Mike Piazza has formally announced his retirement from Major League Baseball.  That makes now the perfect time to evaluate his rank among the all-time great catchers.  Everyone knows that he is the best-hitting catcher of all time.  Everyone also knows that he ranks among the worst all time in throwing out base runners, while he is generally considered competent in the other aspects of catcher defense. 

The Piazza debate therefore features the extremely difficult issue of how to value offense versus defense.  How do we reconcile this dichotomy?  To begin, let's look at the top 25 players in Adjusted Batting Runs who have played at least 500 games at catcher (courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com).  

We see that Piazza has over 150 more batting runs than the next catcher who has a comparable number of games played at the position and over four times as many as the 25th catcher on this list.  Other than Honus Wagner, there is no player as far ahead of his positional peers offensively as Mike Piazza is.  Not Babe Ruth, not Ty Cobb, not Rogers Hornsby.  Okay, maybe Ruth as a pitcher, but he only played 163 games there.

Scott and I, at least, give Piazza considerable credit for his offensive feats.  Here is where the best catchers of all time ranked in the summer of 2006 according to the Baseball Evolution staff:

Whereas Asher, Tony, and Richard unanimously placed Piazza as the fourth best catcher of all time behind catchers who were great both at the plate and behind it, Scott and I placed Piazza significantly higher.

I don't want to speak for the other staff members, but I don't think Piazza did much in the last season-and-a-half of his career to change our opinion of him.  Piazza posted a fairly impressive .830 OPS in the second half of 2006, playing half his games at Petco Park.  He then posted a fairly disappointing .727 OPS as a designated hitter in an injury-plagued 2007 campaign with the A's.  (Side note: Piazza can now add his name to the Top 10 Players to End their Careers with the A's list, but he cannot necessarily replace Frank Thomas on it, as we may have thought at the beginning of the season).

What may have changed is that Baseball-Reference.com now has defensive stolen base and caught stealing data for catchers going back to 1956.  Regrettably, this data does not help us compare Piazza to Dickey, Hartnett, and Cochrane, nor does it allow us to compare Ray Schalk to Ivan Rodriguez on defense.  It can't even fully analyze Yogi Berra, for whom no data exists prior to his 31st birthday.  What it can do is put one Johnny Bench on an even analytical keel with Mike Piazza, and this is useful, since most of us have Bench ranked neatly in between Dickey and Cochrane.  Find out where Piazza ranks with respect to Bench, and it becomes easier to determine where he ranks with respect to the other catchers on our list.     

Continue to Part 2