It might surprise absolutely nobody that the 1970’s featured the best offensive production from the catcher position, relative to total offense, over the period from 1900 to 2019. With the exception of 1973 and 1976, catcher offense (as measured by OPS) exceeded the league average in each year. And the three year average offense (here at Retrotisserie Baseball, we like to do things in threes!) for catchers exceeded the league average in every single year. Led by the Little General, Carlton Fisk, Ted Simmons and others, catchers outperformed the league by .027 points (.713 vs. .686) between 1970 and 1972 and .014 (.734 vs. .720) between 1977 and 1979.
A little background for the analysis might be in order here. I defined a “catcher” as anyone who played at least 1,300 outs (or about 48 games worth) as a backstop during the season, regardless of what other position(s) they might have played. For example, I treated Ted Simmons as a catcher for 1976, even though he also logged 30 games at first base. This eliminates late season call ups and others who played sparingly during the year due to injuries – I wanted to study the guys who bore the brunt of the catching responsibilities for their team. For the period 1911 through 1953, outs were not available, so I used games played as a proxy, with a 48-game minimum. For simplicity, I also just took the season totals for the players who qualified. To analyze how they hit only while they were playing catcher would have been just too much work.
I also decided to look at raw offensive production, to see if these were the best hitting group of catchers in history. What I discovered is that although the production from the catcher position was good (.711 for the decade, better than the 1960’s or 1980’s), the primary reason for the catcher production exceeding the league average was that total offense was pretty anemic during the 1970’s. Since the end of the dead-ball era, average hitting for the 1970’s was second in futility only to the 1960’s.
But back to catchers! Instead of looking at all the catchers, I decided to look at only the top 5 catchers by year. Again what I found was that the 1970-1972 period featured the best hitting group of catchers relative to the league’s total offense, besting the league average by .182 points (.869 vs. .686). But the best hitting group of star catchers over any three year period, based strictly on raw performance, was the 1936-1938 group, headlined by Bill Dickey, Ernie Lombardi and Rudy York. The OPS for the star catchers during this period was .934, slightly besting the 1998-2000 group (Mike Piazza, Ivan Rodriguez, Jason Kendall). During these three years, York (with only two full seasons in the major leagues) had an OPS of 1.01, Dickey was 1.002 and Lombardi was .878. York played only one more year at catcher before being switched to first base. And though he was a 7x All-Star throughout his career, his production after 1940 never again approached his 1937/1938 numbers.
But for those two years, York put up some extraordinary numbers, especially for a catcher. He probably earns himself a first-round pick in Retrotisserie Baseball’s 1935 season.