Why it's so hard to find the next Russell Martin

When Brooks McNiven was called to represent his country at the 2009 World Baseball Classic, he had no illusions of being Canada’s star player. In fact, the career minor leaguer was rather certain he was the last man picked, there only to soak up a few innings if the team got into a serious jam.

Nonetheless, it was a proud moment for the Terrace, B.C., native and it came with the possibility of an interesting perk: the chance to throw to Russell Martin – one of the game’s top backstops.

“I was some nobody minor-league guy and he’s one of the best catchers in the league,” McNiven recalled. “Here I was not knowing what to expect or whether to expect anything at all.”

During pre-tournament play, the right-hander ran into some serious trouble. In his first inning he gave up a screaming double down the first-base line followed by a towering home run to left. McNiven got out of the inning and slunk back to the dugout feeling out of his depth.

Who should greet him there but the then-Los Angeles Dodgers catcher.

“I remember coming into the dugout and I’m sitting on the bench and he came over to me and sat beside me,” McNiven said. “He wasn’t even catching that game, and he didn’t have to do it but he did.”

It was one of those times a catcher has to decide whether it’s best to play therapist or coach.

“When you need to be a psychologist, you’re that guy. You need to be a good listener sometimes,” Martin said. “Sometimes the best thing you can do is not say anything and listen. I’m not always great at that, but I’m trying to get good at that.”

As far as Martin was concerned, the situation called for an X’s and O’s discussion rather than a quiet encouragement.

“He asked me what the pitch was the guy hit out,” McNiven said. “I told him it was a four-seam fastball and he said ‘I noticed you were throwing a two-seam and it looked really good with a lot of movement and a lot of sink on it. Why would you even throw a four-seamer? I wouldn’t waste your time with that.’”

McNiven got out of the next inning, but as fate would have it he never got a chance to apply the advice in the WBC – nor did he get the opportunity to throw to Martin. Even so, it’s a memory McNiven cherishes to this day.

It’s also the kind of story that follows Martin around wherever he goes. Over his accomplished 11-year major-league career, the Toronto Blue Jays catcher has earned a sterling reputation as someone who can call a game and lead a pitching staff.

It’s the reason why Martin soaked up very little blame when Toronto started the season 2-11 and he stumbled out of the gate with an 0-for-20 slump. To say what he does at the plate is immaterial would be an exaggeration – and the fact he’s turned it on of late is certainly helping the Blue Jays dig out of their early season hole – but his primary directive it to guide his team’s pitchers. Until there are any issues on that front, Martin’s contributions to the team aren’t going to be questioned. There haven’t been any complaints yet – and the Canadian backstop has been doing this for 14 years.

The Montreal, Que. native got his start as a backstop with the Rookie-Ball Ogden Raptors in 2003, the second year of his professional career. He’d been drafted as a third baseman but the Dodgers figured they’d give it a shot behind the plate and it paid off. His manager at the time, Travis Barbary, realized instantly the team was on to something.

“It seemed like if he made a mistake he learned from it and he didn’t make it again,” he said. “I can’t remember anyone who converted to the position and got as good as he was as quick as he did.”

Barbary – now the Dodgers catching coordinator – saw from Day 1 that what Martin initially lacked in knowledge of catching nuances, he more than made up for in natural leadership and competitive ferocity.

“I don’t think he had a feel of, ‘These are the pitches I should be calling’,” he said. “I think whatever he put down they trusted him enough and thought, ‘Alright I’m going to do that because if I don’t this guy is going to bite my head off.’”

He wasn’t the only one to notice.

“It was pretty evident talking to other managers around the league at that time, that there was something different about the way he went about his game.”

Martin is a master of the “soft skills” and unquantifiable subtleties of catching. People like to say that it’s not a coincidence his teams always seem to end up in the playoffs. It may seem like twisted logic – if Mike Trout can’t drag a team to the postseason, no one can – but it’s also impossible to definitively refute.

The Canadian veteran has played October baseball in nine of his 11 seasons, and was a pivotal figure in ending a 20-year playoff drought with the Pirates and a 22-year dry spell in Toronto. For “there are no coincidences” believers, that’s pretty compelling stuff.

If we accept that catchers like Martin and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Yadier Molina have these skills that are both valuable and beyond the outsider’s understanding, it’s worth asking how we identify these seemingly-elusive talents. How do you find the next Martin?

As it happens, that’s an exceedingly difficult question to answer. In fact, as far as Houston Astros scout Jim Stevenson is concerned, there isn’t a trickier conundrum for those in his profession.

“From a scout’s standpoint this is the hardest thing to identify,” he said. “That position and that aspect of it.”

To truly tackle the issue of finding the next great game-caller or staff leader, you first have to get over the hurdle of determining what’s a talent and what’s a skill. Can anyone learn to be the perfect combination of chess master and therapist behind home plate? Martin certainly thinks so.

“I feel like everybody has the potential to become a good game-caller, it’s whether they retain the information correctly or if they have a good filter as I like to say,” he said. “People who are able to keep in the good information and filter out the stuff they don’t like so much.”

He’s not alone in this view. As one AL scout put it: “Game-calling isn’t relevant to [my team] because we’re going to have a guy in the system for six or seven years we can teach it to him.”

Stevenson, on the other hand, isn’t so sure.

“The more [experience catchers get] the most advanced they become back there, but it’s also about feeling what that hitter beside you is feeling,” he said. “That’s an intuitive thing. You have it or you don’t.”

Even if you fall on the side of believing in the mental aspect of catching being a talent, it’s become enormously difficult to pinpoint, especially given the way young catchers are developed is changing.

“Most of the guys coming out of high school and college have never had to call a game,” Barbary explained. “It’s just dictated to them.”

It’s a trend that’s made the evaluative process more challenging for scouts like Stevenson, who don’t know where potential draftees are at on the mental side of their catching.

“These kids are brought up now where everything comes from the dugout” he said. “It’s all guesswork.”

To summarize, if you want to find and develop the next player who can call a great game and manage your pitching staff with aplomb, you need to draft a kid who might not have called a game before at a high level of competition, and teach him something that may or may not be teachable – depending on your ideology.

Making the waters even murkier is the fact that even a player like Martin – who at 34 is considered one of the most accomplished practitioners of the art form walking the planet – doesn’t feel like a finished product.

“I’m still learning,” he said. “I’m not even done learning because game-calling is a relationship that you have with your pitchers.”

And all of that fails to acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of the mental side of catching that makes it harder to analyze at each step.

“It’s not a perfect science. It’s subjective to whoever is doing it,” Martin said. “There’s many good game-callers that have different views and it doesn’t mean one is better than the other.”

Teams coveting the next Martin or Molina face a barrage of questions. How can we identify game-calling talent among amateurs with no experience calling games? Which players have the best ability to learn the game? How do we teach a skill that’s so instinctual? Who can grow into a great leader?

It’s the type of quest that keeps a scout like Stevenson up at night.

“This is one of the toughest questions and something you could talk about for hours. It’s a never-ending conversation.”

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