Severe ankle sprain for Swihart

Having your best catcher hurt while leftfielding isn't as needless as losing a pitcher while baserunning, but it's a similar type of frustration.

Are we back to that camp? A few weeks back Vazquez was really saving the pitchers, what's changed?

This seems needlessly reactionary. To me, James is just expressing frustration with Swihart's injury, which seems like a completely reasonable expression that doesn't really have anything to do with Christian Vazquez. I guess you could read into the "best catcher" part.

Myself and others (but not everyone) were all for Vazquez at the time of his return. And its looking more like we might have been wrong. But, importantly, many of us believed Swihart was going down temporarily to work on his defense at C, not be converted to LF. So that's a small thing that changed.

Woah, I didn't mean to sound harsh or ignore that different people think different things. I apologize to James if he also thought that, it wasn't my intention at all. I wasn't being sarcastic, the opinion on Vazquez has soured noticeably over the past few weeks and I don't understand why. He's still the same player he was when the hype was high around him: good defense and bad offense. It's not like his season has been disappointing or anything, he is what he always was. And yet it feels disappointing, which is the part that I don't understand.

Yeah I guess I underrated how bad Vazquez has been. I always thought his defense was overrated, not because it was supposed to be bad by any means but because it was so highly thought of that it was nearly impossible for him to live up to it. But if his defense truly regressed then there's pretty much no point playing him.

Been there, done that (when I was younger and played soccer) in terms of what Swihart is going to have to go through. I am guessing it will be a good 6 weeks, minimum, before he can even start thinking about running again. The ankle probably will swell to the size of a grapefruit and turn about 5 different colors (I remember yellow, purple, red, and a couple other colors). Still it is better than doing his Achilles...

Maybe Off Topic but I watched the 2 STL-SF last 2 games and if you've never heard about Molina reputation before, you would say this guy is a terrible defensive catcher.
What I meant is: Even defense slumps, just remember watching JBJ in the start of the season.

I don't think there's any possible way the Red Sox could have mismanaged Swihart worse than they have this year.

Yeah, those bad sprains can cause ligament laxity. I've never had more than a mild ankle sprain, but that torn peroneal caused me problems for years on that side. Several hamstring injuries and hip flexor problems in four years of running in college. Hopefully the immobilization for two weeks doesn't shrink his leg like it did mine. Of course, he's going to have a much better rehab program...

And last year he was widely publicized as being at the very top of the heap in this regard, with a large proportion of his value being derived from that skill as people commented over and over about how important a skill it was and how it was so overlooked.

At the time I asked the question of whether, when his skills were so widely publicized, whether umpires would react to the information floating around about how good he was at stealing strikes by starting to not give strikes when they saw his glove moving. There was some discussion about that, with significant opinion being that he was so good and so smooth at what he was doing that "offsetting" what he was doing wouldn't happen.

Fast forward to this year, after his injury. Christian has struggled some offensively, which isn't surprising for a young player trying to re-acclimate himself after most of a year away from the game. His throwing isn't back to what it was, which also isn't surprising as he deals with the after-effects of his surgery. Passed balls were always a bit problematic for him, so a recurrence of that, while annoying, may not be all that surprising. But the pitch framing he was always able to do, it is a skill involved with his uninjured arm, and yet, here we are with his pitch framing benefits largely negated, both absolutely and relative to the rest of the catching brotherhood.

So now let's revisit the question. Has his pitch framing really deteriorated somehow, because of inactivity or some other shortcoming on Vazquez's part? Or is it possible that he is doing things the same way, but home plate umpires are evaluating differently what he is doing? Is this something that we can even tell? Does he "look different" trying to frame pitches this season?

I for one am not excited about seeing all this negativity about Vazquez so soon after his return from a major injury. It wasn't all that long ago that people were singing his praises to high heaven and now there's a significant amount of carping. I know the contemporary world turns on the question of "what have you done for me lately?" But now calling Swihart "the best catcher" just seems a little off-putting to me. And anyway, none of it matters because with the sudden injuries Vazquez is going to do the bulk of the catching for awhile, for sure. Bat him 9th, hope he can be at least mediocre at the plate (especially given that the offensive standard for catchers isn't all that high), and let's see if he can work through his defensive issues.

EDIT: OOPS, DonC beat me to some of this. I guess that's what happens to a long-winded poster!!!

I have thought and still continue to think that long-term the Red Sox should be grooming Swihart to be their catcher.

I think Vazquez will improve with the bat and find his way to mediocrity and I think his defense will improve and he will be a defensive asset, but I don't think he's as otherworldly as has been indicated.

I think he'll be a much better defensive catcher than Swihart, but I think Swihart, if given a chance, will become a decent defensive catcher. His game calling is something he needs to improve upon and playing LF doesn't help it. I think, in time, his bat will be a big asset for the catching position.

Temporarily, I could see the sense of going with Vazquez to improve the defense and get a more experienced game caller and I could see Swihart being an upgrade on whatever they had in LF, although I'd prefer the Sox find themselves a LH bat of the DeAza variety to tide themselves over and let Swihart work on his defensive issues at Pawtucket.

I do believe that Vazquez is a really good defensive catcher, but the pitch framing stuff, I thought, was a bit over the top. It was such a relatively small sample size. Honestly, I haven't seen any major evidence that his pitch calling is Tek-like or anything near that or any major evidence that he's constantly stealing strike calls. He's got a strong arm, and at the moment, a noodle bat.

It's a shame that he does need to be pinch-hit for, especially given the fact that they lack a good lefty off the bench to pinch-hit (was Murphy's bat that washed up?)

Honestly I prefer the guy with a good bat who could be a decent defensive catcher rather than the guy with a mediocre bat who's good defensively. Good defensive catchers who can't hit aren't that unique and hard to get, or at least I think so. They're usually backup catchers. I think Vazquez will be better than that, in a Carlos Ruiz sort of way, but I'm not seeing him as a Yadier Molina at this point (he's more Benji at this point).

It's really much more a function of those who were skeptical of him in the first place having their feelings amplified by his poor play coupled with the mismanagement of Swihart, and those who were so high on him being quieter because his recent play has been pretty hard to defend.

Honestly, if Swihart didn't exist I'd probably be fine with giving Vazquez the starting job long-term and letting him try to run with it. I see him settling in a second-division starter who has season where his bat plays up and he's even more valuable than that. But Swihart is a player whose defense improved steadily and whose bat is already above average for a catcher, and he's 20 months younger than Vazquez.