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Maybe Austin Bossart isn’t what we think he is. Maybe there’s something we’re missing in the evaluation of the Williamsport Crosscutters’ catcher as a baseball prospect.
The intangibles Bossart brings to the baseball field have overshadowed who he is, or was, as a draft prospect and as a back-up catcher on the team which will finish with the best record in the New York-Penn League by a wide margin. But listening to the pitchers he catches and his manager talk about him Sunday night following a 2-1 win over State College, it’s clear to see maybe the evaluations of Bossart haven’t delved deeply enough into what’s important.
We get lost far too often in numbers and forget to listen to the people who are most impacted by how Bossart plays the game. There was a reverence with which Kenny Koplove and Rob Tasin spoke when talking about the Penn graduate following Sunday’s game. Williamsport getting seemingly every pitch it needed at the right moment to get double play after double play, and groundout after groundout wasn’t an accident.
Crosscutters pitchers all season have raved about how Bossart calls a game behind the plate. The staff has talked about how it’s taken the thinking process out of the game for them because they can just trust whatever pitch Bossart throws down as being the right pitch.
“You know he knows what he’s doing and he’s been having success the whole time doing it,” Koplove said. “Unless someone feels really confident in a different pitch, you’re probably not going to shake him off. He’s a smart kid, but an even smarter baseball player.”
So this led me to think Sunday night during the 90-minute drive home from State College that maybe I’ve been approaching my personal evaluation of Bossart all wrong. For most of the season, I’ve put Bossart’s ceiling as an organizational catcher, a guy who can hang around the Phillies organization likely as long as he wants because of how strong he is defensively.
As a 14th-round draft pick and a senior in college, the Phillies’ selection of Bossart is as much about taking a flyer on a guy who has a certain skill as it is about anything else. And for one season, a short season, Bossart has made the Phillies look like they made a good decision.
He finishes the season as the Crosscutters’ leading hitter, and only one player in Crosscutters’ history has finished with a higher batting average than Bossart’s .333 mark, and that is 7-year Major League veteran Nyjer Morgan, who hit .343 for the Cutters in 2003.
Bossart is never going to ‘Wow’ any talent evaluator with his bat. He doesn’t hit prodigious home runs – he’s got one this year in Williamsport – whether in games or in batting practice.
But what he does possess is a short, quick swing in which the bat stays through the hitting zone for a long time. He has a knack for finding the barrel, and his rounds of batting practice are as impressive as anyone else’s on the team because of how often he hits line drive rockets toward the gap.
That all shows in his .333 average this year. That shows in the 18-game hitting streak he went on this year, the best in the New York-Penn League this year. There is an argument that’s all moot because he didn’t draw a walk this year in 146 plate appearances, but it’s not as if he’s a free swinger. Bossart works counts, fouls off pitches, and puts himself in optimal positions to be successful.
“He’s a tough out. You know you’re going to get a good at-bat from him about 90 percent of the time regardless of whether he gets a hit or not,” Cutters manager Pat Borders said. “A lot of his hits are not cheap hits either. He hits it really hard. If he can hit and keeps calling a game like he does, the sky is the limit for him.”
What Bossart has done with the bat has been a nice addition to his work behind the plate. It’s been a carry-over of what he did at Penn this year where he was the co-Ivy League Player of the Year.
But Bossart is going to make his money in this game going forward with what he does behind the plate. And judging by the way his pitchers rave about him, he’s quickly ascending to one of the best defensive catchers in a Phillies minor league system which is all of a sudden littered with quality catching prospects.
“Catcher is the toughest position, in my opinion, in any sport,” Cutters closer Rob Tasin said. “He goes out there daily and grinds it out behind the plate. What he does behind the plate he doesn’t bring to his at-bats, and vice versa. We feel like we like we can go talk to him about anything. When we’re on the mound, he knows every pitcher’s personality. He relates to us in a way that is going to help us through each outing.”
Bossart has been the Cutters’ everyday catcher for a month now since Gregori Rivero went down with an arm injury that has ended his season. He’ll be the everyday catcher when the Cutters open the New York-Penn League playoffs Wednesday.
He wasn’t voted the team’s MVP by the players and coaches, but it’d be quite easy to make the argument for him. His offensive season is one of the best ever for a Cutters’ catcher, and he’s been as good defensively as anyone not named Deivi Grullon.
It’s probably easy to dismiss Bossart as nothing more than organizational filler, but it may just be a disservice to do that at this point. He’s a player who’s going to have real value in the system for as long as he wants to play.
Mitch Rupert covers the Williamsport Crosscutters for the Sun-Gazette. He can be reached at 326-1551, ext. 3129, or by email at mrupert@sungazette.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Mitch_Rupert.