A’s ask Suzuki to train his potential replacement

It is easy to talk about being a team player, taking one for the club, just wanting to help the organization win and all the other cliches that baseball players tend to spray around like so many sunflower seed shells.

It is harder to walk the walk and do it ramrod straight when your ego and job are on the line.

Which is why you have to appreciate the approach taken by Oakland A’s catcher Kurt Suzuki this week.

Mired in a prolonged hitting slump that has seen his average hover around .215, Suzuki was told Thursday that the A’s not only brought up Derek Norris, their ballyhooed "catcher of the future," from AAA, but plan to have the two of them alternate behind the plate. Then, they told Suzuki to take a seat while Norris started.

"The catcher of the present and the guy who is potentially your catcher of the future have to coexist," Oakland manager Bob Melvin told Bay Area media. "It’s different, but we feel as an organization, this is what we’re best suited for right now."

If you’re making $5 million in the third year of a four-year contract that escalates to $6.45 million next season and the team that invented "Moneyball" wants you to share time with somebody making the league minimum of $480,000, it doesn’t require 20/20 vision to see where this could be headed.

If you’re 28, haven’t hit a home run since last season and the guy they want you to divide time with is just 23, well, there aren’t a lot of conclusions to jump to.

Bridges to jump from, yes.

Especially if you recall how swiftly the team dispatched Kila Ka’aihue, ostensibly their starting first baseman, earlier this month.

Of course, Suzuki has seen the understudy-turned-starter story before. Five years ago the Baldwin High graduate was the "future" and was brought up to Oakland to work alongside veteran Jason Kendall. A month later, long enough to demonstrate his reliability, Suzuki suddenly became the present and Kendall was packed off to the Chicago Cubs.

That was ages — and lots of physical punishment — ago for somebody who has been behind the plate an average of 132 games a year over the past four full seasons, among the most by a catcher in either league, and has been on track to do so again, injured left hand or not.

Instead of going MMA on the clubhouse water cooler, grousing in the locker room or issuing play-me-or-trade-me ultimatums, Suzuki did something else. He sat down with Norris, mentor to understudy. Not to issue a warning or play with his head, either.

Instead, it is reported, Suzuki offered to provide any insight the rookie might need. Then, sfgate.com reported Norris said Suzuki told him, "Go get ’em."

Suzuki also pledged to redouble his may-the-best-man-win efforts and raise his production to help Oakland win.

"I’m not thinking of this as a death sentence," Suzuki told sfgate.com. "There is nothing I want to do more than perform well for the Oakland A’s. It sucks. I haven’t been performing the way that I can, but I’ve been working on some things and I feel like I’m getting close to getting there."

While it remains to be seen if he will indeed boost his hitting to a higher level, by his actions, Suzuki is demonstrating he is still very much major league.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.