Catching on late

Andrean senior catcher Kevin Franchetti is signed to play at Ball State next year.
POST-TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO

June 11, 2009 BY MARK LAZERUS Post-Tribune sports editor

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MERRILLVILLE

He's not delicate. Not particularly brittle or injury prone. Certainly not soft.

But the way Andrean coach Dave Pishkur treats him, you'd think senior catcher Kevin Franchetti was a glass vase, a family heirloom that must be protected at all times. Heck, if he could, Pishkur probably would mummify the poor kid in bubble-wrap.

He's just too darn valuable.

"We really babied him this year," Pishkur says. "If we take a lead that we feel is safe, he's coming out of the ballgame. The other day (at the regional), we were beating Clark 11-0, and a guy comes up and fouls one off Chetti's shoulder. Right there in the middle of the inning, I took him out of the game. We don't even let him catch batting practice. Ever."

As if on cue, right when Pishkur finishes saying that, backup catcher Sam Tornincasa takes a foul ball off his forearm and comes up wincing and rubbing his arm.

"See that? All it takes is one foul ball," Pishkur says. "Here's Sam coming out right now. That's his job -- he's the one that gets beat up."

It's not that Tornincasa is a bad catcher -- far from it. It's just that possibly no catcher in the region, if not the state, can do what Franchetti does behind the plate.

So having him healthy and safe for this Saturday's semistate game against Delta at Kokomo is priority No. 1 for Andrean.

"As many good ballplayers as we have, we know he's the key to our team," Pishkur says. "You take him off the field, the defense is not as good anymore. The pitching staff's not as good anymore. And we need to score more runs now. In one tournament, we were beating Brebeuf 10-0 in the fourth, so we took Chetti out. As soon as we took him out, there's two stolen bases, a wild pitch, a passed ball, and now it's 10-2 and our pitcher's frustrated. It's the Indy 500 -- as soon as Chetti comes out, that's the start of the race, you can start running. It's not a knock on our other catchers. He's just that good. He changes everything."

Of course, Franchetti's defensive prowess is no secret. He's been the 59ers' starting catcher since he was a freshman -- and it was only because of his defense. The guy only got 13 at-bats his freshman year despite playing nearly every game, always bumped from the lineup in favor of a designated hitter.

Perhaps nobody in the region is better at managing his pitchers and keeping them level-headed during a game. Or at blocking balls in the dirt. Or at throwing out would-be base-stealers. Or at widening the strike zone.

"One thing I like is the framework he does," says senior pitcher Adam Norton. "He gets a lot of calls that maybe he shouldn't."

And he gives his pitching staff the confidence to throw any pitch on any count in any situation.

"If you have runners on base and you want to bury a curveball to strike a guy out, you don't need to worry that if you put it in the dirt, it's going to skip away," says Norton, who's been throwing to Franchetti since they were 12. "It's nice to have that feeling."

Or as Pishkur puts it: "It gives the pitchers confidence -- 'We can do whatever we want, because Chetti's behind the plate.'"

But now things are different -- because Franchetti has become just as valuable at the plate as he is behind it. The kid who got just 13 at-bats his freshman year and hit a pedestrian .280 last year suddenly is the 59ers' cleanup hitter. And he is indeed cleaning up, hitting .423 with 42 RBI, 10 doubles and three home runs in 33 games.

"Coach always says at the beginning of the year, 'This is what I'm looking from you this year,' and all these guys have stepped up to those roles," Franchetti says. "And he told me he wanted me to be an RBI guy, so that's what I based everything on, and that's what I worked on."

It plays out the same way so often, Franchetti can rattle it off without taking a breath. Leadoff man Kyle Kovach gets on base. Ryan Dineen gets him over to second base, either by a hit, a bunt or a well-placed groundout. Norton drills a double to score Kovach, and Franchetti promptly drives home Norton from second.

In other words, there haven't been a lot of second innings in which Franchetti led off.

"Not many," he says with a laugh. "Not many."

Franchetti became an elite defensive catcher by working with the likes of coaches Jim Nohos and Paul Wirtz and handling 18-year-old pitchers when he was 12 and 13 in offseason workouts at Dave Griffin's baseball school in Griffith. He credits similar offseason training with his sudden offensive surge.

Pishkur hooked Franchetti up with John Mallee, the Florida Marlins' minor-league batting instructor who works out of the White Sox Academy in Griffith. They got started early, in November and December, and the lessons weren't quite what Franchetti expected at first.

"When you first go to him, you think you're going to be hitting a lot," Franchetti says. "But in my first couple of lessons, I took maybe 20 swings."

Instead, Mallee broke down the swings of big-leaguers such as Joe Mauer, and explained how every little detail -- hand position, footwork, stance -- affects a batter's success. One lesson, he'd work just on Franchetti's hands. The next lesson would be all about his feet. And after each one, Franchetti would go down to his basement and hit off a tee, turning the lessons into muscle memory.

"He's the type of kid where, if you tell him here's what you're bad at and here's what you have to do, he comes back the next week having worked at it and fixed it, asking what's next," Pishkur says. "He's a talented kid, he's a strong kid, and most of all he's a hard-working kid. You put those together and you've got a pretty good ballplayer."

And the scouts have noticed. A big-league scout saw him when Andrean played Naperville at Notre Dame, and the next day at Griffith, four scouts were in the stands. Franchetti has a scholarship waiting for him at Ball State next fall, but is expected to be taken in today's third and final day of the Major League Baseball draft.

They all want him for his defense, of course. But now that he's got the bat to go along with, Pishkur says he's ready -- "A complete player," he says.

"My goal has always been to play Major League Baseball," Franchetti says. "It's exciting, but at the same time it's scary, it's all coming at you so quick. And we're working here for a state championship -- it's not like I'm not doing anything and have nothing else to focus on. But it is exciting."

Contact Mark Lazerus at 648-3140 or mlazerus@post-trib.com. For more on Andrean's remarkable season, visit his blog at blogs.post-trib.com/lazerus