I’m very proud of my grandson Josh who is the regular catcher on his youth baseball team this year and doing a fantastic job. I have to admit though, that he is poking a hole in my theory of how a coach picks his catcher on a little league team. I always enjoyed coaching my son’s Babe Ruth league teams when he was growing up, and one of the enjoyable things was taking a group of 12-15 kids who show up at the first practice and organizing them into something that resembles a real baseball team. There’s always the short, agile, quick kid who can hit, field and throw (usually because he had 3 older brothers who had him out in the field playing with them at the age of 2). He is automatically the pitcher / shortstop. Then there’s always a tall, gangly kid who doesn’t throw very well but catches the ball and for some reason always seems to be lefthanded. He is your first baseman. But I always joked that I had a method for picking out a catcher each year and Josh doesn’t fit the mold. The first practice session was usually held in early spring and up here in Buffalo that means the players are all decked out in winter jackets, winter gloves under their baseball mitts and winter wool hats instead of baseball caps. Then there was always one kid who would show up late, flying in on his BMX bike, hair messed up, decked out in shorts and a camouflage t-shirt, with snot hanging out of his nose. His idea of parking his bike would be to jump off it and let it crash into the backstop to stop it. You just waited for this kid to show up, pointed at him and said “Get the gear on, you’re the catcher!” I always assumed this was pretty close to the same method hockey coaches used to choose their goaltender, and football coaches their nose tackle, since all these positions require a “special breed” of person. There’s a reason baseball has always referred to the catcher’s equipment as the “tools of ignorance”. The poor guys who play the position take a beating and work harder than anybody else on the field. Actually I think it was a catcher who made up that term, and I always hear Fox broadcaster Tim McCarver, a former catcher, use it.