NTT72USA, Johnny Bench Statue at Great American Ball Park, CC BY-SA 3.0
Catcher might be one of the most difficult positions to play in all of sports, and certainly in baseball, as it is both physically taxing (squatting behind the plate for three hours while wearing heavy equipment) and mentally demanding (calling the pitches, managing runners on base, etc.). Given the heavy responsibilities bestowed upon the catcher, the focus for most baseball teams is to have a great defensive backstop, with any offense being icing on the cake; as such, this makes a catcher who is both offensively and defensively gifted a bit of a unicorn and thus, extremely valuable. Throughout the history of baseball, there have only been a select group of catchers who have excelled in both facets of the game, and unsurprisingly, most of them are Hall of Famers. When it comes to the discussion around the greatest catcher ever, chief among the handful of contenders includes Johnny Bench, one of the engines of Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” in the 1970s, and Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, who backstopped the New York Yankees dynasty of the 1950s and 1960s and is remembered as much for his quirky Berra-isms as he was for his play. In comparing the careers and achievements of the towering Bench and the diminutive Berra, the question is:
Who was better – Johnny Bench or Yogi Berra?
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