Christina Kahrl discusses the release of Bard by the Red Sox:
Bard's release had very little to do with his having a good or bad camp—he was hitting just fine, but the Sox would have owed him as much as a fifth of his salary instead of a sixth had they kept him any longer, and the entire $1.7 million had he made the team on Opening Day. Now, perhaps holding onto him could have made some extra bit of sense, you might think, because surely they'd be able to peddle him before that point, no? No. Because included in the elaborately silly explanation to themselves about what their non-Tek catcher must do is that this unnamed someone or somebody must catch Tim Wakefield, because the alternative, like, say, asking Jason Varitek to, y'know, do so is apparently inconceivable and defies several local ordinances, not to mention that it contravenes matters of faith handed down from William Bradford or Cotton Mather or Eddie Collins or some other rigid keeper of unquestioned tradition. I guess I look at the scenario and wonder again why retaining Varitek made any sense. Consider the median projected performances of Boston's alternatives for donning the tools of ignorance:
Dude Age PA AVG/ OBP/ SLG/ EqA VORP WARP
Varitek 37 258 .235/.323/.389/.249 3.4 1.4
Bard 31 245 .265/.337/.386/.253 4.9 1.0
Kottaras 26 404 .214/.302/.370/.235 -10.0 0.6
Brown 27 336 .205/.275/.326/.209 -11.5 0.3
There's a lot of unproductive bloodlessness here, and with the choice being between something to sink your teeth into or cucumber sandwiches, I'm left asking, "where's the beef?"* Instead, we have a special sort of sacred cow that people shouldn't necessarily stop traffic for, let alone accommodate when the ticklish subject of catching flutterballs arises. Not that there's no time like the present for Kottaras, but the present isn't going to be very special, and if something happens to Varitek, the Sox get left with the same sorry state of affairs they had to deal with last year: something in a scrubby or non-prospect flavor, while punting offensive production at a lineup slot in the name of turning the catcher position into a sinecure for a former talent and a former prospect. If getting rid of the best hitter of the four catchers in camp sounds like a great idea to you, you probably work for the Rays or Yankees.
At its core, this just doesn't make much sense. The financial stakes of retaining Bard are relatively low as these things go, but because the Red Sox seem to be operating their decision tree on who does what behind the plate with a group of iron-clad if/then statements—"if Wakefield pitches, then Tek cannot catch"—they don't seem to be considering the more basic question of whether or not they have a good catcher, and what might actually make them better while trying to avoid the fate of last year's Yankees.
