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1960s Catchers

By Bill James

February 12, 2012

There is no Hall of Fame catcher from the 1960s, unless you count Yogi Berra, who played into the 1960s but was no longer a great player, or Johnny Bench, who came up in late 1967 and was the best catcher in the game the moment he hit the field, but who didn’t start winning MVP Awards until 1970. There were, however, a number of Hall-of-Yeah-He-Was-Pretty-Good catchers, and I have always wondered how they compared one to another. . .John Roseboro against Tom Haller, Earl Battey against Elston Howard, Tim McCarver against Bill Freehan. I count twelve catchers in the decade worthy of study—the six above plus Johnny Edwards, Clay Dalrymple, Buck Rodgers, Joe Torre, Johnny Romano and Randy Hundley. I thought maybe it would be fun to do a Win Shares/Loss Shares comparison of them. Here’s how I would rate those twelve catchers:

12. Buck Rodgers.

Rodgers signed with Detroit as a 17-year-old in 1956, hit pretty well in the low minors but stalled out in the high minors. The Angels selected him in the expansion draft and resurrected his career. He had a good minor league season in 1961, the Angels’ first year, joined the big club late in the season and hit .321 in a sixteen-game trial, driving in 13 runs although it could be noted that he had 3 errors, grounded into 3 double plays and drew only one walk. In any case he started the 1962 season as the Angels’ catcher and caught 150 games for them in 1962, hitting a respectable .256.

We rarely heard him called "Buck" back then; he was always called Bob Rodgers while he was playing, changed it to "Buck", which is what he was called by friends, after he became a manager. Anyway, I always thought Rodgers was better than I guess he really was, I suppose because he made such a strong first impression in 1961-62, when his unusual playing time gave him good counting numbers. He never hit .250 after the 1962 season, had little power, didn’t walk and was 17-for-44 as a base stealer. He was a good defensive catcher, but then all of these guys were; among the twelve catchers here Rodgers ranks last in offensive winning percentage (.300) and tenth in defensive winning percentage (.702).

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11. Randy Hundley

In 1960 the "weak" organizations had basically no player development systems to speak of, and lived almost entirely off of the droppings of the strong organizations. Farm systems started about 1920; by 1940 the Cardinals, Yankees, and Indians had good farm systems, by 1950 the Dodgers, Red Sox, Giants, White Sox, Tigers, Phillies and Braves had pretty decent systems, and by 1960 the Reds, Orioles, Pirates and Twins (the 1950s Senators) had player development operations. But the Cubs, Kansas City A’s and the 1960s expansion teams lived mostly off the throwaway talent from the stronger organizations, although the Cubs did have a little spurt 1960-1962 when they produced three Hall of Famers in three years (Williams, Santo and Brock).

Anyway, Hundley—like Rodgers—was one of those "extra" players; the Giants signed him out of high school and he had a big year at El Paso in 1963, although El Paso was a place that had always had crazy hitting numbers. When he hit .217 at Triple-A in 1964 the Giants traded him to the Cubs (with Bill Hands) for a couple of spare parts.

As with Rodgers, I thought he was better than I guess he really was. He stopped the running game pretty well, stayed in the lineup and hit some homers. His on base percentages were usually under .300. He ranks 3^rd among these 12 catchers defensively, but 11^th as a hitter and 11^th overall.

10. Clay Dalrymple

Rodgers and Hundley signed out of high school. Most of these other guys were college players. Dalrymple attended Chico State University in California; he was, among other things, the heavyweight boxing champion of the Far Western Conference. He signed with an independent minor league operation, went to Amarillo in the Western League, had a good year there, was purchased by a AAA team and hit a solid .191 in 1958. He wasn’t much better in 1959, but the Braves, who had a working agreement with the minor league team, invited him to spring training, based on his defensive skills, and the Phillies drafted him off the minor league roster, apparently after seeing him in a spring training game.

Gene Mauch took over the Phillies in 1960 and was determined to re-build from the ground up. Gene Mauch—and I liked Mauch, and I thought he was a great manager—but Gene Mauch’s failing was that he was overconfident about what he could do with a young player. He thought that he could build Dalrymple into a good major league hitter, and in ’61 and ’62 he spotted Dalrymple against weak opponents, trying to build up his confidence as a hitter. It would be interesting to see whether research would confirm that this happened; I always believed that Dalrymple had misleading numbers in ’60 and ’62 because Mauch made veterans like Sammy White and Cal Neeman play against the tough pitchers, trying to convince Dalrymple that he was a major league hitter. Of course it doesn’t work, because confidence comes and confidence goes away.

Anyway, Dalrymple in 1962 hit .276 with a .393 on-base percentage (!!) and even some power, 11 shots in less than 400 at bats. He was a .700 player that season. He never hit at that level again; according to the SABR Bio Project he now recalls that he developed a hitch in his swing and could just never fix it. He was a platoon player for most of his career, a weak hitter but (like the other guys here, with one exception) a sterling defensive catcher.

