Have you noticed how certain teams just stack great players at certain positions, whether by scouting or training or chance? The Red Sox left field position is the iconic example, going Williams to Yaz to Rice to Greenwell. Toss in Duffy Lewis and Manny Ramirez if you like, but they’re hardly the only example: The Yankees have never lacked for great outfielders, the Dodgers for power pitchers.
For the Detroit Tigers, it’s catchers. The second half of their list is undistinguished, but their top six catchers can match up with anyone, and their top five were career Tigers who all sort to Detroit historically. Meanwhile the Angels are trying to fill out their all-time batteries with John Stephenson and Terry Humphrey. Particularly in the era when I came to baseball, Detroit’s Parrish to Nokes to Tettleton handoff, with Chad Kreuter’s great 1993 hardly registering, was an impressive run. But now I’m just spoiling my own list…1
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Robert Fick 2001
Chad Kreuter 1993
Raul Casanova 1997
Jim Price 1969
Jake Rogers 2023
Milt May 1978
Fick held a regular job in Detroit for two seasons: In 2001, he hit pretty well and mostly caught. The next year, he played right field but made the 2002 All-Star Team anyway as the team lost 106 games. Kreuter had another of those unlikely 1993 career years while Mickey Tettleton was playing a lot of first base and outfield. Casanova's .243-.308-.332 line would have been perfectly fine for a catcher in 1973 or 1985, but in 1997 that wasn't getting it done. Price was Bill Freehan's backup for a while; not a high-usage job, but he popped nine homers in '69. Rogers, the current holder of the starting job, is off to a slow start in '24. Among last season's 21 homers, he smacked four in three days on a road trip in LA. May had useful years in Houston, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, but for his Tigers tenure, he was a consistent .250 hitter with little power.
28 homers in 739 at-bats in his two years in Detroit at the start of the expansion era. Traded for Gus Triandos (who had one more good year left) and Whitey Herzog (who was about ready to turn manager), he spent three middling years in Baltimore and was done before they won the Series. So you could argue the Tigers won that trade, but since they finished under .500 in that one good Triandos year, does it matter? For all the time we spend analyzing player movement, probably more than half of trades end up like that. But so do half our Wednesdays.
A middling starter in Oakland, but a very good backup who ended up getting starter-level at-bats halfway between Nokes and Tettleton and acquitted himself well. Homered off Frank Viola in the '87 ALCS, which didn't help in the series but it's cool enough to tell your grandkids. Played a little outfield in his career, and saw time at all eight non-pitching positions in '87. His final one-game cameo (second base) came in August, so it doesn't seem like a late-season gimmick thing either. Sparky moved a lot of players around, Tony Phillips being his most notable Swiss Army knife.
McCann spent a couple of years with the Mets, so I'm familiar with his play, but as a hitter he'd already done his best work. Never really put it together in Detroit, either; he was something of a fits-and-starts player, useful for his occasional pop and decent glove, but rarely breaking through to the next level. You can see a bit of this in his 2017 splits: He hit 5 homers in April, but hardly anything else: .164 average. He hit .396 in July... with only two homers. When he did show both at once, in May and August, it wasn't that much: .720 and .728 OPS, respectively. The McCann Experience: Feeling like you're set at starting catcher, but never quite happy with the production from that position.
Sort of a proto-Jim Leyritz, spent half his time at first base and corner outfield, but way more valuable for his time at catcher. His best year was probably 1980, when he hit .274-.390-.449 in starter at-bats, splitting time with Hebner at first base. He caught a greater percentage of his games in '82 and hit a tad better (.860 OPS), so we'll use that one. Batted almost twice as often against lefties in his career (1300-772 AB), and his BA and OBP show pretty normal splits of 29 and 40 points, respectively. But he slugged .488 against portsiders, only .338 the other way. A lefty-masher, indeed.
Haase hit 36 homers in 674 AB between 2021 and 2020. To a non-Tigers fan, he's pretty tough to tell apart from Rogers and John Hicks, who we'll rate at first base. Even McCann is a similar model, all right-handed hitters with a bit of power. Lifetime lines through '23: .225-.276-.391 for Haase, .205-.277-.417 for Rogers, .236-.279-.401 for Hicks, .242-.294-.380 for McCann. If the same guy posted those stats in four straight seasons, we'd think him oddly consistent. Raise your hands, people outside Detroit: If I'd called them Jake Haase and Eric Hicks and John Rogers, would you have known I got it wrong? Honestly? Okay, if you're sure...
