What Should the Red Sox Do with Jason Varitek?

The Boston Red Sox are going to have one tough decision this off-season as to what to do with catcher Jason Varitek. His declining skills at the plate are obvious and his age is against him, but he has been the heart and soul of the team for some years now and a fan favorite. Come contract time, since Varitek is going to be a free agent, Boston will have to decide whether to basically pay Varitek for what he has done and meant to the club for the past few years or to let him walk out the door.

Varitek's numbers this year are more in line with a defensive catching specialist than with the decent offensive player he has been in the past. Jason has only 32 runs batted in to go with 8 home runs, on pace to have his worst season by far with the bat. His batting average is one of the lowest in the American League at .218 and he has struck out an alarming 86 times in 298 at-bats. His bat speed appears to have slowed significantly and he has bounced into a total of ten double plays. Yet behind the plate he still more than holds his own defensively, throwing out over a quarter of the runners that attempt to steal on him and committing just four errors, with only two passed balls all year.

There are opposing forces at work here, two in Varitek's favor but two strongly against him. On the plus side is there are no great catchers available, as there are very few elite hitting catchers now in the game. The Yankees were lauded for trading Kyle Farnsworth for Ivan Rodriguez, yet he has numbers similar to Varitek's at this point in the 2008 campaign. The highest RBI total for any catcher right now belongs to the Braves' Brian McCann at 63, with only two others with as many as 60. A replacement for Varitek's ailing bat is simply not there and help from the farm system is not on the way anytime soon..

Also working in Jason's favor is the fact that the Red Sox have traded away Hall of Fame headache Manny Ramirez, meaning they won't be picking up his option for 2009, which was twenty million dollars. This money now freed up could come Varitek's way and make it a little less painful for Boston's brass to sign the catcher.

Varitek's age is not at all in his favor. Born in 1972, Jason will be 37 next April, meaning a multi-year contract will have to be paid out for a man who will more than likely be 39 or 40 years old by its end. Catching is by far the most physically demanding position in all of baseball; Varitek has not appeared in more than 137 games since 2004. Do the Red Sox want to tie up that type of money in a player this old whose skills are clearly on the wane? In the past they have been able to let popular players like Johnny Damon and Kevin Millar go.

But what may be the biggest wrench in Varitek's plan for one more big payday is in the Bronx, where Jorge Posada was in a similar situation last year. A free agent to be, Posada was actually coming off one of his best years ever, but was still going to be 36 years old in 2008. The Yankees ponied up and signed him to a multi-year deal for big bucks. Posada has responded by spending the vast majority of 2008 on the disabled list and now faces season ending surgery on his throwing arm's shoulder. He has been able to catch in just 30 games all year and this signing now looks like an albatross around New York's neck in the years to come. Yet had it not been done, Yankee fans would have screamed bloody murder.

Boston General Manager Theo Epstein now faces a very similar dilemma with Varitek, one that he certainly does not look forward to. How it plays out only time will tell, but I have a feeling that Jason is going to get his money from the Red Sox and then have a very hard time earning it statistically, but his intangibles will make the contract more easy to swallow, as his leadership skills in the clubhouse and on the field have never been called into question.