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9. John Romano

As a teenager growing up in Hoboken, John Romano used to go over to Ebbets Field and work out with the Dodgers. Clyde Sukeforth, the Dodgers’ top scout in those days, had encouraged him to do this, and Romano recalls that the Dodger players were friendly to him and always treated him well.

For some reason Romano signed with the White Sox. He was a terrific right-handed hitter, and as a young player (1960 to 1962) one of the best all-around catchers in baseball, hitting .299 in 1961—he didn’t play the last two games because he didn’t realize he had a chance to hit .300—and hitting 25 homers in 1962. He was a very productive hitter, contributing 120 hits in 1962 but 173 secondary bases (100 extra bases, 73 walks). There’s a rule of thumb; if your secondary bases exceed your hits, than your runs scored + RBI will also exceed your hits, and this was true for Romano: 120 hits, but 152 runs + RBI.

On May 25, 1963, Romano—hitting .284 going into the game—was hit by a pitch. Baltimore reliever Stu Miller didn’t throw hard enough to break a pane of glass, but he threw a pitch that was headed right toward Romano’s face. Romano threw up his hand to protect his face, and broke a bone in his finger. He finished the season hitting .216.

The rest of his career was frustrating. Although he remained a walks-and-homers player, the kind that us guys love, he put on weight and was lethargic behind the plate, plus he was not regarded as the sharpest catcher in the league at working with the pitchers. His career won-lost contribution (104-52) is extremely impressive; if we were to do a short-career all-star team from the 1960s, I suppose he would be the catcher. There was a sense, from 1963 on, that managers were trying to keep his career alive, but it was just never quite working; he could never quite get back to regular- or all-star status. His career ended after he hit .121 in 24 games for St. Louis in ’67 (24-for-58).

In the winter of 1958-1959 Romano and Clay Dalrymple were teammates, playing for Havana in the Cuban League.

8. Johnny Edwards

The 1961 Reds opened the season with no real expectation of competing. The team had finished under .500 for three straight seasons, twenty games under .500 in 1960 (67-87), and they had taken on a rebuilding project. They had traded away their veteran Gold Glove shortstop, Roy McMillan, making room for Leo Cardenas to take over at shortstop, but Cardenas wasn’t quite ready. They had traded their longtime leadoff man/second baseman, Johnny Temple, for a young first baseman, Gordy Coleman, and, early in the 1961 season, they traded their veteran catcher, Ed Bailey.

Bailey was traded to make room for Johnny Edwards, but Edwards wasn’t ready to go yet, either; the team thought they were a year or two away from making a serious run—as you naturally do when you’re coming off a 67-87 season. All of a sudden they got hot. A fling of young pitchers all came together at the same time—Joey Jay, Jim O’Toole, Ken Hunt; the Reds were getting well-pitched games one after another, Gordy Coleman was driving in runs; the Reds were 39-18 in May and June of 1961, and it was beginning to dawn on them that they might actually win this. Unfortunately the interim catcher, Jerry Zimmerman, was pretty clearly inadequate to the assignment, so all of a sudden they had to rush Edwards to the major leagues.

Edwards was a big guy—I am guessing he was the biggest of these twelve catchers, although Haller was also a big guy—but moved around very well and threw extremely well. He had played for The Ohio State University, where he had been a teammate of Frank Howard and Galen Cisco. He hit .186 in 1961, but Zimmerman hadn’t hit much better and wasn’t his equal defensively, and the Reds won the pennant.

For four years after that Edwards was a winning type of player, hitting over .250 every year and flashing occasional power. He stopped hitting in 1966, lost his job in Cincinnati to Johnny Bench, and bounced around for a couple of years as a backup, then resurfaced as your traditional solid-veteran-catcher-who-doesn’t-hit-much, but nonetheless the regular catcher, for Houston. In his career he was basically a .500 player in a pretty long career.

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7. Earl Battey

Earl Battey signed with the White Sox in 1953, bounced through the minors very quickly but then stalled out as a backup to White Sox catcher Sherm Lollar. Lollar in the early 1950s, in his 20s, was a kind of knockaround player who usually hit about .250 with less than ten homers a year, usually batting about 350 times. When he hit 30 something clicked for Sherm, and he had his best years from 1955 (when he was thirty) through 1959.

Battey touched the majors at the end of 1955, when he was 20 years old, but at the end of the 1959 season he was still just hanging around, waiting for Sherm to give up the ghost. After the 1959 season the White Sox, as many of you will know, had a month of epically awful trades, in which they gave up enough young talent to have made them a near-dynasty, and got very little back in return. In one of those trades they included Johnny Romano and Norm Cash to Cleveland for Minnie Minoso, who was pushing 40. In another one they traded Battey and Don Mincher for Roy Sievers, a good first baseman but well past 30. In a third deal, they traded Johnny Callison to the Phillies for Gene Freese.

