NFL
By: Nicholas Mukhar
Who is Joey Bart??? Thirteen seasons ago Buster Posey made his San Francisco Giants debut, seamlessly joining the Giants middle lineup and leading San Francisco to the 2010 World Series championship. Posey won three World Series with the Giants, put together a Hall-of-Fame career, and is now waiting to be enshrined in Cooperstown and take his place among all the other MLB greats. The Giants plan at the time of Posey’s retirement? Bring Joey Bart up from the minor leagues; a top prospect who San Francisco expected to fit in and excel at the big league level as easily as Posey did.
The Joey Bart Experiment
After a lackluster 2022 campaign, Joey Bart was penciled in as the Giants starting catcher for Opening Day 2023. But San Francisco quickly signed veteran catcher Gary Sánchez to a minor league deal as a safety net, which wasn’t exactly a show of confidence in Bart as the everyday Catcher for the Giants. And just over two months into the season, the Giants have called up catchers Blake Sabol and Patrick Bailey from the minor leagues while Bart is back in AAA in a rehab assignment. The emergence of Sabol and Bailey as productive players both with the bay and behind the plate has been a welcomed and surprising revelation for the Giants. With a sudden influx of young catching talent in the Giants’ system, the questions around Bart have become all the more glaring.
Does Joey Bart Have A Future In San Francisco?
Bart’s defense has been serviceable and certainly of Major League quality. His power hitting – a key part of Bart’s game that made him a top minor-league prospect – has been nonexistent recently. He hasn’t hit a homerun in nearly 50 games. And even that wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of his game as a hitter was making up for his homer drought. But Bart has just five doubles during his homer-less stretch and the strikeouts have piled up early in the season. Bart has already struck out over 50 times this season with the Giants’ Major League club, not including the time he’s spent in the minors.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time For Joey Bart
Let’s keep in mind that Joey Bart has only had roughly 500 at-bats in his Major League career. MLB teams usually need a much larger sample size before making a decision on such a prospect like Bart, who was pivotal to the Giants’ long-term plans when he was originally called up to the big league squad. But the issue is not so much if the Giants will run out of patience with their young catcher. It’s more about whether or not San Francisco has roster space to keep him around and hope he develops into a cornerstone catcher.
Blake Sabol and Patrick Bailey are playing too well to be sent back down to the minors. Sabol, in particular, has an impressive seven homeruns in the first two months of the season, and no options left to be sent down to the AAA club. So in order to bring Bart back to the majors, the Giants’ only option would be to carry three catchers on their roster. That’s not something San Francisco is likely to do, because doing so would mean they’d have to shrink the number of pitchers they carry.
Joey Bart does have minor league options remaining, but the Giants can only let him linger in the minors for so long until it starts to kill his confidence. My guess is San Francisco moves on from Bart by waiving or trading, and moves forward with the young talented catchers that have emerged this season.
