Career points right to Hall of Fame

Over the 85 years of voting for baseball’s Hall of Fame, just 19 catchers have been inducted. It takes a special set of credentials, set apart from all other positions on the field, having as much to do with character as statistics.

Buster Posey, you are 100% qualified. Posey’s chances looked bleak after his 2018 hip surgery, which seemed to render him powerless as a hitter and satisfied just to make decent contact. When he took last season off, he seemed to vanish from the conversation altogether. It speaks to Posey’s talent and reputation that he has restored his case — a development as pleasantly convincing as the Giants’ ascent.

Speaking to a number of Hall of Fame voters this past week, I got the sense that the 34-yearold Posey is bound for Cooperstown. “His late-career renaissance has pulled him back on the radar,” said Scott Miller, who has covered the game on a daily basis for various outlets (currently the Sirius XM MLB Network) since 1987. “I think, yes, his all-around game and standing as one of the best catchers of his generation absolutely makes him worthy.

“I think he needs to boost his numbers some; 1,467 career hits and 155 home runs remain borderline light,” Miller said. “His best argument for immortality, of course, is helping lead the Giants to three World Series titles during his time. And that .303 lifetime batting average is impressive; only five of the enshrined catchers are over .300. I think this year is going a long way toward re-establishing Posey in the minds of voters who had started to discount him.”

(Note that the list of 19 Hall of Fame catchers includes three from the Negro Leagues — Josh Gibson, Biz Mackey and Louis Santop.)

The Athletic’s Jayson Stark, a Hall of Fame baseball writer who began working the beat in 1979 with the Philadelphia Inquirer and spent many years with ESPN, said he isn’t so concerned with the statistical context.

“It feels like he’s building a Derek Jeter-like case, in the sense that he’s been defined by winning, presence, leadership and professionalism from the day he first set foot in the big leagues,” Stark said. “And that counts for a lot. When a guy has been pretty much the gold standard at his position for a decade, he’s a serious Hall of Fame candidate. And that’s Buster.”

Very few players at any position made such immediate impact.

“Think about this,” former Dodgers first baseman Eric Karros said recently on a Fox baseball broadcast. “Over Posey’s first three seasons, as a catcher, he won Rookie of the Year (2010), got two championship rings (2010 and ’12), won a batting title (.336) and the MVP (2012), and got a $150 million multiyear deal. Nobody else checks all those boxes. It’s the best three-year start in history.”

The Giants went on to win their third title in 2014, and by that time, people were looking well beyond the numbers. From the moment he replaced Bengie Molina as the Giants’ everyday catcher (late May 2010), Posey had the look of an all-time great. Perhaps because he had been a pitcher in high school, and on occasion at Florida State, he had an innate sense of rhythm — how to identify it and maximize a pitcher’s stuff on a given night. To this day, you seldom see pitchers shake off his signs. He knows when to calm someone’s tattered nerves or offer a few choice words of motivation.

How important is that? Consider all of Posey’s work with the Tim Lincecum-Madison Bumgarner-Matt Cain core, and currently with an everchanging Giants staff that maintains its status among baseball’s best. Then recall the young Joey Bart having such difficulty with Johnny Cueto, an artist of the mound with a rhythm all his own. Add Posey’s consistently strong and accurate throwing arm, plus his knack for framing pitches; the Giants feel he creates seven or eight strikes a night, snatching borderline pitches into the corners of the strike zone. Add all of that up, and you have the essence of a great defensive catcher.

As a hitter, with an insideout swing that characterized some of the game’s most distinctive stars (think Will Clark or Mike Piazza), Posey burst onto the scene with a knack for the off-field stroke. Waiting just a split-second longer to unleash his swing, thus letting the ball travel just a little bit longer, Posey was consistently able to drive balls into the opposite field. At the same time, be careful pitching him inside; he could dead-pull it right out of the yard, most memorably with his grand slam off Mat Latos in Cincinnati during the 2012 NL Division Series.

When Posey had to undergo hip surgery, I thought back to a long-ago scene in the Yankee Stadium parking lot. Eavesdropping into a conversation between Reggie Jackson and a couple of beat writers, I heard the great slugger say, “It’s all in the hips. That’s where power hitting comes from.”

Post-surgery, essentially without his legs, there were times when Posey could do little more than tap grounders to the right side. The year off was beneficial in that sense; he’d looked noticeably stronger in spring training before deciding to pass on playing the season, and now we find him entering Saturday hitting .332, his best average since his MVP season, with more home runs (15) than he’s hit since 2015.

Who’s to say he can’t stay in that groove for two or three more seasons? A few Hall of Fame catchers have thrived at 34 and beyond, notably Yogi Berra, Carlton Fisk and Ernie Lombardi. But others were cascading toward the twilight at that age, including Bill Dickey, Mickey Cochrane, Roy Campanella, Johnny Bench, Pudge Rodriguez, Gary Carter and Ted Simmons, whose recent induction sets a favorable precedent for Posey. (Simmons owns a .285 lifetime average and was never known for his defense.) In fact, thanks to Bill Arnold’s “Beyond the Box Score” column, we learn that Posey’s 2021 OPS of .982 entering Saturday is the highest in history for catchers 34 or older.

As a Hall of Fame voter since 1990, I’ve made my judgments mostly on feel; how players struck me at the time, not in retrospect, and how others spoke on their behalf. As such, I loved my response on Posey from ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian, who knows and understands the game as well as anyone.

“Sometimes you look beyond certain numbers and see what really matters,” he wrote via email. “I’ll never forget watching the Giants’ spring-training batting practice in Scottsdale many years ago. Posey was in the cage, and I was standing next to Aaron Boone, my ESPN teammate and an accomplished major league player.

“‘Look at that move,’ he said reverentially, watching that little motion Posey made to bring the bat head into the hitting zone. ‘That is so beautiful. Do you know how many hitters can do that?’ Not many. Moves like that are reserved for future Hall of Famers.”