Certain franchises get a reputation for being downtrodden after a few years—or, let’s be honest, decades—without a championship. Sometimes when you break down their rosters, it’s easy to see why: The Cubs always needed pitching, or at least a park that didn’t brutally punish the same. It’s not like the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers have teemed with All-Stars, historically. Sometimes, however, when you analyze the team they seem as formidable as their peers down to the subatomic level, leaving us to wonder if the fault lies not in our (sports) stars, but in ourselves.
Cleveland catchers, in both the Guardians and pre-Guardians eras, present us with such a group. They’ve got quality and quantity, with a number-one selection, a top three, a top five, and a top ten to match up with almost anyone, and a selection of spare parts behind the leaders suggesting a healthy and competitive catcher-producing machine.
I’ll go out on a limb and suggest the championship drought indicates a potential problem with some of the other positions, but this assortment of catchers is quite good. Behold their mighty stats!1
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Tony Pena 1995
Chris Bando 1984
Kelly Shoppach 2008
Bo Naylor 2023
Jerry Willard 1985
Gary Alexander 1978
After three down years as a starter, Pena recovered in Cleveland well enough to cover for the oft-injured Sandy Alomar with the great 1995 team. Got the better of his former teammates in Boston with a walk-off homer in the Division Series. Bando posted one of the best part-time seasons by a catcher in the 1980's; a switch-hitter, he slugged .489 against lefties and .516 against righties. Shoppach cracked 21 homers in his only season of full time at-bats. Production came and went thereafter, but he remained dangerous enough to enjoy a two-homer game for the Rays in the 2011 Division Series. Naylor took over the Guardians' catching job last July, slugging .470 down the stretch. Brother Josh plays first base, so Paul and Lloyd Waner have been put on notice. Willard is another of the series of proverbial catching widgets to flit through Cleveland in the 80's; hit .294-.355-.491 against righties in a platoon role. Alexander was primarily a DH, but he hit 27 homers. One of my Rules for Roster Construction is, anytime a DH can catch, consider him a catcher.
Speaking of Cleveland in the 80's, Allanson held their catching job longer than Bando or Willard had before him, although he was the weakest hitter of the three. His '88 was entirely acceptable, featuring a .263 average at a time when runs weren't exactly storming home plate. Also led the league in runners caught stealing and double plays. Hit .337 in September, but his OPS was just .748 even so. There are limits to the utility of a hot streak to a light-hitting catcher, and the decade was just killing time until Sandy Alomar Jr. anyway.
Sort of an Andy Allanson for a bigger-hitting era. Well, that's not quite fair, I guess: He hit .277 with 34 doubles in 2001, .281 two years earlier. The American League hit .267 in '01, .259 in '88. Diaz was 10 points better than the league, Allanson just 4 points. Still, it slots into the same category: Adequate Catcher who doesn't really impact your playoff chances or solve your catcher's spot long-term. Diaz did help them to the Division Series, though, and hit 5-for-16. Traded (with Ryan Drese) for Travis Hafner, who definitely made an impact.
Here's another common box we can sort catchers into: Long-Term Backup who got to play one season and had a career year. In the case of Perez, that meant 24 homers, 63 RBI, .452 slugging, 50 points higher than his slugging in any other season. He had homered in consecutive Division Series in 2016-17, plus that two-homer game in the 2016 World Series, so his power potential might not have surprised anyone who watches baseball on national TV. Caught 10 of 14 runners who attempted steals against him in the 2020 season. Even Megatron's arm cannon won't keep you playing at .165, however...
That "Immortal Azcue" nickname might have been a bit tongue in cheek, but he was quite good for most of the 1960's. Going back to the league batting average, hitting .280 in 1968 was no small feat. But he'd also slugged .460 in '63, and hit 20 homers in a little more than a season of at-bats in '66 and '67. What I do find a bit odd is how he did most of his hitting from the fourth or fifth spot in '68, but Cleveland's homer leader that year was Tony Horton with 14. Duke Sims hit 11, splitting Azcue's position. Jose Cardenal was on the team—posting a .658 OPS. So yeah, they hit Azcue in the middle of the order and won 86 games. '68 was another world, man...
You have to choose whether to rank Ellis at first base or catcher, but... well, see above. At least for game roster purposes, and kind of also in life, if a guy can play first base or catch, let him catch! I still haven't recovered from the Mets moving Piazza to first base that one year. And Ellis was right at the level of offense that becomes really valuable from a catcher, pedestrian for a first baseman: 24 homers, 132 RBI between the two positions in '73-74, OPS of .742 and .751. Didn't catch that many base thieves, but improved in that area in '75 even as his offense fell off. Mostly played first later on, but continued to catcher periodically through the 70's.
