You’ve learn the headline and no, it’s not clickbait. It’s one thing that somebody who was paid to look at baseball for a residing mentioned. Don’t shoot the messenger. However that’s an actual quote about Johnny Bench. Sure, the identical Johnny Bench who revolutionized fashionable catching, is within the Corridor of Fame, and customarily thought of to be the best catcher of all time.
There’s a choose group of former gamers who will not be accepting of the present methods groups are having their catchers go about their enterprise. There is just one catcher in Main League Baseball today who catches with out one knee down. And that has infuriated some outdated heads within the recreation who appear to suppose it’s resulting in extra handed balls and wild pitches (there isn’t any knowledge to again this declare up) and catchers have to get again to a full crouch to cease this epidemic that doesn’t seem to exist in actuality. John Smoltz even introduced it up throughout the NLCS broadcast on Fox and supplied knowledge that seems to be made up concerning the new catching stance that’s taken over the sport previously few years.
Mike Petriello of MLB.com did some digging, and identical to the “nobody desires to work anymore” stuff that yow will discover each single era saying concerning the one which adopted them for the final 150 years, he discovered one about what Johnny Bench did for catching and the way it was “not for the perfect”.
The quote is from 1989. It was given to Peter Gammons at Sports activities Illustrated. It got here from Birdie Tebbetts. He was an All-Star catcher 4 occasions in his profession (in hindsight it’s a giant “how?!” on condition that his mixed WAR in these 4 seasons was 3.4, or roughly half that of Elly De La Cruz in 2024). After his taking part in profession he was a giant league supervisor for components of 11 seasons, together with 5 with Cincinnati (1954-1958 – he was fired after 113 video games in 1958). In a bizarre however true stat – he had a profitable document as a supervisor, with a .515 profitable proportion. He additionally by no means completed higher than third place as a supervisor and he solely did that when (1956, 91-63 with the Reds).
Bench would make his debut with Cincinnati in 1967. That was a 12 months after Tebbetts managed for the ultimate time in his profession. He would later transfer into scouting, which is the job he was in when he spoke with Gammons concerning the present state of catching.
The modernization of the sport has itself proved an enemy: “The catching fundamentals are horrible, beginning with the brand new gloves which have made one-handed catchers out of everybody,” says Tebbetts. Till the Cubs’ Randy Hundley got here alongside within the mid-Sixties, all catchers had used stiff, unhinged, pie-plate gloves that necessitated using the proper, or meat, hand to catch the ball. Hundley modified to a versatile mannequin that was extra like a primary baseman’s glove.
Then alongside got here Johnny Bench and Fisk with palms like Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Smith. “They modified catching, however not for the perfect,” says Tebbetts. “An excessive amount of reaching. An excessive amount of blocking of balls with their gloves as a substitute of shifting their our bodies. An excessive amount of backhanding. And. with the proper hand means again [most one-handed catchers keep their meat hands behind their backs to save them from being injured], by the point most of those guys get the ball out of their gloves and are able to throw, they’ve given the runner a few further steps. Too typically, when a scout talks a few good younger defensive catcher, he’s speaking about seeing the child throw in infield observe. Catching’s a hell of much more sophisticated than that.”
There’s rather a lot to unravel right here, however let’s simply begin with essentially the most absurd factor – Tebbetts was an expert baseball scout who believed that gamers obtained A COUPLE OF EXTRA STEPS as a result of catchers have been preserving their throwing hand behind their again throughout the supply of the pitch. That simply doesn’t cross the sniff take a look at.
The ethical of the story is that the whole lot was higher than it’s now. It’s hardly ever true, however on this case it’s positively not true.
Brett Kennedy opts totally free company
The Cincinnati Reds depth took a bit of little bit of successful within the pitching division. Brett Kennedy, who has pitched for Cincinnati in every of the final two seasons as a minor leaguer and has been known as as much as the massive league membership in every season, too, however didn’t take the mound this season when he was known as up.
Kennedy, who turned 30 again in August, spent the second half of the season on the 60-day injured listed. He had struggled in 2024 earlier than he wound up on the injured checklist however his closing outing actually went south as he allowed six runs whereas recording only one out. That bumped his ERA as much as 7.74 on the season.
Again in 2023 he obtained again to the massive leagues for the primary time since 2018 when he was with the San Diego Padres. With the Reds he went 1-0 in 5 video games, throwing 18.0 innings with a 6.50 ERA.
Whereas Brett Kennedy wasn’t precisely somebody that the group was counting on as a long run answer, he and gamers like him do permit groups to maintain veteran varieties round that they’ll name up after which really feel comfy designating for project to clear a roster spot at any time when they should and never be overly involved that one other group goes to say them and depart the membership with out that depth that they might want in Triple-A.