I became a baseball fan about a year after that, and by the time I became a baseball fan, Battey was generally regarded as the best defensive catcher in the American League. You know the phrase "built like a catcher", which generally means 5-9 and 220 pounds? Battey was built like that but he was six foot tall and very athletic, a kind of a linebacker’s build. He was agile, and he had a rocket.

He hit .300 in ’61, hit close to 20 homers a year. He was a very good player for seven seasons, 1960-1966, totally stopped hitting in 1967, I think due to an injury of some sort. I credit him with a career won-lost contribution of 120 – 83, which, if he was a pitcher, would make him about even with Josh Beckett (125-81).

6. Tom Haller

Tom Haller played for the University of Illinois at the same time that Johnny Edwards was playing for Ohio State, and had a brother, Bill Haller, who was a long time American League umpire. In 1961 he was part of a Tacoma team (Triple-A) that had 29 players on the roster who had major league careers, including Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry. Johnny Orsino was also on that team and also a catcher; Orsino was a better hitter than Haller at that time, but Haller was stronger behind the plate, and won the competition with Orsino to be the Giants’ guy.

In 1962 Haller shared the Giants’ catching gig with Ed Bailey, both of them left-handed sluggers. Haller hit 18 homers in 272 at bats; Bailey 17 in 254 at bats, and between them they also drew 93 walks. Although he didn’t hit at that level after they expanded the strike zone that winter, he was a better-than-league hitter, and belted 27 homers in 1966. The Giants would win 95 games every year and finish second to somebody every time.

In 1968 he was traded to the Dodgers, and became a singles hitter, either because:

a) He decided to change his approach at the plate,

b) He had an injury that took away his power and forced him to change his approach, or

c) The Dodgers wanted him to play the game that way.

The point is that he remained a very productive hitter; his .285 batting average in 1968 is like a .325 average in a normal season; it was 42 points above the league batting average, and we credit him with an offensive won-lost record, for the season, of 17-3. It’s an unusual thing; in fact, I’m not sure I can think of any other power hitter who became a singles hitter past the age of 30, and yet somehow remained a highly productive hitter. It would be interesting to know why that happened, but I don’t know. Anyway, he was the regular catcher for the Giants for six years and the Dodgers for three, and he was a "winning" player all nine years. His career won-lost contribution was 146-81, which, if he was a pitcher, would make him Freddy Garcia (145-95), Mike Garcia (142-97), or Johnny Allen (142-75) or Remy Kremer (143-85) or Chris Carpenter (144-92) or Firpo Marberry (147-89), or even Dizzy Dean (150-83).

I also really don’t understand why the Giants traded Haller to the Dodgers. The Giants had a young catcher they liked, Dick Dietz, but they didn’t get that much in return for Haller (Ron Hunt), and they already had a second baseman who was comparable to Hunt (Tito Fuentes.) That trade doesn’t seem to make much sense.

5. John Roseboro

Roseboro became the Dodgers’ regular catcher after Campanella’s car wreck, and in his first season as a regular hit .271 with 14 homers in 384 at bats. He didn’t hit .271 again for six years, and his batting was always regarded as a disappointment, although his defense was extremely good. He rates here as the best defensive player in the group, with a career defensive winning percentage of .810, but his offense is also under-rated. In 1960, for example, Roseboro hit only .213 with 8 homers, which looks ugly, but when you work it through it’s not all that bad; he had 15 doubles, 3 triples, 8 homers, 42 RBI and 44 walks in 287 at bats. You scale that up to full-time play, you’ve got 30 doubles, 6 triples, 16 homers, 84 RBI, 88 walks; you can live with it.

Roseboro was often contrasted with Tom Haller, because of the West Coast rivalry, but actually, he was much more like Clay Dalrymple than he was like Haller; in fact, Roseboro and Dalrymple could almost be regarded as the same player, except that Roseboro was a little better. But there were both not-too-good hitters who had a couple of good years early in their careers, batted left, walked a lot, popped a few homers, and were very strong defensively.

After the 1967 season there was a musical catchers episode; Roseboro went to Minnesota, replacing Battey, and Haller came down to LA, replacing Roseboro. I remember as a teenager this was very confusing too me, and I still don’t really get it; the Dodgers traded Roseboro and Perranoski for a couple of players who really didn’t do anything for them (Mudcat Grant and Zoilo Versalles), and I don’t really get why the Twins gave up on Battey after one bad season or why the Giants let the Dodgers have Tom Haller cheap. The Dodgers cleaned house after Koufax retired in 1966, trading away Maury Wills and Tommy Davis, but they went into the ’67 season thinking they still had a good team. They lost almost 90 games, had serious clubhouse issues all summer, and continued to rebuild with basically pointless and mystifying moves after the 1967 season.

