One of the things about having a more established team is there are fewer spring training roster battles. Backup catcher isn\u2019t exactly the most glamorous position, especially when backing up one of the league\u2019s more famous iron men, but it is one of the things we have to watch this spring alongside the yearly bullpen battle and the platoon obstacle course in right field. As a reminder, the candidates are:<\/p>\n
Then there are the non-roster invites currently in camp with the Mariners. Two are MiLB journeyman who have been with the Mariners in the past in Bryan O\u2019Keefe and Nick Raposo, and three are homegrown prospects Josh Caron, Connor Charping, and Luke Stevenson. Jakson Reetz, another MiLB journeyman, rounds out this group. This crew is here mostly to catch because catchers make the spring training world go round – and gain experience in the case of the prospects – but there\u2019s an outside outside outside chance O\u2019Keefe, Raposo, or Reetz might have a late-career resurgence. Realistically, though, this is a three-horse race between Knizner, Pereda, and Garver. Given those options, which of the the three is your early spring pick to make the Opening Day roster? Really, what this question asks is: what do you see as the role of a backup catcher, and what traits do you value most in that position?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the things about having a more established team is there are fewer spring training roster battles.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2392],"tags":[5,74226,61593,620,4,619,65,3235],"class_list":{"0":"post-587415","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-mariners","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-community-chat","10":"tag-maillbags","11":"tag-mariners","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-seattle","14":"tag-seattle-mariners","15":"tag-seattlemariners"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116116940578729366","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}