Bullpen catcher
coaching position in baseball
The bullpen catcher is a member of a baseball team's staff, often a former professional or college player, who catches the ball for relief pitchers warming up before entering a game and starting pitchers before games. A bullpen catcher differentiates from a typical catcher as they are considered a coach and not a player, thus they cannot be behind home plate in an official game.
History
The duties of the bullpen catcher predate the coaching staff position itself. For many decades, it was standard for baseball teams to roster three catchers. The third catcher usually wouldn't see frequent playing time and was primarily responsible for helping pitchers warm up in the bullpen. In the 1980s, teams began to drop the third catcher from their roster in order to free up the spot to add a player considered more valuable. The bullpen catching duties were gradually shifted to a new position on the coaching staff instead of the active roster. Having a member of a team's staff dedicated solely to bullpen catching allowed them to become more specialized in it. This change has been attributed to Major League Baseball's financial rise in the 1980s.
Gary Waits was the first full-time bullpen catcher in Major League Baseball, being hired by the Cincinnati Reds in 1970 and remaining on the staff until 1978.
“Bullpen catcher” enters the record as coaching position in baseball. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bullpen, catcher and coaching can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11334856. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bullpen catcher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.