Is Adams becoming Corbin's personal catcher?

DENVER – There may be no more tried-and-true axiom in baseball than the one that stipulates a team’s No. 2 catcher will almost always start a day game after a night game. Managers don’t want to run their starting catchers into the ground, so they summon their backups to work anytime there’s a quick turnaround from one game to the next.

And for the better part of the season’s first month, that’s exactly how Davey Martinez has used Riley Adams. Five of Adams’ first seven starts behind the plate came in day games that followed night games. The lone exceptions: April 9 (a Saturday night game) against the Mets and April 19 (the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Diamondbacks).

Then on Wednesday night came a new twist: Adams started a night game following another night game, in advance of a day game. Why? Because Patrick Corbin was pitching, and right now it seems that will dictate Adams’ playing schedule more than anything else.

“They work well together,” manager Davey Martinez said prior to Wednesday’s game. “Patrick feels comfortable throwing to him, and he’s actually done well catching him. So another good opportunity for them to work together. And if it does work out well, we may have to leave him catching Corbin, if Corbin feels comfortable throwing to him, which I know he does. We’ll see how that plays out, but I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

After Corbin went eight innings allowing three earned runs and throwing only 94 pitches Wednesday night against the Rockies, Martinez may have no choice but to keep pairing up the two batterymates.

Adams has now caught Corbin three times this season, and coincidence or not, they’ve been the left-hander’s three best starts to date: April 17 at Pittsburgh, April 28 vs. Miami and Wednesday night at Colorado. Add a solid outing the one time they worked together late in 2021, and Corbin’s ERA pitching to Adams is now a sparkling 2.81. (For comparison’s sake, Corbin’s ERA in six career starts working with Keibert Ruiz is 7.96.)

“I feel like I’ve been throwing to him for a lot longer now,” Corbin said. “Just the way he mixes things up, it seems like we’re on the same page a lot. It’s fun when you’re out there, things are clicking and you’re getting easy outs. It makes things a little easier for me.”

Sometimes, there’s no specific reason why a pitcher enjoys more success working with a particular catcher over another. In this game, Martinez did specify that Adams gives Corbin “a bigger target” than Ruiz, based strictly on his physical size.

Corbin cited Adams’ game-calling skills, which appear to pair up with his own ideas quite well.

“He’s pretty smart back there,” the left-hander said. “He knows the hitters, he knows the pitchers. I think he’s done a good job just mixing up my pitches, using changeups, pitching inside, things like that. I don’t know if there’s one reason, but he works hard at a lot of things, so it’s easy to see why he’s been good back there.”

So now this begs the question: Is Adams going to be Corbin’s personal catcher? Martinez generally doesn’t like to make such designations, but it’s hard to ignore the difference in Corbin’s performance when Adams catches him.

And there is some precedent for such an arrangement. From 2019-20, Yan Gomes caught all 44 of Corbin’s regular season starts because the two worked well together.

So perhaps that assignment now belongs to Adams.

“We’ll see what happens five days from now,” Martinez said, “but I kind of liked what I saw out of both of them today.”