HOUSTON — Disaster struck during Yainer Diaz’s 32nd start as a full-time catcher. A capricious pitcher put the Houston Astros catcher in a circ*mstance that can’t be mimicked in spring training or games with low stakes, the only two forms of experience Diaz received during his breakout rookie season.
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Diaz had caught 679 1/3 major-league innings before Framber Valdez veered from convention in the fifth inning Monday night. No one inside the Astros organization specified the game plan, other than to acknowledge Valdez did not follow it.
Chaos, candor and at least one closed-door meeting ensued, elevating an innocuous act into something worth more study. Pitchers shake off catchers every night, so disagreements within batteries often do not prompt much deep thought.
Underperformance and urgency by the Astros alter the norm. So does the departure of a catcher few of Houston’s pitchers would ever dream of disobeying. Moving on from Martín Maldonado after six seasons improved the Astros’ on-field production, but always invited wonder about the intangibles Maldonado mastered.
Maldonado caught all 198 regular-season innings Valdez threw last season. The catcher acted as a pseudo-manager who took so much pride in his pregame preparation that most of the pitching staff placed inherent trust in almost anything he did.
Expecting Diaz to equal that is silly — and something Houston did not expect from a 25-year-old with 154 games of major-league experience. Assigning him any blame for Valdez’s actions on Monday night is just as ludicrous, a fact manager Joe Espada seemed to reinforce on Tuesday afternoon.
Logan O'Hoppe and Jo Adell go back-to-back and the @Angels take the lead in Houston! pic.twitter.com/o0q2NOMU2Z
— MLB (@MLB) May 21, 2024
Espada said he met with Valdez before Tuesday’s game against the Los Angeles Angels. The manager declined to reveal any details from their conversation but made it clear that the responsibility for Monday’s events does not belong to Diaz.
“(Catchers) call a pitch, a pitcher shakes and they throw the pitch they feel convicted to throw, but saying that’s something to do with a young catcher, I don’t think so,” Espada said.
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“Framber’s been our Opening Day starter three times. He’s an All-Star. He knows what he wants to pitch. They both sit together and go over the game plan. The pitcher gets a feel for a pitch and if he wants to execute that pitch because he thinks he’s right on that particular time, he’s got the right to do that. But to point fingers, no.”
Diaz’s first 33 games as a full-time catcher have inspired confidence, even as Houston entered Tuesday’s game against the Angels with a 4.64 ERA. Injuries and a front office that ignored the team’s pitching depth this winter are more to blame than anything Diaz is doing.
Diaz remains an above-average blocker and caught seven of the first 33 runners who tried to steal against him, a tick below the league’s 22 percent caught-stealing rate. A dip in Diaz’s offensive production is almost expected as he absorbs a higher defensive workload, but as the last few seasons have shown, anything the Astros receive from their catchers is lagniappe.
Still, Diaz has a .681 OPS across his first 181 plate appearances. He is hitting far too many ground balls and reverting to poor plate discipline after an encouraging start to the season. After coaxing six walks in his first 73 plate appearances, Diaz worked two across the subsequent 108. He has always been a free-swinger with an ability to make contact outside the strike zone, but over-aggression can doom him.
“I’ve just been thinking and worrying about too many things — trying to do too much and not be the player that I know that I usually am,” Diaz said after finishing Monday’s game 2-for-4. “Today, I tried to just calm it down, make it simple and just be the player that I know I can be. We have a lot of baseball to play still, so I have the faith and the trust that I know things are going to turn around and get better for me.”
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Diaz took some of his most encouraging swings this season Monday, but Valdez’s antics rendered them a footnote. Starting 7-19 magnifies every mistake or squandered chance across the team’s next 136 games. Losing a five-run lead at home against a listless Angels team is the most heinous of Houston’s first 27 losses, the type that could cost a club chasing a postseason spot in September.
Winning will render the club’s collapse on Monday moot and allow it to be remembered for what it was — Valdez authoring another chapter in his enigmatic career. He has veered from game plans long before Diaz became the club’s full-time catcher, even with Maldonado behind the plate. Diaz even acknowledged the battery “got out of the plan a little bit” during Valdez’s previous start, when he struck out eight across seven scoreless innings.
On Monday, Valdez matched his career high with eight earned runs allowed. Only one had scored before Valdez threw a first-pitch changeup to Nolan Schanuel with one out in the fifth inning, defying all logic and going against any public or proprietary information.
Schanuel is a left-handed hitter. Across his first six starts, Valdez had thrown five changeups to a left-handed hitter. Schanuel sent the sixth off an advertisem*nt along the left field facade, a three-run home run that trimmed Houston’s lead to two.
for more home run content, go to part two 📱#RepTheHalo pic.twitter.com/eiToQERYd0
— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) May 21, 2024
“I was the one who decided to throw that pitch there and obviously paid the consequences,” Valdez said through an interpreter. “We lost the game because of my fault. Made bad pitches, allowed eight runs because of that. It was my fault. I had to pay the consequences there.”
Valdez demanded to answer only four questions following Monday night’s game, leaving Diaz to rationalize his pitcher’s indefensible decision. Diaz surmised, through an interpreter, that “maybe he saw it as, ‘This is a way I can get back into the game plan.’”
“Maybe me as a catcher, I should have forced him more and pushed more to throw certain pitches in certain counts, but at the end of the day, he’s the one who knows how he feels and what pitches he feels comfortable with,” Diaz said.
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Catchers aren’t holding the baseball, so forcing a pitcher to throw anything is difficult. Maldonado didn’t make any of Houston’s hurlers throw any particular pitch, but their implicit trust in him removed most doubt they may have harbored.
Maldonado gained that faith across six seasons in Houston. Eight weeks of the regular season isn’t long enough for Diaz to match it.
“Overall, I think he’s done well. I personally expected there to be challenges along the way, as I would for anybody coming into the major leagues, especially in a role like a catcher,” catching coach Michael Collins said. “I think overall, there’s been learning experiences along the way, but as far as being able to take all this information, be still worried about his offense, worrying about a whole staff now and making adjustments with the pitchers, it’s a daily conversation that we continue to have.
“Obviously there’s still a lot of work to do. What we’re shooting for is — if you call Maldonado outstanding — we’re shooting for that kind of leadership level. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we’re working toward it.”
(Photo of Diaz: Erik Williams / USA Today)
Chandler Rome is a Staff Writer for The Athletic covering the Houston Astros. Before joining The Athletic, he covered the Astros for five years at the Houston Chronicle. He is a graduate of Louisiana State University. Follow Chandler on Twitter @Chandler_Rome
