03-03-2025
This Week in Mets: Spending a spring morning with the busiest person in camp
'Manuscripts don't burn.'
—'The Master and Margarita,' Mikhail Bulgakov
It's 8:30 on a Saturday morning at Clover Park, and Dave Racaniello has already been up for 3 1/2 hours. He's setting up the pitching machines on the six-pack of pitchers' mounds just outside the New York Mets' clubhouse, making sure the curveballs they'll deliver are just enough in the dirt for the club's catchers to work on their blocking.
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This will be a light day for Racaniello. There are only seven pitchers throwing bullpen sessions and four throwing live batting practice — about half of what it could be this early in spring. And so, Racaniello will have a pair of 15-minute breaks during a 112-minute span in which he catches 254 throws from seven different pitchers. Remember, a light day.
(Pitch counts have been recorded since 1988; the Mets have played six games since then with more than 254 pitches, all of them at least 14 innings long.)
Most people arrive at spring training with a blueprint for how to work themselves as close to midseason shape as possible by the time camp breaks. The bullpen catcher, though, will never be as busy as he is in the first few weeks of camp.
'We probably work our hardest right out of the gates,' Racaniello said. 'The first two to three weeks with 37 pitchers in camp, that's the most amount of work we'll do throughout the season. You've got to be ready, your arm's got to be in shape more than anything else.'
Because of course, catching 254 deliveries in less than two hours isn't the problem. It's throwing it back all those times.
'There's no replicating coming in here and playing catch nine times a day,' he said. 'There's no simulating getting your arm ready.'
Racaniello is, remarkably, entering his 25th year as New York's bullpen catcher. (The Mets added Eric Langill as a second bullpen catcher in 2011.) A catcher in high school and college, he first got his foot in the door as an emergency fill-in. On July 5, 1997, Racaniello attended a game with a childhood friend from Stamford. Stamford being Stamford, the friend's father knew Bobby Valentine, and they met with the Mets manager before the game. Valentine noted that the club's usual bullpen catcher was unavailable that day; could Racaniello fill in?
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Racaniello thought it was a joke. By the second inning, he was rushing to put shinguards on to warm up long man Cory Lidle; Armando Reynoso wasn't long for the evening.
'I had no idea what I was doing,' Racaniello said. 'I was there with four or five friends, and they came over to the bullpen with hands in the air, like what is going on? It was crazy.'
Racaniello helped out at home games the rest of that season before going back to college. Before the 2001 season, Valentine got back in touch. How about doing it full-time?
'I thought it was an amazing thing that happened and I never expected to be called back,' he said. 'I had never thought about it. I didn't even know the position existed. I grew up a baseball fan my entire life, I never even thought about a bullpen catcher.'
In the quarter-century since, Racaniello has biked from New York to spring training, he's climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with R.A. Dickey (which he joked was a heck of a lot easier than catching R.A. Dickey), he's had surgery to remove bone spurs from his elbow and he's become David Wright's close friend and chief punching bag.
On this Saturday morning, fans often know him better than the pitcher he's catching. He is as much a fixture with the Mets as 'New York Groove.'
'It's a good time to be a Met,' he said. 'I'll be here as long as they let me.'
When discussing how his four-seam circle change operates differently than other pitchers, Mets reliever Kevin Herget casually mentioned the break he wants: 'It gets like 16 to 20 (inches) of horizontal.'
This is something you hear all the time in conversations with pitchers now — specific numbers on their movement goals. This was not the case for the first several years I wrote about baseball; in 2014, a pitcher saying he looked at that type of data merited a profile.
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So I asked Herget, drafted by the Cardinals out of New Jersey's Kean University in 2013 (in the 39th round, which no longer exists), how his understanding of his bread-and-butter changeup has evolved while in pro ball.
When he started, he said, you knew a pitch was good if hitters swung and missed at it. Now, you know why they swing and miss.
'(The proliferation of data) makes adjustments easier,' he said. 'It used to be, 'That looked good and that felt good. I don't know if it actually moved the right way.' Your eyes aren't moving in slow motion so it's hard to tell.
'(Now), the movement was here and it might need to be here. That pitch felt like this, and the data showed it wasn't great. It makes the adjustments, especially in a controlled setting, a little bit easier and a little bit faster.'
Herget said more sophisticated data wasn't introduced in the St. Louis organization until around 2016. By 2021, he estimated, it was fully incorporated across the sport.
'Especially young guys, that's the only language they speak,' he said. 'They know the data stuff, which is great. From a player development standpoint, it's why these guys are getting so good so quick and why their stuff is evolving so quickly.'
Parental leave is unfortunately not a fruitful time for one's reading, and so for a little bit the epigraphs may have to come from books I've mentioned before, like Bulgakov's masterpiece. Like 'The Recognitions' last week, 'The Master and Margarita' easily makes my top 10 or so novels I've ever read.
A Mets reliever has struck out at least one-third of opposing hitters nine times in franchise history. Edwin Díaz has done it five times, Armando Benitez twice, and Reed Garrett did it last year. The other remaining time happened in 2020. Do you remember what Mets reliever struck out an even one-third of hitters he faced that season?
HINT: He returned to the Mets in 2022 but didn't pitch nearly as well.
(I'll reply to the correct answer in the comments.)
(Top photo of Racaniello, left, with fellow bullpen catcher Eric Langill: Courtesy New York Mets)
