I was an oversized kid. My first little league baseball coach kept asking me if I wanted to try catching. We already had a kid on the team doing the catching and I believe his name was John Malec. John had a tendency to get lazy back there and he would sometimes sit instead of squat in in his crouch at which point our coach would scream, “Get your damn rump off the ground Malec. If you’re tired go home!”
Young Malec was not alone. That same phrase or words very similar could be heard shouted to boys dressed in oversized catcher’s gear by coaches and parents at thousands of baseball fields across our country. It was against protocol and considered taboo for a catcher to let his buttocks come in contact with the dirt when assuming the catchers’ crouch position to await the next pitch. So every time Coach Aldi would ask me if I wanted to catch, I would quickly say no because I did not want to have anybody yelling at me to keep my rump off the ground.
Now if today’s Beantown Baseball Birthday Celebrant had started his Major League career in 1960 instead of 1980, either John Malec would be walking around with a lot fewer emotional scars or I myself might have even given the tools of ignorance a shot. Why? Because Tony Pena gave every lazy kid catcher an automatic retort to the phrase “Get your damn rump off the ground catcher.”
Pena sat on his rump waiting to receive every pitch thrown to him in 1,950 games during the eighteen-years he spent in the big leagues. That put him in fourth place on the all-time Major League list for most games caught. He wore a Red Sox uniform for 534 of those games.
Boston signed this native Dominican as a free agent after the ’89 season for four years and $9 million. He spent those next four years as Boston’s starting catcher. By then, Pena was no longer the .280 hitter he had been during his early years with the Pirates but he could still handle his responsibilities behind the plate. In fact, he won the AL Gold Glove for catchers during his second season with the Red Sox, in ’91. When his average plummeted into the .180s during the final year of his contract, however, it made the decision to not re-sign him easy for Boston’s front office. He then moved on to Cleveland, where he backed up and mentored Sandy Alomar Jr. for the next three seasons. The five-time All Star retired after the 1997 season with a total of four Gold Gloves, 1,687 career hits and a lifetime average of .260. He is now the highly-respected bench coach for the Yankees.
