Joey Bart is off to a hot start with the Pirates. Should the Giants have regrets? (2024)

On Thursday, the official Twitter account of Major League Baseball shared a video. There were 69 replies as of this writing, and a lot of them were from Giants fans. Most of them weren’t very nice to the Giants’ front office.

Joey Bart's hot start with the @Pirates continues!

He's 7-for-20 with 3 HR with Pittsburgh so far. pic.twitter.com/91WlHy5cOn

— MLB (@MLB) April 25, 2024

Joey Bart’s success with the Pirates has the potential to be a thing. It could be a thing for another couple days, another week or another month. It could be a thing for so long, that your kids’ kids will have opinions on it. Shout out to the Cubs fans in their teens and 20s who get upset when they think about Ernie Broglio.

So this is a perfect time to plant a flag. Don’t be shy, share a take. There’s a comment section under this very article. Let’s discuss how the Giants traded former 2018 first-round (second-overall) pick Joey Bart for 2023 eighth-round (227th-overall) pick Austin Strickland, who hasn’t appeared in a minor-league game yet, and now Bart is having a tremendous start to the season. Let’s form opinions and stick by them, even in the face of confusing or contradictory evidence either way.

Was it a mistake for the Giants to trade Joey Bart for a minimal return instead of keeping him around as a backup catcher?

First, some ground rules. I’m not going to try to convince you that Bart’s fast start is a mirage. He had a similarly hot start in 2022, and it’s impossible to ignore the sample sizes here. He’s typically struggled against breaking balls, and he’s seen fewer than 30 of them so far this season. Still, Bart is making great contact, and he’s doing things like this with breaking balls on 0-2 pitches:

That’s strong plate coverage in an 0-2 count. So I’m not going to mewl about data from 2022 on Baseball Savant or anything like that to prove a point. Maybe he’s figuring this stuff out.

But I’m also not going to convince you that Bart has figured this stuff out. The early returns are good, but I wrote a lot of words on the early returns from 2022, complete with embedded videos that supported a narrative I was trying to construct. Bart is doing a great job laying off pitches out of the strike zone this year, but he’s still swinging and missing more than almost every other hitter in baseball. It’s possible to do both and thrive. There are still reasons to be skeptical.

Instead, let’s look at the alternate universe in which Bart is the backup catcher and complement to Patrick Bailey.

In our universe, Bart is out of options. The margin for error there is more forgiving than you might expect. The Giants’ current backup catcher is Tom Murphy, who is 2-for-27 with a below-average defensive reputation, and it’s still not as if the Giants are panicking. Maybe in a month or two they’ll have to revisit the situation if nothing changes, but the slump of a backup catcher is somewhere near “sleep patterns of the bench coach” on a team’s day-to-day concerns. The Giants could have navigated a backup catcher without options, even if he was struggling. They have one now.

In our universe, Patrick Bailey has been excellent. Go to Baseball-Reference’s 2024 Giants page, and at the top are a bunch of mugshots. It’s the Giants ranked in order, from left to right, in order of their Wins Above Replacement this season. Logan Webb is in the top spot, as you might expect, and then there’s Bailey. And that’s even though I’m 98.2-percent sure that WAR isn’t a great way to evaluate catchers. He’s hitting for power, he’s hitting for average, he’s catching the dickens out of the ball, what are we even complaining about? The Giants have a good catcher. If he keeps hitting like this, they might even have a great one. Buster Posey-to-Bailey probably won’t end up like Ted Williams-to-Carl Yastrzemski or Yastrzemski-to-Jim Rice on the all-time succession rankings, but the early returns are a lot of fun.

In the alternate universe, Bart is getting starts against lefties only. That’s probably a good thing for the Giants, as Bailey’s much better as a left-handed hitter, but we don’t know if that’s a good thing for Bart. He’s had reverse platoon splits for his entire career, to the extent that if he hit lefties as well as he hit righties, he probably would have been entrenched as a starter a long time ago. But he’s really struggled against left-handers — he’s hitless against them this season so far — which would have made him an imperfect complement to Bailey.

In the alternate universe, Bart is still feeling trapped in an organization that doesn’t value him as much as he wants to be valued. He would be a backup, full stop, a low-level employee with no prospects for advancement. There would always be the chance of an injury or complete collapse, ghoulish as that might be, but that would be the only way to move up the corporate ladder.

In the alternate universe, Bart isn’t getting starts every other day because he’s hot. In his first game with the Pirates, Bart went 2-for-5 with a homer. That’s the kind of performance that gets a player back in the lineup quickly … unless he’s the clear backup to a (relatively) established starter who’s also doing well. As long as Bailey was hitting, Bart would have been buried.

In our universe, man, you really don’t know what’s going to happen with catchers. It’s not just about the potential for injuries — although it’s also very much about the potential for injuries. It’s about wear and tear, mixing and matching. Bailey had a .904 OPS at the start of July last season, and he had a .503 OPS in the 64 games after that. The conventional wisdom says that he was tired and run down after starting so much, and I buy into that. But you know what would help in a situation like that? Say it in your best Sam Kinison voice: Another catcher you trust.

Bart was overqualified to be a backup catcher, even if he was underqualified to be a starting catcher, if that makes sense. He needed to be in a situation like the one he’s in, with a franchise that can throw spaghetti to the wall and a Joey Bart of their own (Henry Davis, formerfirst-overall pick) still finding his sea legs (pirate joke).

The grand conclusion is this: No matter what happens, there’s no guarantee that it would have been the same with the Giants. If Bart eventually sputters with the Pirates, that doesn’t mean the Giants did the right thing. If he hits 340 homers, makes six All-Star Games and pulls Mike Piazza’s mustache off in a bar fight, that doesn’t mean the Giants did the wrong thing, at least from the perspective of someone considering the available information as of April 2024.

The time to plant this flag was two months ago. From here, it sure looks like making Bart an every-fifth-game starter wouldn’t have done him or the team any favors. He deserved better, and the Giants had an opportunity to add a veteran offense-first, lefty-mashing catcher in Tom Murphy to take 20 percent of the starts when a defensive wizard needed a rest. That offense-first catcher left his dingers in Scottsdale, and he’s hitting -.033 at the moment, but let’s not bury him yet.

The Giants have a catcher doing really well. The Pirates have a catcher doing really well. It could have been a lot different for everyone involved, but I’m almost thinking this has a chance to be the best-case scenario for everyone involved?

There’s a lot that can happen when a catcher gets drafted second overall like Bart. There was once a catcher drafted second overall (1981, January phase — that used to be a thing) who never really established himself. He kicked around, playing for seven teams, and that was that. Except that wasn’t the end of his baseball career. Currently, he manages the San Francisco Giants, a team he played for from 1986-88.

Does this mean that after all this hemming and hawing, Joey Bart might be the manager of the San Francisco Giants in 2060? It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that baseball has to offer. And it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing for Bart to succeed or struggle from here. Plant a flag now, though. Don’t be a phony and stand by your opinion. Mistake or not?

My flag: Probably best for all parties. Also, Austin Strickland is going to finish with 173 career saves, which will really complicate this whole discussion.

(Photo of Bart: Charles LeClaire / USA Today)