First Gloves: Jim Hegan

At first glance at the back of his baseball card, Jim Hegan didn’t look very valuable.

• He batted .228 for his career, and never hit higher than .249 in a full season.

• He hit only 92 total homers in 17 seasons, with a high of just 14.

• He was almost comically slow on the bases, being thrown out in 24 of his 39 career steal attempts.

• In any offensive category he was only in the top-10 in the league 12 times, and 5 of them were in intentional walks because he always batted eighth in the lineup, just ahead of the pitcher. Three others were for striking out a lot.

Sure his defense was good, but there weren’t any Gold Glove Awards for most of his career to celebrate that part of his game, and they didn’t put assists and putouts on baseball cards. His teams were always good, and he was a constant for them, so it brought him enough notoriety to get his own signature-model catcher’s mitt, but few would have called him the best catcher in the game. This was the era of Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra after all.

It’s hard to read Jim Hegan’s signature, but that’s one of his model gloves.

And yet Jim Hegan was a five-time All-Star, and got MVP votes a couple of times, and in 11 seasons as Cleveland’s primary catcher they only had a losing record in his first one. In 10 of them the team’s pitching staff was in the top half of the league in ERA while throwing mostly to him, and in 6 of them their ERA was the best.