naylor said nothing is more irritating than a foul ball off the hand. He added that he’ll occasionally be completing his pregame routine on a foam roller when a sharp pain pops up unexpectedly. That’s when he cycles through every possible pain-inducer from the previous night.
“Wait, why does this hurt? Oh yeah, I got a foul ball there last night,” he said.
McGuire said he wakes up “every day” with a mysterious bruise or ache. On April 30, it was his thumb, from a foul tip that struck his mitt at an awkward angle. Adrenaline fueled him the rest of that game, but it was stiff when he woke up the next day; he hadn’t realized how hard he had jammed it.
“Most of us have some sort of thumb injury,” said Cubs catcher Yan Gomes, who uses a protective guard and a stockpile of tape for added security.
All of them, not most, have some sort of something. Hinch, who caught for parts of seven big-league seasons, said it’s “the reason we all look like hell when we’re done playing.”
In August 2018, Joey Votto joined the Reds’ injured list, and Barnhart and Curt Casali, the club’s catchers, shared some of the first-base duties in his absence. For the catchers, it was like a spa day.
“We’d always joke with each other,” Barnhart said, “that, ‘Man, if my body always felt like this and I got to go to the plate, this is a great feeling. You don’t have to squat down. You’re not worried about getting hit. All you have to do is stand at first base and catch the ball? That’s it? My body feels great.’”
— The Athletic‘s C. Trent Rosecrans, Chad Jennings, Stephen J. Nesbitt, Sam Blum, Cody Stavenhagen and Andy McCullough contributed reporting.
(Top photo of Contreras suffering a broken arm: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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