Talkin' Baseball Catching flack: looking back on 11 years of below-average Brewers backstops

Following an All-Star season in 1999, longtime Brewers catcher Dave Nilsson decided to take his 105 homers and .287 lifetime batting average with him back to his native Australia and call it a career. Having allowed backup Mike Matheny—who would go on to win four Gold Gloves over a 13-year career—to depart in free agency before the ’99 season, the team was left in a sudden and wholly unfamiliar bind at the catcher position.

At the time, no one could have guessed that Nilsson’s exit would usher in a long, dark period of old, ineffective, offensively anemic and overall laughable catchers in Milwaukee, a dismal era that continues to this day. With the Brewers in the midst of their 11th consecutive season without an All-Star catcher and currently contemplating whether to even bother replacing the club’s injured No. 1 catcher/awesome website subject, The A.V. Club takes a look back at our recent history of bad backstops and wonders whether we’ll ever break this curse.

Henry Blanco and Raul Casanova (2000-2001)
In their two years together behind the plate, this two-headed, half-assed catching combo tallied a combined 240 hits—a number Ichiro Suzuki has twice eclipsed in a single season. Blanco hit .236 and .210 while serving up 31 RBI both seasons; Casanova fared little better statistically in limited playing time.

Paul Bako, Raul Casanova, Robert Machado, Jorge Fabregas, and Marcus Jensen (2002)
During the Brewers’ historically awful ’02 season, the spendthrift brass opted to employ a veritable who’s-who of shitty game callers rather than pay one player a little more money to do a semi-serviceable job. Makes you wonder why this team lost 106 games, huh? The quintet of Bako, Casanova, Machado, Fabregas, and Jensen lived down to super low expectations, combining for a pitiful 11 homeruns, 63 RBI and 125 hits, all while surrendering 109 stolen bases.

Eddie Perez and Keith Osik (2003)
Unsurprisingly, Milwaukee didn’t retain any of their catchers from ’02. Instead, they enlisted the services of former Atlanta Braves backup Perez, who was Greg Maddux’s longtime personal catcher. Perez brought a defensive presence to the position and managed a respectable 11 HR, 45 RBI and .271 average, but the 35-year-old also missed 55 games and walked a pathetic 17 times. His sad attempts to leg out ground balls were also thoroughly depressing, but not as depressing as his 34-year-old backup Keith Osik, who hit .249, 2 HR, and 21 RBI over 80 games.

Chad Moeller, Gary Bennett, and Mark Johnson (2004)
Most Brewers fans look at this group and see three men who each hit below .225 and combined for just 8 HR and 49 RBI while retiring just 29 runners in 118 stolen base attempts. But Chad Moeller hit for the cycle in April, which practically makes him a Hall Of Famer in this group.

Damian Miller, Chad Moeller, and Mike Rivera (2005-’06)
In his first season as Brewers owner, Mark Attanasio changed the way Brewers fans looked at the catching position forever—by signing yet another ancient, light-hitting free agent. Damian Miller was an adequate upgrade from the ’04 season catcher options, but he still hit fewer than 10 homers and drove in fewer than 50 RBI in full-time duty. His backup, the mysteriously retained Moeller, hit .206 in 66 games and went back to not hitting for the cycle. The following year, Miller produced even less, so the Brewers released Moeller and promoted equally mediocre minor-leaguer Mike Rivera to the big league roster.

Johnny Estrada, Damian Miller, and Mike Rivera (2007)
You can’t blame the Brewers for trading their No. 2 pitcher for a former All-Star catcher—unless that catcher is Johnny Estrada. Milwaukee sent Doug Davis and two promising prospects to Arizona to get Estrada and pitcher Claudio Vargas that winter. Estrada made bad on Doug Melvin’s vote of confidence by driving in 54 runs, walking an Eddie Perez-like 12 times and allowing a career-high 73 stolen bases.

Jason Kendall and Mike Rivera (2008-’09)
Jason Kendall was a throwback in that he called a good game, hated taking days off, wasn’t afraid to lean into a pitch, didn’t wear batting gloves, and couldn’t hit a grizzly bear with an SUV. Though he managed to throw out more than half of would-be base stealers during his 2-year Milwaukee tenure, Kendall’s absent bat undid most of his good defensive deeds. In exchange for $9.5 million, Kendall rang up an embarrassing 4 HR, 92 RBI and .242 average in two years.

Gregg Zaun, George Kottaras, and Jonathan Lucroy (2010)
Aged free agent pickup Gregg Zaun put up power numbers somewhere between Kendall and Miller before a shoulder injury ended his season and (probably) his Brewers career. George Kottaras has clubbed a surprising number of homers but is largely unproven, as are rookie Jonathan Lucroy and Angel Salome, the troubled prospect Lucroy leapfrogged en route to the 25-man roster.

Who knows when (or if) the Brewers will field a catcher with the intangibles of a Ted Simmons, the athleticism of a B.J. Surhoff or the Australian-ness of Dave Nilsson. Maybe Kottaras will prove himself a worthy starter; perhaps Lucroy or Salome will live up to the hype. Hopefully it won’t take another 11 seasons of old, underperforming and altogether boner-shrinking backstops before the Brewers catcher problem is solved.