We have Roseboro with a career won-lost contribution of 168-120. If he was a pitcher, that would be Saberhagen (167-117). You will note there was no mention of Marichal here.

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4. Elston Howard

Elston Howard was the first African-American to play for the Janquis. "They finally got me a n----," said Casey Stengel, "and I get the only one that can’t run." He was slow when he got to the Yankees, but he was not yet a catcher. The Yankees saw his value as a potential catcher, and hired Bill Dickey to work with him, help make him a catcher as he had made Yogi Berra a catcher. Dickey, a Louisiana native, was very good with Howard, in a time when relations between the races were not good; later the Yankees also hired Jim Hegan to work on the same project.

Howard was extremely well schooled to be a catcher, but Yogi Berra had run off generations of young catchers, including Sherm Lollar, Clint Courtney and Gus Triandos. Clint Courtney, a regular since 1952, was only one year older than Howard; Triandos was a year younger. What made Howard succeed where the others had failed was that he could crush left-handed pitching. Courtney was a left-handed hitter, and Triandos, although a right-handed hitter, was curiously weak against lefties. Howard murdered them, hitting .379 against left-handers in 1958 and .423 in 1961. As the Yankees saw a lot of left-handers in those days and Berra was an aging left-handed catcher, hitting left-handers was something that would buy you playing time there.

Howard—like Bill Dickey—was a truly great player for four years in what was otherwise an up and down career. And, as I have written many times, had both men played at the same time, in a symmetrical park, Howard would have had better numbers than Dickey did. Yankee Stadium was great for Bill Dickey; it was Death Valley for Howard, who hit 113 career homers on the road, but only 54 in his home parks, and also for a higher average on the road.

Howard won an MVP Award in 1963 in what his third-best season; he was better in both 1964 and 1961 than he was in 1963.

3. Tim McCarver

Tim McCarver’s career as a player is easy to underrate. His long and brilliant career as a broadcaster outshines his career as a player. He is rather modest in talking about his career, talking more about his poor throwing over the second half of his career than about his very good on base percentages or his quite outstanding offensive performances in his years as Steve Carlton’s personal catcher. His .822 OPS in 1967 was 159 points over the league average, which makes it more like a .900 OPS in a normal season. He was second in the MVP voting that season, and I have him with a won-lost contribution of 22—5, suggesting that the MVP vote was reasonable. He had a long series of good years, but never drove in or scored even as many as 70 runs in a season. These things cause him to be underrated.

I see him as a winning player in fourteen different seasons—1963 through 1971, as a regular, 1973, as a half-time regular, and 1975 through 1978, as a backup.

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2. Bill Freehan

Bill Freehan hit .585 for the University of Michigan in 1961. The Big 10 seems to be the accidental theme of this group; I had never realized before that so many of the 1960s catchers were Big 10 alumni. Freehan also played football for Michigan; I think several of these other guys also played college football, although I didn’t confirm that.

Freehan was named to the All Star team eleven times, which is the record for an eligible player who is not in the Hall of Fame, and was 7^th in the MVP voting in 1964, 3^rd in 1967, 2^nd in 1968.

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1. Joe Torre

Among the 12 catchers listed here, Joe Torre is the one who has a strong Hall of Fame argument. Like Ted Simmons and Mike Piazza, his Hall of Fame case has been weakened by the fact that he was an offense-first player at a defender’s position, which creates cognitive dissonance for the voters. Although Torre did win a Gold Glove in 1965, that was kind of a fluke, and he was never a top-flight defensive catcher. He was easily the poorest defensive catcher in this group. When Hall of Fame voters think about catchers, they think about defense first.

Torre won an MVP Award as a third baseman (1971; we have him at 30—2), and easily exceeds the standard of 100 more Win Shares than Loss Shares that I use as one of the tests of a Hall of Fame player.

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The 1963 American League MVP Award

The rules say that there must be one Most Valuable Player in each league each season, but if ever there was a league for which an exception should be made, it would be the American League in 1963. The player selected as the MVP, Elston Howard, was a sub-Hall of Fame talent having his third-best season between 1961 and 1964—and yet it is difficult to say that he was the wrong choice. The American League MVPs of the previous three years—Maris, Maris, and Mantle—were both injured. The only regular player in the league who had ever won an MVP Award, Nellie Fox, was 35 years old and a shadow of his former self.

I made a list of candidates for the MVP Award, a couple of them not legitimate candidates for the award but just guys that I was interested in, and then figured Win Shares and Loss Shares for them. Let me start by presenting a chart of these; the category off to the right is their finish in the 1963 AL MVP voting:

By Win Shares and Loss Shares the Most Valuable Player appears to be Bob Allison (25—4), a player for whom I have a particular fondness because he played for Kansas University. Allison hit .271 in 1963 but with 35 homers and 90 walks giving a league-leading .911 OPS. He led the league in runs scored with 99; the fact that it was one of the few leagues in history in which no player scored 100 runs is indicative of our problem.

