Baseball Remembers: Wally Schang

Timing is everything.

In the early days of baseball, catchers were expected to, well, catch. Their defensive abilities, and abilities to call a game and lead a pitching staff, were viewed as their primary contributions to a team. You saw that recognized all the time, as players like Bob O’Farrell and Mickey Cochrane were awarded MVPs despite being good-but-not-great hitters in the years they won. Seemingly every year, some banjo-hitting catcher got down-ballot MVP votes despite having a below-average OPS with no power.

• Jimmy Archer had three straight seasons, 1911-13, in which he received MVP votes despite OPS+ marks between 80 and 96 each year. In one of those years, 1911, Johnny Kling was traded mid-year and finished with a .212 batting average ad 62 OPS+, but finished 27th in MVP voting anyway.

• In 1912, Bill Carrigan of the Red Sox batted .263 with no homers and an OPS+ of 85. He not only finished 18th in MVP voting but was hired to manage the Sox that offseason.

• The 1914 St. Louis Browns were pretty bad, finishing in 5th place with a record of 71-82-6, but they managed to have three players receive MVP votes. Two of them were Tillie Walker and Del Pratt, which made sense because they were their two best players and hitters. The third was catcher Sam Agnew, who finished 23rd even though he batted .212 with a 63 OPS+ while guiding a pitching staff that allowed the 3rd-most runs in the league.

• Hank DeBerry was 22nd in MVP voting in 1924 despite batting .243 with an OPS+ of 80. That was the same year Hank Severeid had an OPS+ of 91 but was 6th in MVP voting in the American League. It should be known as The Year of the Overrated Hanks.

• The next year, Ray Schalk tied for 12th in the AL MVP voting with an OPS+ of 86, while Benny Bengough was 24th with an OPS+ of 60.

You get the idea. This wasn’t an absolute rule, of course, and there were good-hitting catchers who were also recognized, but generally they were appreciated more for things that didn’t show up in their stat lines.