Mike Piazza took a break from reporting at Howard Stern News to sign with the Padres this weekend. He gets a $2M, one-year contract and will replace Ramon Hernandez, last year's starter, who signed a four-year, $27.5M deal with Baltimore, behind the plate.

Piazza says that the team will leave up to him how often he will play catcher. I guess the feel that Piazza's old enough to act as a coach and why not let him fill out the lineup card. Piazza says that he hopes to play about ninety to hundred games behind the plate. With the Padres also picking up career backup Doug Mirabelli, who averages about 50-60 games a year, that seems to make sense behind the plate at least.

The Padres, however, are moving Ryan Klesko back to first base after losing their previous starter, Phil Nevin, and after adding more depth to the outfield. So for Piazza to get 40-odd starts at first, would mean that Klesko would either rest, DH (which Piazza is more likely to do), or displace a corner outfielder, which I guess would mean sitting Dave Roberts (or Brian Giles—as the saying goes, you make the call). I'm fine with that, by all means rest Roberts as much as possible, but it seems like there's goes to have to be a lot of flexibility on the team.

Then there's the issue of Piazza's health behind the plate. It seemed a foregone conclusion at the second half of last season that Piazza would go to the AL and DH regularly, but I guess the opportunity wasn't there. Even though Piazza played 101 games behind the plate last year, only 53.7% of the estimable ESPN polling audience think he will be able to catch 90 this year.

I'm just happy that the rumors were wrong and the Phils aren't adding yet another catcher on the wrong side of 30 to their execrable mix next year. They already have a pair of 34-year-olds in Mike Lieberthal and Sal Fasano plus waiting in the wings are Keith Osik, Ed Ott, Barry Foote, and a Roy Partee in a pear tree. If the signed Piazza and got rid of Lieberthal, that would be fine (if they also had a decent backup). But what would happen is that they would use one of the aging catchers to become an albatross on Ryan Howard's back at first. Charlie ("I need a friggin'") Manuel does not need complications.

So let's assume that the California breezes help Piazza meet his goal of 90-100 games behind the plate—they have to top the breezes from the aptly named Flushing, Queens. I have to ask, what's the big deal? How many games do starting catchers really play anyway?

Well, I looked it up. So far in the 2000s, the average starting catcher has caught just 109.67 games, and that's the second highest average all time for starting catchers, just behind the Seventies (110.76 games).

So, again I say, big deal.

For those who are interested, here are the average games played at each position for all starters across all teams (i.e., the person who played the most games at the given position). I have a table for the current decade (which contains 2005 data now that Sean Lahman's 2005 update is available) and for all-time:

OK, catchers playing just two-thirds of the games makes sense because of the demands of the position. But why have the relatively easy defensive position of left fielder dipped below catchers recently? Could it be that they tend to split time at first and as a DH more often then others? Maybe. And they same may go for right fielders, though first baseman don't seem to lose much time DH'ing given these numbers.

Finally, shortstop have consistently shown up to the most games. The last time they didn't lead all positions was when they were edged by first basemen in the Thirties. Oddly, in major-league baseball's first decade (the 1870s), shortstops cam in third (with 80.82% games played) behind left fielders (83.11%) and pitchers (81.95%), two of the worst positions for games played now.