Catcher Luis Campusano impresses Padres teammates, coaches with his work
Padres catcher made his MLB debut with a bang nearly four years ago but just made his 70th big-league start on Tuesday Padres catcher Luis Campusano has impressed his teammates, coaches, and manager, Kyle Higashioka, with his strong performance. Despite starting 70 games in his career, Campusano, who has started 70 games since his rookieing, has improved significantly. Over his past 105 plate appearances, dating to Aug. 29, he is batting.376/.400/.554 with six doubles and four home runs. He has had multiple hits in four of his seven games this season, and his seven RBIs are tied with Jake Cronenworth for the team lead. Campusano's progress is evident, despite some early struggles due to injury and inexperience. Despite these setbacks, he has shown promise to become a major-league catcher.
Published : a month ago by Kevin Acee in Sports
Padres catcher Luis Campusano walks with pitcher Yu Darvish to the dugout before Tuesday’s game against the Cardinals at Petco Park.
He lined the first pitch of his fourth plate appearance the other way, off the top of and then over the right field wall, then jogged around the bases having collected his first big-league hit.
It seems like a long time ago.
He has started 70 games since.
“That’s nothing,” backup catcher Kyle Higashioka said after his eyes went wide upon learning just how young in his career Campusano is.
Higashioka is learning Campusano the same way hitting coach Victor Rodriguez is and how catchers coach Brian Esposito did last year and manager Mike Shildt did over the previous two seasons.
There were no preconceived notions or expectations.
“I’ll tell you something about that kid,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t know him that long. But everything that he does is with a purpose. He wants to be a good player. Not just hitting, but the catching. The whole game, he wants to be good, and he works hard.”
That is the overwhelming accord.
“If the lights are turned on in the building, he’ll be there to do something,” Esposito said. “And that’s just why we’re starting to see the fruits of that, because he’s smart and he’s a hard worker, and he really wants to be good.”
After all the starts and stops due to injury and inexperience and the perception by some that he was inept, Campusano is signaling that he is becoming what many in the Padres organization envisioned when they made him the first catcher selected in the 2017 draft.
Over his past 105 plate appearances, dating to Aug. 29, Campusano is batting .376/.400/.554 with six doubles and four home runs. He has had multiple hits in four of his seven games this season, is batting .400/.400/.600 with three doubles and a home run in 30 plate appearances, and his seven RBIs are tied with Jake Cronenworth for the team lead.
Campusano’s improvement behind the plate is obvious, even if there are disparate opinions inside the organization on how bad it was to begin with — or even how fair it is to assess where he was two and three years ago.
Much of that has been documented. It doesn’t need to be rehashed now, in part because like that debut, the struggles seem like a part of the distant past.
There were some ugly moments along the way, to be sure. Campusano was not ready when an Austin Nola injury caused the Padres to rush him to the big leagues in 2021, and there were some veteran pitchers on that team who did not feel comfortable with him behind the plate.
Bob Melvin, a former catcher who demands a lot of his catchers, hardly played Campusano after arriving in 2022.
There were also multiple injury interruptions, including wrist surgery last April.
But for as long as it has seemed to take, here he is at 25 years old, having grown into a solid big-league catcher and with multiple indicators that he intends to be even more than that.
Last season, 23 teams had a catcher start the majority of their games. Just four were younger than Campusano.
“Experience is a huge thing for catching,” said Higashioka, who started 201 games over the past three seasons for the Yankees after making his MLB debut at age 26 in 2017. “You don’t get experience unless you play at this level. Every chance that you have and every time you fail, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate: ‘What do I need to do better and how do I get to the level that I want to be at?’ Sometimes it just takes a few times of trial and error to kind of dial those things in.”
Campusano, naturally reserved and quiet, has been strikingly intentional the past two years about engaging with pitchers. He has become a voracious consumer of information. He spent the past two offseasons in San Diego, working with pitchers and Esposito and other coaches. His second address might as well be the batting cage beneath the stands at Petco Park. That or the weight room adjacent to the clubhouse.
“He’s done a tremendous job of just owning his career at this particular point,” Esposito said. “I don’t know what it looked like before me coming around. I’ve heard everything just like everybody else has, so I just didn’t have any judgment on what he was about. It was just a matter of like, ‘Hey, how can you and I partner in this? I can help lead you in that direction for right now. But at some point, the ownership of this is going to be transferred over to you.’ … He has really embraced that. He’s super smart, and he’s an incredible worker.”
Shildt notes that Campusano is a constant questioner — at their offseason dinners, throughout spring training and before and during games.
“There’s a curiosity,” Shildt said. “... He always wants to know — not questioning like, ‘I don’t agree.’ But like, ‘What did this player do? What is your experience with that?’ It’s real sincere. … We initially had a connection, the connection being he’s a good dude. He’s a genuine person. He’s unassuming, he is who he is. And the guy loves the game, and he wants to be great.”
Shildt managed Yadier Molina in St. Louis, and Campusano has quizzed him about this generation’s premier catcher.
“(Some) people will talk, talk about things and that’s great,” Shildt said. “And then he goes and works on things. … I’ve shared some things about my observations about catchers, their work, etc. Next thing you know, he goes and does it.”
Campusano talked last year during his late-season emergence — a stretch that included him starting 16 times in a span of 24 games and catching three games in a row for the first time in his career — about the biggest difference being more comfortable and confident the more he played.
“Oh, it’s a lot different,” he said this week. “It’s like, coming up, you’re just trying to find your comfort. Over the course of time you kind of just find yourself and know yourself and you know what you need to get done in order to play at the highest level. For me, as a catcher, it’s a lot of the game planning, getting with pitchers, making sure that I get my early (batting practice) in and I get my weights in. So there’s a lot on the plate, but I’m someone who wants a lot on my plate. Because I can handle it.”
Topics: San Diego Padres