With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.
Today we are looking at catcher Tucker Barnhart.
It says Tucker Barnhart…
But have you ever considered…
Bucker Tarnhart?
It has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?
Bucker Tarnhart sounds like the name of a hobbit, someone who attended Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday party and drank beer and ate and had
a merry old time before diving under the table when the dragon fireworks went off.
Just like every team needs more than five starting pitchers to make it through the season, every team needs more than two catchers to make it through the season. Catchers get banged up, they hurt things, they start just not playing well. They go on paternity or bereavement leave.
And when that happens, a team is going to summon a catcher up from AAA to fill in. Sometimes the filling in is just for a day or two. Sometimes it is for a week or ten days. Sometimes it is multiple weeks. You never know with these catchers. You might even have a situation where the catcher called up from AAA to replace the unavailable catcher temporarily gets hurt, and then you have to find a fill-in for the fill-in.
So if you are a catcher with a modicum of ability, you can hang around for a long time. Not necessarily in the majors, of course. At least, not for a full season, or necessarily even if a definitive period of time. But every team needs a lot of catchers to catch pitchers in spring training, and every team needs players at AAA who, if not exactly capable, are not so inept that they can’t be called upon to be a band-aid for a bit in the bigs.
Which brings us to Tucker Barnhart. Barnhart was, once upon a time, a starting catcher. He was the Reds’ regular catcher from 2016 through 2021, won a couple of Gold Gloves, had a random 3.6 bWAR season fueled by a National League leading 3.1 dWAR, never had a bWAR as high as 1.0 in a season otherwise.
After catching 116 major league games for the Reds in 2021, he was traded to the Detroit Tigers after the season, with the Tigers picking up the $7.5 million club option for 2022 that the Reds were passing on. I remember there being carping from certain circles when that happened, the Reds being ripped for being cheap and just dumping salary, but, well, its Tucker Barnhart we are talking about. Not wanting to have to pay a 31 year old Tucker Barnhart $7.5 million to play for you in the year of 2 thousand and 22 seemed fairly reasonable at the time.
Barnhart promptly put up a 554 OPS in 94 games for the Tigers, went to the Cubs for 2023, only played 43 games, and saw his OPS drop to 541. Games played and OPS dropped again in 2024, with the D-backs, to 31 and 497, respectively.
So last year, Texas brought him to camp, and he was sent to Round Rock to be the catcher behind the glass that you break in case of emergency. Emergency struck at the end of April, when Kyle Higashioka’s hamstring issue necessitated getting a functional catcher on the active roster. Barnhart managed to stick around until the end of May, even once Higashioka and Jonah Heim were both healthy, though he only played in eight games — three as the starting catcher, four as a mid-game replacement at catcher, and one as a relief pitcher.
Barnhart was DFA’d at the beginning of June when Nathan Eovaldi’s injury resulting in Codi Heuer being summoned, with Barnhart being the 40 man roster casualty. He was released, re-signed, spent June in Round Rock, and then retired. His final season in the majors saw him slash .231/.333/.231 in 15 plate appearances.
Given that inoffensive veteran catchers are always needed for the purpose of stashing in the minors, Barnhart could have hung around a while longer, I imagine. However, per B-R, he has earned over $30 million in his major league playing career. I can see why a guy who was a regular for a number of years, who made a lot of money in his career, and who is playing out the string might decide going home and spending time with his family was preferable to trying to hang on as a AAA journeyman.
Previously:
