I’ve had the nail teed up for a while now, but Willson Contreras officially drove it home for me with a pair of swift strokes Tuesday night in San Diego. And while that silver spike is really just an allegory for the young catcher’s ascendance, it may also be the last one in Miguel Montero’s coffin.
Back in January, I wrote that Contreras would probably come up in late 2016 to acclimate to the majors and that the Cubs would put him into a timeshare with Montero in 2017. In retrospect, I still feel pretty good about this analogy:
It’s like a dad taking the training wheels off of his kid’s bike and holding onto the seat while the youngster pumps his legs through those first tentative revolutions before finding his balance and taking off down the street.