By Nathan Rode
National Supervisor

High school catchers are one of the riskiest demographics in the draft. It’s a very demanding position with the wear and tear it brings physically and the mentality needed to run a pitching staff. In conversations about catching prospects, it got me thinking, where do big league catchers come from? Without looking at any data, I would have guessed that most come out of the college or international ranks and high school picks are less common.

The numbers suggest otherwise. Using Baseball Reference’s player index, I ran a query to find players that caught 100 or more games in a season from 2006-2015—the last 10 seasons. There were 67 that fell under those parameters, totaling 195 individual seasons. Where did they come from?

College	High School	International	Junior College	NDFA
22	20	16	6	3