Allison led the league in runs scored, was third in home runs, fifth in total bases, fourth in RBI, third in walks, second in runs created, first in runs created per 27 outs, fourth in on base percentage, and second in slugging percentage. He was a good defensive right fielder, played some in center, and was the most feared base runner of his time, in that he was big, fast, and liked to run into people. He seems to have finished higher in everything else than he did in the MVP voting (15^th).

However, while we might safely conclude that Allison should have done better than he did in MVP voting, it might be a stretch to conclude that he actually should have won it. The Win Shares and Loss Shares system is based on runs, but makes no adjustment for the under-performance or over-performance of the team. The Twins, based on their runs scored (767) and runs allowed (602) should have won about 100 games. In fact, they won only 91 games, finishing third.

Allison has a very thin lead anyway. If we discount Twins’ runs for the fact that they did not turn them into wins, as we probably should, Allison would drop back to perhaps fifth place in the voting, or even lower; perhaps tenth. His candidacy appears to depend on issues that are too fine for our sifter.

Setting Allison aside, that moves Camilo Pascual into the top spot. I loved Camilo Pascual; he was a little Cuban with the best curve ball of his time. Kind of imagine Tommy Gordon as a 20-game winner. Pascual was 21-9 in 1963, led the league in strikeouts and had a 2.46 ERA. I didn’t realize he was such a good hitter; he also hit .250 that year and drove in 12 runs—which is a lot of RBI for a pitcher, but the previous year he had hit .268 and driven in 19. I credit him with a won-lost contribution of 26-8.

But Pascual was a teammate of Allison’s, and if we discount Allison’s numbers for the underperformance of the team, perhaps we should also discount Pascual’s by the same percentage. Not necessarily; we could check to see whether the team under-performed in Camilo’s starts.

They did, actually; the Twins outscored their opponents in Pascual’s starts exactly 2 to 1, 164 to 82, which would mean they should have won 80% of those games, or 25-6. They were actually 22-9, an underperformance of three games.

OK, so we have to discount Pascual’s performance somewhat, as well. That pushes Gary Peters into the top spot at 24-5. Peters was the Rookie of The Year in 1963, 19-8 actual won-lost log with a league-leading 2.33 ERA, and I mentioned that I didn’t realize that Pascual was such a good hitter, but everybody knew that Peters was a good hitter; he was famous for it. He hit .259 with 3 homers, 12 RBI that year.

Peters had been in the minors a long time, with curiously consistent won-lost records in the minor leagues—10-6, 10-5, 13-9, 13-11, 12-9, 13-10. Finally he had a losing record in the minors (8-10 at Indianapolis, 1962), then shot up to the majors the next two years and went 19-8 and 20-8 his first two seasons. Go figure.

Anyway, Peters was certainly an impressive rookie and an MVP candidate, but he has the same problem; the White Sox also underperformed. They scored 683 runs and allowed 544, so they also should have won about 99 games, but didn’t; they won 94. If we knock Peters’ back about 5%, that kind of puts him back on an equal footing with Allison and Pascual, not to mention a dozen other guys who aren’t very far behind him.

If we move Peters down, that leaves Albie Pearson in the top spot at 24-7. Pearson is a really interesting candidate. He was a tiny, tiny man—listed at 5-5, 140—the smallest player of his day. He used his size to his advantage, drawing 92 walks that season. In 1958 he had been the American League’s Rookie of the Year, hitting .275 for Washington, but then he got hurt in ’59 and Bob Allison took over the position and won the same award, pushing Pearson aside. Pearson was traded to Baltimore and let go to the Angels in the 1961 expansion draft.

Pearson was a fan favorite, as a small player often is, but announcers of the generation talked about him in very patronizing ways, as if he were a child. We would hear often that "Little Albie", whenever he hit a home run, would muscle up for the next week and over-swing, trying to hit more home runs. His outstanding strikeout to walk ratios (37 to 92 in 1963) rather belie this tale, but that was the image of him that prevailed at the time, that he was a little guy who would rather have been a big guy.

Sportswriters in that generation had absolutely no concept of the value of a .402 on base percentage, and absolutely no awareness that the Angels’ were playing in the worst hitter’s park in the American League, with a Park Run Index of .82. The Angels had a disappointing season, losing 91 games. Considering these factors, it is perhaps not surprising that Albie finished 14^th in the MVP voting.

The Angels, however, once more underperformed their run ratio; with 597 runs scored and 660 allowed they should have won 73 games, which isn’t many, but they only won 70. That’s only a 4% discount, but then, Albie doesn’t have much of a margin to work with. (The teams that over-achieved their run production, if you’re curious, were Baltimore and Cleveland). I think Albie was as deserving of an MVP vote as any of these other guys, but it’s hard to argue that he was more deserving or uniquely deserving among the competitors. He was, like Allison, Peters and Pascual, another guy who had a good year, but maybe not an MVP year.

