‘You can never be afraid back there’
Before every game, as he puts on his catcher’s gear, the New York Yankees’ Gary Sanchez silently braces himself for the job’s inevitable surcharge — the dings and dents and body shots that require bravery, if not a touch of masochism, to endure night-in and night-out.
“You can never be afraid back there,” Sanchez said.
Absorbing punishing blows are part of the catcher’s job, but nothing hurts as much — and nothing causes as much damage — as a foul tip that glances off the hitter’s bat and goes straight into the catcher’s mask, rattling the brain and sometimes causing a concussion.
The trauma can last for a moment or a few hours. In some cases, it can end a career: Former Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, a four-time Gold Glove winner as a catcher, retired after a series of concussions in 2006. Umpire Dale Scott did the same after missing nearly the entire 2017 season with head injuries.
And this month, Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Francisco Cervelli hinted that he, too, had reached a breaking point after a sixth documented concussion. He suggested he would likely stop catching (though he later walked back those comments).
Those who have gone through it describe the experience in disquieting terms.
“Your ears start ringing, you lose the sense of where you are and then the headaches start coming,” Tampa Bay Rays catcher Travis d’Arnaud said. “I’ve had back-to-back pitches get me, straight on, and I couldn’t even stand after that. They had to take me out of the game.”
Robinson Chirinos of the Houston Astros likened the impact to a thunderous “boom.” It not only staggers a catcher, he said, but leaves him wary of the next pitch, which can significantly increase the risk of long-term injury if it makes contact.
“You definitely don’t want another foul tip right after you’ve had a bad one,” Chirinos said. “You’re thinking, ‘Please, not again.’ ”
That fear is not unwarranted. Head trauma experts say the brain is exponentially more susceptible to a severe concussion after an initial blow. At speeds of around 90 to 105 mph, depending on how hard a pitcher is throwing and the force of a hitter’s swing, a baseball can feel as devastating as a punch from a heavyweight boxer.
“The cells are, in a sense, stunned,” said Chris Nowinski, chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “You have this ongoing struggle for the cells to get the energy level back to normal. It’s an intense time frame for about five minutes.”
Umpires are just as vulnerable, especially the ones who set up in what they sometimes call the “kill zone” — the space directly over the catcher’s head or over his right shoulder during a right-handed hitter’s at-bat. That’s where umpires are most at risk.
“The moment you get hit, all you see is white, like a bright light,” former umpire Jim Joyce said. “And believe me, it hurts like hell.”
Scott, who had four concussions in the last five years of his career, including two in the final ninth months, agreed.
“The first thing is, it’s loud, it’s like an explosion,” Scott said. “It’s like you almost go into shock. The last time it happened to me, my mind wasn’t on the next pitch. Instead I was thinking, ‘Is the next one the one that’s going to take me out?’ That’d never happened to me before. That’s when I knew it was time to get out.”
Unlike football or hockey players, who can retreat to the bench for treatment before returning to the game if they are not seriously injured, a catcher has only a few moments to decide if he can continue. Dangerous as it might seem, most do, falling back on a credo of toughness and commitment.
“This is what you sign up for,” the Yankees’ Austin Romine said, adding: “A football player will tell you the same thing — it’s part of the job. I’ve accepted it because I love being a catcher.”
After a particularly hard impact, a team trainer might rush out and administer an impromptu concussion test, asking what day it is or in what city the game is being played. But a few seconds is too small a window to properly diagnose a potential trauma.
There has been discussion among Major League Baseball’s leaders about someday introducing a free substitution rule for catchers, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who was not authorized to comment publicly on them. A new rule could allow catchers to leave the game for a set number of minutes or innings for a medical examination, with the possibility of returning to the field if they are deemed healthy enough.
Baseball’s current protocol