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Known for big bat, Piazza was underrated defensively
- Updated: July 19, 2016
When Mike Piazza gets inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this weekend, you’ll hear plenty about the legendary offensive skills that launched 427 home runs and got him into 12 All-Star Games. That’s as it should be; Piazza is either the best hitting catcher in history or darn close to it, depending on how you measure such things.
What you won’t hear about very much about, in all likelihood, is what Piazza did behind the plate. Needless to say, his defensive reputation was less than stellar. Here’s The New York Times calling Piazza a “hard-hitting, poor-catching star” at the time of his 1998 trade to the Marlins. Here’s Sports Illustrated kindly calling him “not a smooth receiver” in 2000. If you were so inclined, you could find plenty of other similar stories from the time. The narrative goes that Piazza wasn’t much of a catcher, and that’s probably how he’ll be remembered: all bat, no field.
But as we know all too often, the narrative is hardly infallible. So let’s take the time to offer an important reminder as Piazza goes off to Cooperstown: There was actually more to like about his defense than you may have thought at the time.
That’s partially because we have new and better ways of looking at catcher defense now, and partially because there seems to be an unwritten rule that if poor hitting catchers must be good defenders, then the inverse must be true as well. It’s easy to remember Piazza launching homers and failing to throw out runners (a career 23 percent caught-stealing rate, when the league average was usually between 28 and 31 percent), but it was harder to see what he was good at.
Take, for example, pitch framing, which we now know to be a pretty important part of the game. The skill of presenting a pitch so that an umpire is more likely to call a ball a strike (or not lose a strike to a ball) has been around forever, really, but it’s never really been measured reliably until the past few years. That means that during Piazza’s playing career it was rarely discussed, and never quantified.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be measured, though. Last year, Baseball Prospectus — using gory math that you’ll be much happier not reading about here, though you’re …
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