You’ve read the headline and no, it’s not clickbait. It’s something that someone who was paid to watch baseball for a living said. Don’t shoot the messenger. But that’s a real quote about Johnny Bench. Yes, the same Johnny Bench who revolutionized modern catching, is in the Hall of Fame, and generally considered to be the greatest catcher of all time.
There’s a select group of former players who are not accepting of the current ways teams are having their catchers go about their business. There is only one catcher in Major League Baseball these days who catches without one knee down. And that has infuriated some old heads in the game who seem to think it’s leading to more passed balls and wild pitches (there is no data to back this claim up) and catchers need to get back to a full crouch to stop this epidemic that doesn’t appear to exist in reality. John Smoltz even brought it up during the NLCS broadcast on Fox and provided data that appears to be made up about the new catching stance that’s taken over the game in the past few years.
Mike Petriello of MLB.com did some digging, and just like the “no one wants to work anymore” stuff that you can find every single generation saying about the one that followed them for the last 150 years, he found one about what Johnny Bench did for catching and how it was “not for the best”.
The quote is from 1989. It was given to Peter Gammons at Sports Illustrated. It came from Birdie Tebbetts. He was an All-Star catcher four times in his career (in hindsight it’s a big “how?!” given that his combined WAR in those four seasons was 3.4, or roughly half that of Elly De La Cruz in 2024). After his playing career he was a big league manager for parts of 11 seasons, including five with Cincinnati (1954-1958 – he was fired after 113 games in 1958). In a weird but true stat – he had a winning record as a manager, with a .515 winning percentage. He also never finished better than 3rd place as a manager and he only did that once (1956, 91-63 with the Reds).
Bench would make his debut with Cincinnati in 1967. That was a year after Tebbetts managed for the final time in his career. He would later move into scouting, which is the job he was in when he spoke with Gammons about the current state of catching.
The modernization of the game has itself proved an enemy: “The catching fundamentals are terrible, starting with the new gloves that have made one-handed catchers out of everyone,” says Tebbetts. Until the Cubs’ Randy Hundley came along in the mid-1960s, all catchers had used stiff, unhinged, pie-plate gloves that necessitated the use of the right, or meat, hand to catch the ball. Hundley changed to a flexible model that was more like a first baseman’s glove.
Then along came Johnny Bench and Fisk with hands like Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Smith. “They changed catching, but not for the best,” says Tebbetts. “Too much reaching. Too much blocking of balls with their gloves instead of shifting their bodies. Too much backhanding. And. with the right hand way back [most one-handed catchers keep their meat hands behind their backs to save them from being injured], by the time most of these guys get the ball out of their gloves and are ready to throw, they’ve given the runner a couple of extra steps. Too often, when a scout talks about a good young defensive catcher, he’s talking about seeing the kid throw in infield practice. Catching’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”
There’s a lot to unravel here, but let’s just start with the most absurd thing – Tebbetts was a professional baseball scout who believed that players got A COUPLE OF EXTRA STEPS because catchers were keeping their throwing hand behind their back during the delivery of the pitch. That just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
The moral of the story is that everything used to be better than it is now. It’s rarely true, but in this case it is definitely not true.
Brett Kennedy opts for free agency
The Cincinnati Reds depth took a little bit of a hit in the pitching department. Brett Kennedy, who has pitched for Cincinnati in each of the last two seasons as a minor leaguer and has been called up to the big league club in each season, too, but didn’t take the mound this season when he was called up.
Kennedy, who turned 30 back in August, spent the second half of the season on the 60-day injured listed. He had struggled in 2024 before he wound up on the injured list but his final outing really went south as he allowed six runs while recording just one out. That bumped his ERA up to 7.74 on the season.
Back in 2023 he got back to the big leagues for the first time since 2018 when he was with the San Diego Padres. With the Reds he went 1-0 in five games, throwing 18.0 innings with a 6.50 ERA.
While Brett Kennedy wasn’t exactly someone that the team was relying on as a longer term solution, he and players like him do allow teams to keep veteran types around that they can call up and then feel comfortable designating for assignment to clear a roster spot whenever they need to and not be overly concerned that another team is going to claim them and leave the club without that depth that they may need in Triple-A.
The post Reds Notebook: Bench changed catching, but not for the best? appeared first on Redleg Nation.