Like all sports, the national pastime revolves around stars, followed by the rest of the regulars and then the benchwarmers. Somewhere in the last group is the backup catcher, a man who gets into maybe one game a week if he’s (un)lucky because the main guy is always behind the plate unless he gets hurt or needs an occasional day off. For every Yogi Berra, there’s a Ralph Houk who appeared in just 91 games over an eight-year career with the Yankees.

Throughout THE TAO OF THE BACKUP CATCHER, we are told how Erik Kratz and his fellow backups must have a real love for the game to keep at it for so long, fully realizing they will never enjoy the careers they had expected. These athletes were often the best on their little league teams through college, believing they were on their way to being a high draft pick with a huge signing bonus and unlimited potential.

"THE TAO OF THE BACKUP CATCHER is quite earnest in its portrayal of this unique position on a team and in an organization, basically providing bodies for the 'real prospects' to gain experience."

Kratz was not one of them. A strong family man, he and his wife had a five-year plan that obviously kept getting extensions. He became a baseball lifer, bouncing around the minors starting in 2002. Along the way --- as Tim Brown reminds us several times --- Kratz played for some 30 teams, scattered across the U.S. (plus one in the Dominican Republic). A look at his page on Baseball-Reference.com is at once startling and amusing.

We see the tenuous life of an itinerant ball player. How long will he be around this particular team? How will he handle the practical and emotional effects when it comes to being traded or released? How will he be received by new teammates and front-office personnel? How long should he keep going, knowing there’s a family at home missing him, and vice versa?

We get to know Kratz as a dedicated professional who understands what his role is and accepts it. All he can do is be prepared for the day when he sees his name in the starting lineup. In the meantime, he will catch bullpen sessions, work with pitchers, listen and observe, and basically do “whatever it takes,” satisfied just to have a job doing --- in some cases --- the only thing for which they have training.

The baseball cinephile will recognize a couple of similarities, intended or not, to Crash Davis in Bull Durham. There’s the concept of the difference in the number of hits needed over the course of a season that could substantially boost a player’s batting average and make him a more appealing candidate for promotion. There’s also an episode where a catcher, annoyed with his pitcher’s attitude, alerted the hitter to what was coming, resulting in a home run.

THE TAO OF THE BACKUP CATCHER is quite earnest in its portrayal of this unique position on a team and in an organization, basically providing bodies for the “real prospects” to gain experience. But Brown practically beats the reader over the head with the notions of sacrifice, humility and, ultimately, acceptance. There are repetitive references to Kratz’s career path in terms of moving around and dealing with frustration amid his love for the game. Without those, this could have been a substantially shorter book.   

Brown served as co-author on Rick Ankiel’s 2017 memoir, THE PHENOMENON: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life. The odd thing about THE TAO OF THE BACKUP CATCHER is that the voice is not Kratz writing in the first person, so in a sense one wonders why his name appears in the co-author role.