The Atlanta Braves have the luxury of multiple quality options behind the plate.

Most teams follow the model of “a star and a scrub”, where one player gets a majority of the starts with a replacement-level player behind him taking one or maybe two games a week. For example, Philadelphia Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto played in 135 games last season (133 behind the plate), while backup Garrett Stubbs played in 41.

The Braves could absolutely do a time share if they want to, as they have two quality catchers. The question: Is it the best idea for Travis d’Arnaud and Sean Murphy to split time?

Welcome to Braves Today’s Opening Day countdown series! We’ll use the number of days until Opening Day to look at the 2024 Braves roster through a different lens. Today: 74, the number of games that catcher Travis d’Arnaud played in last season.

Baseball is a grind for everyone involved, with 162 games spread across the country during the hottest part of the year.

But it’s doubly so for catchers.

Unlike other positions, a catcher straps on five to ten pounds of gear and then squats in the hot sun for hours, making hundreds of throws back to the pitcher and to the various bases. It’s physically grueling.

We’ve seen some of the best players to ever strap up behind the plate, from old timers like Johnny Bench and Yogi Berra to recent legends like Joe Mauer and Buster Posey, spend time at other positions to either extend their career into their mid-30s or simply because they physically couldn’t play behind the plate anymore.

So splitting time between two quality players makes sense.

Besides, you never know when an injury will make one of those catchers unavailable for an extended period of time. d’Arnaud missed over a month with a concussion early last season, and Murphy started at catcher for 26 of the 28 games Atlanta played during that stretch (and came in during the 8th inning of another one, ultimately playing five innings.)

So you can see how giving one catcher a heavy workload and then losing the other catcher to an injury could leave a team ill-prepared to handle the short-term absence of one of their two backstops.