One of my favorite all-time catching careers. Left-handed batter who'd periodically toss out a .318-.390-.446 line (1980) or a .323-.406-.481 (1986) or 13 homers in half a season with the Yankees (1985). Even in a fairly pedestrian year by his own standards, say 1982, Hassey still put up a .709 OPS, better than most catchers of the era. Later in his career, as his bat faded, he ended up as the perfect complement to Terry Steinbach in Oakland, picking up a ring. Began and ended 1980 red-hot: .368 in April, .347 in September/October. But he never actually cooled off all the way, hitting .284 in his worst month of the year. Just a thoroughly useful player for over a decade.
Sims hit 64 homers over a four-year stretch from '67-70, although he's hardly ever their official catcher in that stretch thanks to the presence of Azcue and Fosse. Only played 61 games at first in his career, a little in the outfield, so he's not a Jim Leyritz type; they just kept coming up with good catchers. That .859 OPS in 1970 looks good in any context, putting a cherry on top of an impressive run. Clearly the best MLB position player born in Utah, though the state has also produced a few good pitchers, notably Bruce Hurst...
The rich get richer, as Cleveland moved Carlos Santana to guitar player (okay, fine, first base) and replaced him with the top AL catcher of 2014. Performance fell off for three years afterward, before rebounding in 2018. Picked a bad time to have the worst year of his career: .167-.201-.327 in 2016, 0-for-4 in the World Series. Won it all three years later in Washington, so it all works out unless you're a Guardians fan hoping to get a ring this century. Among nations that have produced four to six Major League players, only Jamaica (Chili Davis, Devon White) and Aruba (Xander Bogaerts) can claim a player as good as Gomes. Poland is in the conversation with Moe Drabowsky.
Elston Howard and Earl Battery stand as the best AL catchers of the 60's, but for a couple of years at the start of the decade, Romano was just about half a notch below them. 46 homers, 161 RBI from '61-62, OPS of .860 and .842. Particularly deadly against left-handers in 1961, hitting .381-.433-.646. Now that's what you like to see from your righty-hitting catcher. Traded to the White Sox later in the decade, then traded back in a complicated series of moves that seems to have involved half the notable players of the decade: Norm Cash, Minnie Minoso, Tommie Agee, Tommy John, Rocky Colavito. I'm not even going to try to sort that all out.
You know about the All-Star Game collision; worth noting he hit .309-.370-.412 that August before missing most of September. In the wider picture, Fosse's 1970 stands as the tallest spike in an impressive run of Cleveland catching from Romano through Hassey. They flipped him for George Hendrick, who played in two All-Star Games as Cleveland's center fielder, hitting 267 homers in his career, so that's a pretty good deal even before you consider they also got Dave Duncan, who was probably a little better than Fosse in '73-74. Career platoon difference was nonexistent: .667 OPS with the split, .676 against it. Near the end of his career in ‘77, got into 11 games as an Inaugural Mariner.
An awkwardly balanced career. I remember him as one of the best AL catchers of the 90's, and he played in six of the decade's ten All-Star Games, so I'm not crazy. Hung around the league for 20 years, which suggests a long, productive career. But when you try to figure out how many full, productive, non-injury-plagued seasons he had... I mean, maybe three? He was a worthy Rookie of the Year in '90 and his '97 was great (.324-.354-.525). But he battled injuries in the first half of the decade, fell off at the plate in the second half, was a reserve catcher later on. So you end up with 1994 as his third-best season: He hit .288-.347-.490 in kind of a full year, considering the strike. But he played in only 80 games, which is still just 80 games even with an asterisk. Hard to build a Hall of Fame resume at that rate...
Like the aforementioned Santana—the player, not the Evil Ways guy—Martinez broke my First Rule of Roster Construction. In his case, it was mostly late-career after he left Cleveland. Drove in 395 runs from 2004-2007, which is some Gary Carter-level production even considering the era. Those years are all pretty close together in quality, but he added 14 hits and 7 RBI in the '07 playoff run, so we'll let that break the tie. Hit .327 with 12 homers, 46 RBI in May and June that year. As noted in the Red Sox article, Cleveland didn't get much for him in trade, but we’ve also established they've had no problem coming up with catchers in the modern era, and they didn't after Martinez, either.
My gut instinct tells me to pick Alomar here, but that's probably the All-Star Games talking. If you had to pick a catcher to maintain a healthy level of production and help your team win, Martinez clearly beats out the guys ranked from 2-4, who had more abbreviated primes, and Martinez is also a multi-time All-Star. I think he's the clear choice.
On Monday: Rangers catchers. On to the West!
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