Ted Simmons retired from Major League Baseball in 1988.
That was 33 years ago and he's just now going into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
It's great that his career is finally being recognized but it is long past due and that's a shame. Simmons was a worthy Hall of Famer in 1993, when he would have first been eligible to be selected by the BBWAA, and it's a crime against the sport that it took this long for people to finally recognize a brilliant career.
What is interesting to me is that it's the more modern measures of players - things like WAR and JAWS - that have taken a player from a couple of generations ago and shed light on his accomplishments. Based on Jay Jaffe's JAWS system (rankings and an explanation of JAWS can be found here) Simmons ranks 11th all-time among catchers and was more like 7th or 8th at the time he retired.
So why didn't voters select him when they had the chance?
Well, that's the era that used "counting stats" as the sole source of determining a player's candidacy. In fairness, the sabermetric explosion hadn't really happened (it was in its early stages) in the early 90's so voters used those counting stats along with awards and what they saw with their own two eyes (which is always incomplete). You would think the folks covering the game would understand the impact a catcher makes pitch-by-pitch, game after game, but apparently they didn't. You don't have to be a Gold Glover to have a positive impact on your team behind the plate, especially not when you're one of the best hitting catchers of all-time like Simmons.
What hurt him, certainly, were comments like these from Whitey Herzog from his books "White Rat: A Life in Baseball" and "You're Missin' a Great Game."
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“I liked Teddy. He is bright and intelligent and he played hard for me in 1980. If the National League had the designated hitter rule, he would have died a Cardinal."
“Teddy couldn’t catch, at least not on my club … He gave up a lot of passed balls and he couldn’t throw worth a damn.”
“Ted hit the ball like a son of a gun, was a fine person who played hard and cared about winning, but he had one major weakness as a ballplayer: poor arm strength.”
Back then narrative was all anyone really had when it came to catcher defense. There were no framing metrics, no blocking stats, no instant pop times and average velocity of throws coming out of the crouch. Everything was word of mouth back then and when the words come out of the mouth of someone like Whitey, well, that carries a lot of weight.
I'm not arguing that Whitey was wrong in his evaluation of Simmons because the key words to me in those quotes above were "not on my club." In other words, Simmons catching abilities didn't match up with Whitey's speed and defense philosophy. Simmons may not have been the catcher Whitey wanted - he had signed Darrell Porter to be his guy - but he was a solid catcher nonetheless, according to metrics like WAR that show Simmons was basically league average defensively.
A league-average defender, at the most difficult position in the sport, that also had some of the best offensive numbers of any catcher in history, especially at the time he retired, should be recognized. The catcher is involved with every pitch of every game he plays when his team is in the field. No other position carries that weight, physically or mentally, and the guys who can do that job every day while also hitting in the middle of the order are special and rare.
Interestingly, the case for Yadier Molina will be a similar one to make...just in the opposite direction. Molina is the league average hitter who happened to be one of the best defensive catchers of all-time and to me he's a no-doubt Hall of Famer.
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Simmons and Molina are two sides of the same coin. Both play(ed) the most demanding position in the sport, one an elite hitter and the other an elite defender and both were solidly competitive on the other side of the game. Both also have/had the reputation of being a smart, heady player.
Simmons finally gets his day, as Molina will one day as well, and they'll both have advanced analytics to thank for people better understanding the depth of their contributions.
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