That knocks us down to Tom Tresh. The Yankees had four MVP candidates—not counting Bobby Richardson, who actually finished 10^th in the MVP voting, ahead of Allison, Pearson and Pascual, but who I did not include in this study because of his .294 on base percentage. The four legitimate MVP candidates on the Yankees were Tresh, Howard, Whitey Ford and Jim Bouton.

The Yankees over-performed a little; they should have won 101 games, but found a way to win 104. Tresh also deserves some credit, in my book, for his ability to do whatever the Yankees needed done. In 1962 Tony Kubek had military service commitments; Tresh stepped in, drove in 93 runs and won the American League Rookie of the Year Award, and the Yankees won the pennant. In 1963 Kubek was back but Mantle was injured. Tresh moved to center field, and the Yankees won the pennant.

Tresh, however, has MVP issues of his own. He drove in only 71 runs, hitting just .240 with runners in scoring position; the Win Shares/Loss Shares system doesn’t pay attention to that, either, but perhaps we should. He hit .158 on the season with two out and runners in scoring position, and hit just .149 against the Yankees’ closest competitor, the White Sox. These may be niggling issues, but again, it’s not like he has a commanding lead to work with.

Next up is Dick Radatz, Da Monstah. The first great power reliever, Radatz in 1963 pitched 132 innings, striking out 162 batters, which is the third-most ever for a reliever, the record being held by Radatz himself in 1964. He saved 25 games, won 15 more, and had a 1.97 ERA in a hitter’s park.

Radatz was a sensation, and he did finish fifth in the MVP voting, which is the highest finish we’ve seen so far. Radatz could be the MVP, but to say that he is depends on a close and careful calculation of the extent to which his 132 innings were leveraged innings. The Win Shares System relies on an estimate of this based on his Saves, a fairly crude tool for that purpose. I don’t think that we can say, based on what we actually know, that he should have won the MVP award—any more than we can say this about Allison, Pascual, Peters, Pearson or Tresh.

Next man up is Whitey Ford (24-11), actual won-lost record of 24-7, and then Elston Howard (22-6). To me, it is ultimately impossible to say, since somebody had to win the Award, that Elston Howard is not the most deserving candidate. Howard hit worse with runners in scoring position than Tresh did (.227), although his overall clutch numbers are OK. He hit .327 and .351 against the Yankees two closest competitors, and hit a third of his home runs (9) against those two teams.

The people who were on the scene knew many things about these players that we do not know, strive as we might to increase our understanding. Their judgment at the time was that Howard was the best player in the league, and, since it is not clear that they were wrong about this, I think we have to assume that they were right.

A few notes about the rest of the list. Earl Battey had almost exactly the same triple crown stats as the MVP, Elston Howard; Howard hit .287 with 28 homers, 85 RBI; Battey hit .284 with 26 and 84. Both strong defensive players, both catchers. Win Shares fails to make the distinction between them, listing both of them at 22-6.

Al Kaline finished 2^nd in the MVP voting despite finishing 12^th in our ranking method. But again, given the unusual circumstances of the competition—everybody really is about the same—it is hard to say for sure that he didn’t deserve to win the award. Kaline was a Gold Glove right fielder, and hit .398 that season with runners in scoring position.

The guy who really seems to have been over-voted was Harmon Killebrew. Killebrew led the league in homers, as he always did, with 45. But he hit only .258, drove in only 96 runs, hit 60% of his homers with the bases empty, and hit just .233 with runners in scoring position. He was not a defensive asset, and he hit .189 with 1 homer and 6 RBI in 15 games against the Yankees. His team, as noted, under-achieved. I really don’t get why Killebrew should be 4^th in the MVP voting in this competition, or why he should be ahead of his teammates Allison, Pascual, Earl Battey and Jimmie Hall.

Dick Stuart of the Red Sox led the American League in 1962 in home runs and RBI (42 and 118), and was 13^th in the MVP voting. My evaluation shows him to have been less than a .500 player (16-18). His on base percentage was .312. The Park Run Index for Fenway was 115, second-highest in the league. Stuart was a notorious defensive liability, nicknamed "Dr. Strangeglove", and made 29 errors that year at first base. He led the league in grounding into double plays, with 24. I think if you add up the positives and negatives for him, it’s a wash.

One of the sources I used to pick the players to be included here was the All-Star team chosen by my group at STATS Inc. (myself, John Dewan, Don Zminda, Neil Munro and Jim Callis) when we published the All-Time Sourcebook about fifteen years ago. We chose Dick Stuart as the best first baseman in the league, and Jerry Lumpe as the best second baseman. I have both of them as sub-.500 players (16-18 and 16-17).

