The Cardinals Apparently Fixed Willson Contreras’s Catching Problems in One Week
A week ago, the St. Louis Cardinals made a big, sloppy show of how they were removing Willson Contreras from his catching duties. There was talk about how their big free agent signing needed to work on some things, and that maybe eventually he’d get back to catching. These are the Cardinals, after all, and they weren’t going to let the new guy muck up the catching infrastructure that Yadier Molina had built! If it took weeks … nay months! … nay YEARS to get this right, they were going to make sure they did what was necessary to “fix” their catcher.
It took a week.
So a week of DH duties and presumably a whole lot of intensive work behind the scenes, and the problems that were worth an absolute circus surrounding your big new signing are suddenly gone. Must’ve been some unbelievable levels and volumes of work!
Nope. It was basically nothing:
From that read, it sounds like Contreras took a week of DH’ing and decided it wasn’t for him. He had a conversation with the Cardinals, told them he wanted to catch, and … that was that? Back in the job? After everything that happened last week (and, not to mention, the Cardinals suddenly actually winning some games)?
“I told them that I’m ready to catch, I’m not just going to be a DH,” Contreras said, per the STL Post-Dispatch. “For me, it’s really hard to just be a DH when I know that I can be behind the plate. I know (Andrew) Knizner has done a really great job. I’m not against him. He’s my teammate. He’s one of my favorite teammates, but I was just ready to catch.”
Maybe it’ll all work out fine, and things are happening behind the scenes that’ll improve the pitchers’ “comfort” with Contreras behind the plate. But if so, it sure was weird to totally throw the new guy under the bus last week only to bring him right back out and act like nothing ever happened in the first place.
As for me, being that I am petty and definitely don’t want to see the Cardinals continue to get hot, I’m ready to root HARD for the pitching staff to implode again. The respawned drama would be delicious.
