Best Offensive Catcher - Career

(Ranking Using Runs Created, Batting Runs & Runs Generated per 500 At Bats)

By Charles Rosciam

Who is the Best Hitting Catcher Ever? Given the career performances of such masked men as Yogi Berra, Johnny Bench, Mickey Cochrane, Bill Dickey and new comers like Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez, the answer is not easy to discern. Bill James, the father of sabermetrics developed a system to answer that question, as did Pete Palmer & John Thorn. Recently Jim McMartin proposed a simpler, more accessible system.

Bill James has given us Runs Created as a way to measure hitting. His original formula for Runs Created is [(hits + walks)(total bases)] divided by [AB + BB] has been replaced by increasingly elaborate ones that take into account more than hitting skills (stolen bases, for example). For example, James’s "technical version" of RC involves this formula:

Runs Created = (H + BB + HBP - CS - GIDP) (TB +.26[BB - IBB + HBP] + .52[SH + SF + SB])

Pete Palmer and John Thorn, based on their linear-weights solution, have proposed a measure of hitting they call Batting Runs. Batting Runs (see page 571 of the 5th ed. of Total Baseball) requires knowledge of 11 variables and 9 constants:

Batting Runs = (.47)1B + (.78)2B + (1.09)3B + (1.4)HR + (.33)(BB + HB) + (.30)SB - (.60)CS - (.25)(AB-H) - .50 (OOB)

Because both Runs Created and Batting Runs are not easily computable by the interested fan, Jim McMartin wanted to find an adequate measure of hitting that the average fan could use during the season. He was willing to sacrifice some degree of accuracy to gain a more user-friendly measure. Runs Generated is his solution to this problem. [For a complete presentation of McMartin's Runs Generated methodology See McMartin's Paper ]. Runs Generated is easy to compute. It involves only 4 variables (total bases, walks, at bats, hits) and 2 constants:

Runs Generated = (.35)(Total Bases + Walks) - (.25)(At Bats - Hits)

To satisfy all proponents of the three aforementioned systems, I have presented the career batting (hitting) rankings using all three systems, standardized to per 500 At Bats. I selected the 12 Hall Of Fame catchers, added 18 Notable (Not HOF) catchers, and threw in 8 current active catchers for a total of 38 catchers.

These cream of the catching crop guys were all ranked from 1 (best) to 38 (worst) for each individual methodology (Runs Created, Batting Runs, and Runs Generated). The following table lists the results of these rankings, shown in order of McMartin's formula.

Mike Piazza tops the list in two of the three ranking systems and probably will be on top in RC/AB after the 2000 season.. But, who is the second best, third, etc? One approach is to take all three systems and join them together into one overall ranking. The best method is to use a z-score that will "standardize" all three completely different scales into one nice score. The following table is the result of this "merger"