On a kind of whim, I included Norm Cash here. Compare Cash and Stuart. Stuart had more hits, more doubles, more triples, more homers, more runs scored, more RBI. Stuart won about as many games for his team as Cash did, but he lost a lot more. He made a hundred more outs, 478 to 377. Cash drew twice as many walks (89 to 44), struck out half as often (76 to 144), grounded into less than half as many double plays (9 to 24), hit for a little better average, had an on base percentage 74 points higher (.386 to .312) and an OPS 23 points higher (.856 to .833), while playing in a slightly tougher park for a hitter. He was a better fielder, although he was not really a good fielder, but he was much better than Stuart. I have Cash’s defensive contribution at 3-3, Stuart at 1-6. Taking all phases of their play, I would much prefer Cash (19-7) to Stuart (16-18), and I would rate Cash as nearly even with Harmon Killebrew, who finished 4^th in the actual voting.

COMMENTS (20 Comments, most recent shown first)

jdw
Fun piece. Kind of a forgotten era of catchers between the Yogi/Campy era and the one ushered in with Bench. There were more decent catchers in the era than folks remember.
7:33 PM Feb 23rd

trn6229
Thanks for the interesting analysis. 1963 was the start of the second Deal Ball era which lasted through the 1968 season.

1974 was an interesting MVP vote as well. Jeff Burroughs won the AL MVP because the Rangers improved so much that year. He did have the most Win Shares with 33. He was a sluggardly slugger with little defense. Bobby Grich was a productive hitter and a great defender and he had 32 Win Shares for the AL East Champion Orioles. Reggie Jackson had 30 Win Shares for the World Champion A's. 1974 was similar to 1958 with lots of parity. The Angels were 68-94, the worst record in the AL, the Tigers were 72-90, second worst. The Orioles won the most games, 91 and the Athletics won 90.

Take Care,
Tom Nahigian
3:29 PM Feb 22nd

bjames
But there's no way 4-2 would be an appropriate defensive rating for Yaz in '63. 3-3, maybe, but not 4-2. The '63 Red Sox were an awful, awful defensive team; one of the worst ever. For the left fielder on an awful defensive team to score at .667 (4-2) would be impossible.
5:40 PM Feb 21st

bjames
With regard to Yaz's defensive win shares. . .part of the function of the defensive win shares is to even out players between positions. Catchers and shortstops tend to have high defensive winning percentages. Left fielders and first basemen have low defensive winning percentages. Yastrzemski in 1963 is credited with 2.36 Wins, 4.21 losses, a .359 defensive winning percentage. That's not bad for a left fielder; Don Lock, playing CENTER field that year, was at .295--granted, it was a joke to have him in center--and Leon Wagner was at .246.

But there is also an issue with respect to left field in Fenway. Since the LF area in Fenway is small, it tends to substantially reduce the number of plays made by left fielders. Since our ability to make position-specific park adjustments is limited or non-existant, we are probably, to an extent, being misled by this, and probably giving Yaz a slightly lower rating than he deserves.

5:36 PM Feb 21st

RoughCarrigan
sgoldleaf. Yaz apparently did two things that were key to his offensive improvement in 1967. He focused more on pulling the ball. The other thing was that he had apparently taken classes to finish his college degree the couple offseasons before that. Before the 67 season he trained with, if I remember right, a czech american trainer who had sniffed with disdain at Carl's level of fitness. And from then to the end of his career, Yaz was something of a fitness nut.
12:04 AM Feb 20th

mauimike
Thanks, sgoldleaf. I think I heard the story from another place, but that might be it. I got most of the facts right and then I added a twist or two. No harm, no foul, right?
8:13 AM Feb 16th

Steven Goldleaf
Here's mauimike's Roseboro story straight from Glory Days:

There are screened box seats behind home plate and between the dugouts at Dodger Stadium that are built at field level. The people that sit in them actually sit below field level, with the upper part of their bodies above. A lot of stars sit in these seats. One time Liz Taylor was sitting in one in an especially low-cut dress. Driz didn't miss much. He was pitching and his first pitch went way wide, wild, and right up to the screen in front of her box. I went back to pick it up and when I looked down there was Liz, both of them. It took me a long time to pick up the ball. When I did, I didn't throw it, but took it back to the mound. When I handed it to Driz, I asked him what kind of pitch that was supposed to be. He smiled and said, "I just like to take care of my catcher."
6:47 PM Feb 14th

Steven Goldleaf
Well, the Win Shares system as I understand it is based on strict team Wins and Losses but the individual contributions are based on the theoretical Runs produced (and saved) which sometimes adds up to a different result--when the discrepancies are large, anomalies result.
10:36 AM Feb 14th

MWeddell
Bill wrote: "The Win Shares and Loss Shares system is based on runs, but makes no adjustment for the under-performance or over-performance of the team." I'm puzzled by that. I thought that one forced the team's totals to equal the team's W-L record, so if the team underperformed in a manner where we can't pin the problem on a specific player, everyone's win shares were adjusted downward.
8:20 AM Feb 14th

