Former Texas Tech baseball coach Larry Hays didn’t know how good a player Josh Bard was going to be, let alone that he’d develop into a 10-year Major League catcher, when Bard arrived at Tech.
Neither, apparently, did Bard. He told a banquet audience Friday night he started playing catcher because he “wasn’t good enough to play anywhere else.”
“There was a kid when I was in Little League that got hit by a bunch of foul balls, so he took off his gear and walked off the field,” Bard said. “I was sitting there at shortstop.