MAY 24: Herrera has been reinstated from the injured list. Greiner, who’d apparently been selected as a designated COVID substitute, has been returned to Reno and removed from the 40-man roster.
MAY 19: The D-Backs have selected catcher Grayson Greiner onto the major league roster. Fellow backstop José Herrera has been placed on the COVID-19 injured list in a corresponding move.
Greiner signed a minor league deal with the Snakes during Spring Training. That marked his first experience outside the Tigers’ organization, as he’d spent seven-plus seasons with Detroit since they nabbed him in the third round of the 2014 draft. Greiner tallied 477 big league plate appearances between 2018-21, hitting .201/.274/.309 with nine home runs.
The righty-hitting backstop has spent this season with Triple-A Reno. He’s mashed at a .351/.429/.514 clip through ten games, and he’s now in line for his first MLB action of the season. The Diamondbacks are without Carson Kelly because of an oblique strain, leaving Daulton Varsho as the primary backstop.
Herrera had been Varsho’s backup, but he’ll be out for an indeterminate amount of time. Arizona has also lost Kyle Nelson, Cooper Hummel and Nick Ahmed to the virus list in recent days. Herrera, 25, is hitting .125/.222/.150 through his first 18 MLB games.
Varsho needs to get used to being behind the dish on a regular basis. With Thomas arriving, and Carroll and others waiting in the wings, his outfield days are probably over.
I don’t think it’s so much about his ability to be behind the plate as it is the teams desire to have his speed/bat in the lineup everyday. Something that won’t happen with him as the everyday catcher.
Even if he gets more consistent playing time behind the dish, I don’t know that he’d be hanging up his OF glove.
With limited experience, he’s still one of the better OF defenders on the roster; in the scenario where Thomas and Carroll are both up, Varsho is likely a glove preferred over Smith and Luplow in RF and can double switch between the two positions.
Being able to consistently PH for the C spot is a luxury that many teams don’t have; getting a competent C bat out of the crouch and into another position that’s not at the bottom of the defensive spectrum is a luxury that many teams don’t have; one double switch improving the defense at two positions is a luxury that many teams don’t have. If it’s a role that he can thrive in, then he should be given every opportunity to do exactly that.
All of that being said, most scouts had more confidence in his potential to be a 2B (in spite of never playing there) over a C based on athleticism alone (the same reason the DBacks thought he’d work in CF); if that’s something that he ever wanted to pursue working on in the off season, a decent bat/speed that plays all of C/2B/CF/RF over the course of the season would be the ultimate luxury of depth. That sounds like a poor man’s Biggio; a man can dream.
High heat I think by the end of Varsho’s career, Biggio will be a poor man’s Varsho!
Did you copy and paste that from the other thread?
6’6” 238. That’s a huge bodied catcher.
Good luck to Greiner but he never hit enough with the Tigers
Yet was still one of the top catching free agents out there. The state of catching in todays game is awful.