It's awkward historically that Ausmus had his best offensive years in Detroit and San Diego, as he's the closest thing to a career, first-team franchise catcher the Astros had during their time in the National League. Without him, they're left looking for a right-handed complement to Alan Ashby. In a world where heady catchers often advance to the manager's job, Ausmus might have been the most inevitable skipper this side of Mike Matheny; he took the Tigers to the playoffs in 2014, his first season, but posted only one winning record thereafter. Detroit lost Max Scherzer between seasons and saw Justin Verlander limited to 20 starts, illustrating once again it's more important to have guys to throw the ball than guys to tell them how to throw the ball.
Between his stints in Florida and Detroit, led two franchises to unlikely World Series berths. The Florida run was more dramatic, as Rodriguez only hit well one year out of three in Detroit, and it wasn't the Series year. 2004 was the last season of his career when he raked like the I-Rod of old, before entering his journeyman phase. Hit only .167 over the playoff run (8 for 48), but did homer in the LCS. Had a truly remarkable stretch in June of 2004: 43 hits in 86 at-bats, a .500 average with 13 extra-base hits, .733 slugging. Began a 14-game hitting streak in late May, and had 15 multi-hit games in June. Didn't start a game that month without getting a hit, as he only went hitless in the second game of a doubleheader against Philadelphia, 0-for-2 after entering as a pinch-hitter.
You remember those Topps All-Star cards with the league leaders on the back? Nokes made the front side of the AL home run list in their '88 set, cementing himself in my young mind as an exciting new slugger. The shine was practically off his brilliant future before I opened that pack of baseball cards: Nokes dropped from 32 to 16 to 9 homers, before being exiled to the Yankees in that brief era when the New York Yankees were a downtrodden team to which one could be exiled. Didn't hit lefties even in his great season (.207), then lost that side of the job to Heath, batting 38 and 43 times against the platoon split over the next two years. That may have been a platoon gone awry: New York batted Nokes 111 times against lefties in '91, and he slugged .459 enroute to a 24-homer resurgence.
Considering the difference in eras, Avila's stats don't look too different from Ray Fosse's: 714 hits versus 758, 397 RBI versus 324. Avila's got more power and walked a lot more, Fosse hit for a better average. But in the proverbial ballpark. Like Fosse, Avila had a big year in his first full season, then his play fell off as he suffered injuries. He remained a useful player for several years, but never recaptured the bottled lightning. Of course, Fosse wound up with the 70's A's dynasty and won two World Series rings, but Avila was with the Tigers when they went to the playoffs four straight years, so he had his chances as well. It's a lot harder now, and he hit .153 in the playoffs.
After an early-bird appearance in the Baltimore article, it's time for Mickey Tettleton: The Movie. Unleashed by the power-mad Tigers of the early 90's, he hit 95 homers over three years from '91-93, skipped a beat due to the strike year, then hit 32 more after moving on to Texas in '95. To be fair, he was only on-track for about 25 homers at the time they stopped play, and I don't hold with discounting '94's totals entirely. A switch hitter, he had essentially no platoon differential, hitting .241 both ways, .445 versus .458 slugging. You can see why the Rangers went out and signed him: He posted a .957 OPS against them with 22 homers, his second-most against any team.
The second-best catcher of the 80's after Gary Carter, and really the only AL catcher keeping pace with the flurry of big catching seasons in the NL early in that decade. One of those super-consistent players who makes it tough to chose a career year, he drove in 114 runs and hit 42 doubles in '83, but he also posted an OBP 25 points below the previous season, slugging 46 points lower. Basically Tettleton without the walks (which isn't nothing because the walks are a big part of Tettleton’s value) but with a better throwing arm: Retrosheet credits him with throwing out 39 percent of runners, against Tettleton's 29. Parrish also went one more year on his power peak, hitting 120 HR from '82 to '85.
Since we're doing this, Freehan topped out at 98 homers over five years, but doing that in the 60's—and particularly for a championship team in 1968—gets all kinds of extra credit. He was especially great down the stretch, hitting 16 homers from July 1st through the end of the year and tacking on another in the LCS. After his '67-68 peak, Freehan's performance fell off, but he posted a rally year in '71 and another (playing half the time at first base) in '74. Also played in eight All-Star games, homering off Steve Carlton in 1969.
To be honest, Freehan beats out Parrish mostly because I remember him as one of the catchers included in the late-NES era baseball video game, Legends of the Diamond. I don't think I even owned that game and may not have played it twice, but if the NES with the same staggering level of 8-bit detail that brought you Tecmo Super Bowl says the man was a Legend of the Diamond, who am I to argue?
On Thursday: Blue Jays catchers.
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