Steven Goldleaf
Just wanted to add: this was an extremely FUN article for me, and I'd love to see more such articles re-visiting past (pre-sabremetric) seasons and holding them up to sabrmtrc scrutiny (I know I'm supposed to leave out some vowel from sabermetric but I always forget which one).
7:29 AM Feb 14th

Steven Goldleaf
Grote also was credited with "toughening" up the young Mets staff, who lacked guts, balls, and other anatomical parts without his rude challenges to their manhoods--he wasn't very popular supposedly but he was a "leader" for what that's worth. I'd also like to have seen him included, though maybe he's a little late--most of these catchers started off in the 1950s or very early 60s, and Grote didn't come along until the mid-60s He was a hothead, who got thrown out of a game when he was their final catcher, causing an outfielder to catch the remainder of that game, which they lost due to the outfielder's fielding error.
6:36 AM Feb 14th

garywmaloney
Would love to see some discussion or measurement of "handling pitchers" -- which catchers helped ordinary pitchers overperform, etc. Take McCarver, for example; Gibson would have been great anyway, but what did McCarver contribute to the brief halcyon seasons of Larry Jaster (1966), Dick Hughes (1967), Ray Washburn, etc. Who helped make their pitching corps BETTER? I remember Grote being credited with aiding the young Mets pitchers immensely with his pitch calling, etc. Any way been found to chart this, Bill?
9:04 PM Feb 13th

Steven Goldleaf
Supposedly the element Yaz added to his game in '67 was hustling--so maybe the young Yaz had a reputation for dogging it a bit?. (Also, anecdotally, he started working out seriously in the winter of '66-67, according to my old memory of old events--this could also be ex post facto reasoning, of course. The guy started hitting on a whole 'nother level, he had to be doing SOMETHING different.) Yaz did win a GG in the season Bill has his defense 2-4, so I must wonder what's going on here.
7:12 PM Feb 13th

Steven Goldleaf
Interesting that Yaz rated so low for his defense, 2-4, the same as Killebrew, a notorious ox in the outfield. Yaz was young and a multi-Gold Glover, so I expected him to put up about the reverse defensive numbers he did, which would have put him at 24-5, tied with Peters. He led AL OFers in assists that year. I wonder what went bloooie for Yaz in 1963—off-year fielding? Rounding error? New position (was that the year he played CF?)? He and Killebrew were the only players on Bill’s list to win MVP awards later in their career, ’67 and ’69 respectively.
5:39 PM Feb 13th

mauimike
Another John story without, Juan. At Dodger Stadium they used have to seats behind home plate a little bit below field level. One day, Liz Taylor showed up fashionably late and sat there. She was wearing a very low cut dress. While in the dugout Don Drysdale who was pitching nodded to John and said, "I'll take care of you." While warming up during the next inning he threw one, "just a bit outside," in front of Mrs. Taylor. John ignored the ball offered by the umpire went to pick the errant throw up. He got on eyeful. Teammates...
12:38 PM Feb 13th

CWright
Bill Freehan is the only one in that group with 100+ win shares above replacement level as a catcher. No one else is even close.

But if you set aside the catching qualification, Joe Torre is even higher. (Torre appeared over 50% more often at other positions than he did as a catcher.) Not having a dominant position and being a poor defender really hurt the memory of Torre's value as a player. Only about 8% of his value above replacement value is in his defense, which is incredibly low for someone who played half his games at catcher and third base. But offensively, he was very impressive with 125 offensive win shares above bench.
10:43 AM Feb 13th

BringBackTriandos
And which of these 10 played semi-professional baseball in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan?
10:37 AM Feb 13th

raincheck
John Roseboro was a Hall of Fame caliber user of swear words. He was a good and colorful storyteller who spiced up his stories with liberal use of dugout language. On the Sports Century series on ESPN Classic I always enjoy it when Roseboro is interviewed. It's often a good story and it ALWAYS has a few bleeps in it.
10:36 AM Feb 13th

DanaKing
" His long and brilliant career as a broadcaster"

Well, long, anyway. Too long.

No argument about his abilities as a player, though.
7:13 AM Feb 13th

evanecurb
Torre was not a catcher after 1968. How does that figure into your rankings? I remember that Bill Freehan was commonly thought to be the best catcher in the AL in the late sixties but he didn't have a lot of competition.

I was thinking about some of the guys who did NOT make the list: Jerry McNertney, Andy Etchebarren, Duane Josephson, Jim Pagliaroni, Chris Cannizzarro, Paul Casanova....Seems like the sixties may have been a bad decade for catchers. None of the guys on my list could hit worth a lick.

Is Jerry Grote considered more of a seventies catcher than a sixties catcher? Another guy who couldn't hit, but had a great reputation defensively.
11:18 PM Feb 12th

1960s Catchers

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