Last fall, Ezra Lacina, a Vashon High School class of 2014 graduate, was the assistant head baseball coach at Everett Community College.

And last week, Lacina was the catcher for a bull pen session with Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodger star and last year’s winner of the National League Most Valuable Player award.

What a difference six months can make in a young person’s life.

In a recent article for sports website The Athletic, the Los Angeles Dodgers were ranked second in performance out of 30 major league baseball teams over the past 25 years. The Dodger’s payroll, at over $320 million dollars, is top in the league. And while Ohtani did not pitch last year, he is training this spring to return to the mound.

Baseball requires great nuance and patience, and joining a top team like the Dodgers isn’t easy. Don’t call them. They’ll call you.

Last fall, just after the Dodgers won the World Series, Ezra Lacina got that call.

At Vashon High School, Lacina played catcher for the varsity team coached by the fabled Steve Hall, who Lacina credits as a major inspiration and mentor. Steve’s untimely passing last year had a profound impact on Lacina – not unlike losing a father. In addition to playing baseball and football, during his senior year Lacina fulfilled his service hours requirement by writing numerous articles for The Beachcomber on basketball, fast pitch softball and baseball.

His recruiting profile from that senior year said that his goal was to play baseball at the professional level. Coaching for the Dodgers certainly fulfills that dream.

From Vashon, Lacina had a brief stint at Green River Community College before journeying to Kansas where he played ball at Sterling College and met his wife, Patti. After graduation he transitioned from playing to coaching in 2020. Apparently missing the rain, Lacina returned to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 2020 and worked his way up the coaching ladder at Everett Community College.

His reputation as a coach grew with his development of five catchers who went onto success at Division 1 programs, including two junior college All Americans. He offered a series of private coaching clinics and also ventured into social media with a popular set of videos on catching technique. His work in Everett led to that call last year after the world series ended.

Lacina is now at spring training with the Dodgers in Glendale, Arizona. He is a bullpen catcher and coach, spending about half of each day on the major league side and half with the minor leaguers. Bullpen catchers have a diverse role, from warming up a pitcher before going into a game, to working with pitchers coming back from an injury, to just working with a pitcher on an off-day workout. Importantly, they also coach the Dodger’s catchers.

Lacina summed up the role at the high-level, well-resourced team this way: “The amount and sophistication of instrumentation is phenomenal and the data on every conceivable metric is a game changer. But the bullpen catcher is still a vital part of the evaluation. The catcher sees what the batter sees, and there are a lot of intangibles.”

As the velocity and spin rate of thrown pitches has increased — the average fastball speed in the major leagues is up by more than 4 miles per hour in the last 20 years, and the top speed now can routinely exceed 100 miles per hour — the stress on the human arm is reaching the limit of sustainability. The ligaments and tendons in the elbow can only take so much torque.

The bullpen catcher is a critical component in analyzing the mechanics of the throwing motion and thus improving pitcher longevity. If a starting pitcher in the major leagues throws 35 starts and averages 80 pitches per start, under today’s salaries, that works out to more than ten thousand dollars per pitch.

After spring training season wraps up in early April, Lacina and his family will head to Michigan for the summer season, where he will be coaching for the Great Lakes Loons, a High-A class Dodger affiliate. We’ll be following along this summer — go Loons!

Pat Call — whose dad and brother were successful baseball players — is an occasional sportswriter for The Beachcomber.