The Red Sox unconditionally released catcher Josh Bard today, placing him on waivers that essentially place him back into free agency. Theo Epstein stated that the backup catcher job is George Kottaras’s to lose after apparently winning the position battle this spring.
Bard’s spring numbers, though, have been superior to Kottaras’s. Bard hit .429 in six games while slugging .786 with a .529 on-base percentage. Kottaras was impressive, but his offensive numbers pale in comparison to Bard’s: he’s hit .286 in ten games, slugging .500 with a .375 on-base percentage. As we know, however, Spring Training stats often belie a 
player’s true potential - or lack thereof. Bard’s 2008 numbers were actually worse than Varitek’s, and not just by a little. Kottaras has only three major league games to his name, but his offensives stats from Pawtucket in 2008 are easily better than both Bard’s and Varitek’s.
As Tony Massarotti points out, though, this isn’t about the numbers game. Kottaras is cheaper (to the tune of at least a million dollars) and a four years younger (which is twenty-four years younger in catcher years.) Not only that, but Kottaras caught knuckleballer Charlie Zink last season in Pawtucket with success, and if you remember, Bard’s experiment with the knuckleball in 2006 was less than successful. And the fact that the young catcher is out of options in the minor leagues didn’t hurt his odds any. Nor did his left-handed bat.
Mazz theorizes in his article that, in retrospect, Bard may have been signed as an insurance policy in case the club was unable to re-sign Varitek over the offseason. That’s a sensible enough guess, but I’ll take it a step further. I’m skeptical, after Bard’s performance with the Sox three seasons ago and his miserable year at the plate in 2008, the Red Sox would have signed him to be their full-time catcher under any circumstance. I’d be willing to wager instead that the Sox signed Bard to give the Wakefield experiment another go in case Kottaras wasn’t ready for the bigs. Massarotti tells us that internally, the Sox were leaning toward Kottaras for the backup job since the beginning of camp. At least. That wouldn’t have made sense if the Sox had signed Bard to be Tek’s replacement: if he was good enough to replace Tek (not quite the superhuman feat it was once considered), he should have been a lock for the backup job and may not have been offered the non-guaranteed contract. Kottaras was at least in the back of the front office’s mind when Bard signed on the dotted line.
Whatever the Sox’s intentions, I have a sneaking suspicion they got what they wanted this off-season: Varitek back to handle the pitching staff, and a (mostly) promising young catcher who proved he was ready to catch Wake and back up Varitek. Should Kottaras’s rookie campaign prove successful, expect to see him in a Red Sox uniform for several years.
