Under normal circumstances, in the playoffs, your backup catcher is your emergency catcher. The second catcher is your emergency catcher because he’s only going to play if Jorge Posada suffers an injury. That’s the only reason the second catcher is a necessary addition to the roster. So, if Jorge Posada is going to be the starting catcher in every game, Jose Molina is not really your “backup” catcher so much as he’s really your “emergency” catcher.

Now, leaving aside the question of whether we like the decision to have Molina start games with Burnett and just acknowledging that this is the current state of affairs… In those games that Molina starts, he is almost assuredly not going to play 9 innings. Unless there’s a crazy blowout, Molina will be lifted so that Posada can hit, and then take over at catcher, as soon as Burnett is lifted from the game. So, when this situation, which is almost a certainty, arises, you have Molina out of the game, Posada in the game, and you have NO backup/emergency catcher, by design. If Posada gets hurt, you have Jerry Hairston, who has never caught a pitch in MLB, as your catcher. This is why you need Cervelli on the roster. For one and maybe two games in the ALDS, without Cervelli on the roster, you’d be leaving your team, by design, vulnerable to a situation in which they don’t have a backup catcher to come in to the game in case of emergency. That is, frankly, unacceptable. A roster constructed with such an obvious and dangerous deficiency, for the sake of carrying Freddy Guzman (FREDDY GUZMAN!) on the roster as a pinch-runner, would be the absolute height of folly.

Taking this a step further… Since Posada probably wouldn’t even enter a game started by Molina that’s a crazy blowout, you’re looking at a scenario in which any game started by Molina in which Posada takes over for Molina is going to be a game the Yankees are either leading or trailing by a reasonably surmountable margin, or even a tie. So the only games in which Cervelli even becomes an option are going to be relatively close games. If you don’t carry Cervelli you are, again, by design, deciding to risk having no catchers available in a close game… You’re willing to risk what is most likely to be a relatively close playoff game on the catching ability of Jerry Hairston. Totally unacceptable.

Once the decision was made to start Molina with Burnett, Cervelli became a necessity on the roster. I don’t like it, I wish the Yankees never got into a situation in which they felt compelled to give postseason starts to Jose Molina. Now, if you want to argue that they should carry one less pitcher and carry Guzman in that pitcher’s stead, that’s a different conversation. But once they put themselves in this position and made the decision to start Molina and to carry 11 pitchers, the addition of Cervelli to the roster was a foregone conclusion.

That’s just not true. There has been plenty of evidence tossed around here the last few days supporting that Molina would decrease AJ’s runs against.