THT: McLaughlin: The path to Cooperstown: the catchers

Chips and clips…Crank’s jazz is longer than Del Rice’s face!

Ted Simmons in the decade of his prime was a workhorse, averaging 136 games a year behind the plate; only Gary Carter averaged more plate appearances over that long a stretch, and only Carter and Ray Schalk caught more games. That durability and his dependable bat tend to get overlooked by analyses that focus only on career totals and percentages. And statistically, Simmons caught a little more than a league-average number of baserunners against only slightly more than a league-average number of attempts; at least in that aspect of his defense, there’s no sign that Simmons was a liability. Simmons tends to get the 1-2-3 punch of the fact that (1) he has a poor defensive reputation, (2) he played for a team that won before he got there, underachieved with a lot of talent while he was there, and won after he left, and (3) so many of the great catchers played for so many winning teams that we tend particularly to equate a catcher’s skills with his team’s success.

Perhaps he did contribute to the club’s attitude problem in the late ‘70s, but many of those Cardinal teams were not as strong across the board as their handful of stars would have you think, and it’s worth noting that Simmons did, outside of his prime years, contribute significantly to a pennant-winning team in Milwaukee. To truly appreciate Simmons, you need to sit back and read the rest of this list—catchers who bring as much to the table as he did, year in and year out for a decade without injuries or off years, are extremely hard to come by.