Note: I had this written earlier this week, and now it feels like a great follow-up to Paul Articulates Offensive Catchers article posted on Thursday.
So as we watch our current catching tandem of Messrs McCann
and Nido, there is a lot of complaining about production. Well, I say, get in line behind a lot of
Mets fans over the last 60 years.
While I have not looked at the other positions in any detail, the 101 catchers the Mets have employed over the years have had rather underwhelming results as a whole. I am not even going to get into their hitting statistics. As most of you are probably aware, I don’t like the WAR measurement, but I’m going with it for the purposes of this piece.
All good Mets fans can probably name the Mets top 5 catchers in their history.
The top 5 in games played (as a catcher) and top 5 in cumulative Baseball Reference Wins Above Replacement as members of the Mets are both the same set of names, although in a slightly different order.
Mike Piazza is the WAR leader as a Met compiling 24.7 WAR while donning the orange and blue. His 826 games caught are second behind Jerry Grote’s 1176. Grote is in third place in WAR with his cumulative 14.6.
In third place in games caught and fifth place in WAR is Todd Hundley with 745 and 9.2, respectively. John Stearns owns the second place slot in WAR with 19.6 for his 698 games caught, while Gary Carter is in the top 5 list of both categories with 566 games caught (5th) and 11.3 WAR (4th).
I will skip over number six in both categories for now and
move on and group the remainder of the 101 together into a category called “the
not many special catchers used by the Mets over their history”.
The Mets have had more catchers with total Mets WAR less than 0.0 (48) than with total WAR greater than 0.0 (46). The other seven accumulated exactly 0.0.
The greatest number of games caught with the Mets while racking up zero WAR was Mike Fitzgerald’s 115.
12 of the 48 with negative WAR caught more than 50 games, including the 106 games caught last year by James McCann netting him -0.2 WAR.
Of the 101 catchers used by the Mets, only 5 of them were able to have a Mets career of at least three years and not incur a year of negative WAR.
- Jesse Gonder caught in 161 games between 1963 and 1965 and had annual WAR of 0.4, 1.4, and 0.1, mainly as the backup to Chris Cannizzaro whose low WAR for his four years at Shea was 0.3. (his high was 1.6, the same year that Gonder had 1.4).
- The other three were more recent. Mike Piazza’s eight years of positive WAR started with his high of 5.4 in 1998 and ended with his low of 0.1 in 2005 (while catching in 101 games).
- Ramon Castro took over where Piazza left off starting in 2005 and maintaining positive WAR through 2009 as the backup catcher averaging about 50 games a year.
- The fifth and most recent catcher to avoid the negative was Kevin Plawecki from 2015 through 2018, although he did finish at 0.0 in 2016.
Yes, even four of the Top 5 catchers managed to accrue a year of negative WAR while donning the gear for the Mets.
How long do the Mets keep catchers? There are no Yadier Molina’s here
accumulating a lot of games. It surprised
me to find Josh Thole with the ninth-most games caught with 279 games. Travis d’Arnaud is #7 (378) and MackeySasser rounds out the top 10.
Before I get into #6 and 8 on both lists, finishing off the top 10 in WAR are #7 is the aforementioned Chris Cannizzaro with 3.4, number 9 is Plawecki with 2.8 and tied for tenth with just 2.6 WAR are Todd Pratt, Vance Wilson, and Paul LoDuca.
Now numbers 6 and 8 on both lists are two of my all time favorite Mets. They don’t make back-up catchers like Ron Hodges and Duffy Dyer these days.
Ron Hodges (#42 to me) had a 12 year career from 1973 through 1984 catching in 446 games and accumulating 6.1 WAR while only dipping into the negative one year (his second year in 1974). He backed up Grote and Stearns most of his career, but led the team in 1983 catching in 96 games. As far as Mets back-up catchers go, Hodges topped the list and it really isn’t close.
Duffy Dyer is the next best and was the backup catcher to Jerry Grote on both of the first two World Series teams in 1969 and 1973. He was actually the ‘starting’ catcher (defined as catching in more games than any other catcher) in 1972 with 91 games caught. His Mets career spanned the end of 1968 through 1974, catching in 326 games generating 3.4 WAR.
Ah, to have a catcher like Hodges around now would be a luxury. Ten straight years (and 11 of 12) of not great, but positive WAR. And a lefty bat to as a bonus.
This has rambled a bit long but you can probably catch my point. . the Mets have not been a hot bed of catching talent over the years. Only 7 of the 60 years have produced a 4.0 or greater WAR from anyone behind the plate. We are not experiencing anything new in 2022.
Finishing up with a last fast fact - it doesn't say much when two of the top five catchers in Mets history don the cap of another team on their Baseball-Reference page.
If anyone is interested in more catching stats or the list of everyone that has caught for the Mets , I can provide much more with the research I have done. Some of the names brought back some memories!
I became convinced that the Mets felt so badly burned by the Chilcott disaster that they avoided high draft picks of catchers ever after. They did pick Plawecki in the Comp round. To me, his career has been a disappointment.
ReplyDeleteYou draft in the 8th round, most times you get nothing, occasionally you get a Nido, rarely you get....a Megill.