5 Baseball Cards of Forgotten All-Star Catchers
Tales of ballot stuffing, wrong names, and big mitts behind the plate
Today, Bruce Benedict turns 69 years old.
While you may remember Benedict as a mainstay of some mostly not-great Braves teams, did you remember that he actually made it to an All-Star Game twice?
Since catcher cards are always fun — provided they’re done right — I thought we could celebrate Benedict and his accomplishments with some other tools-of-ignorance cardboard.
Here then, are some great baseball cards of five catchers you may not remember as All-Star…but who were!
1955 Topps Ed Bailey (#69)
This card has a little bit of everything, especially for a Reds fan:
Smiling headshot
Classic, poised catcher action shot
Mr. Red sneaking into the scene
“Redlegs” as a snapshot when we were all afraid to be “Red”
Facsimile autograph sou you could at least pretend
As for Bailey, he was an All-Star six times, including twice in 1960 and once in 1957, when every Red(leg) was apt to get the nod.
Bailey hardly ever gets mentioned among good/great catchers, and a lot of that probably has to do with his playing in a small market 60-70 years ago while the New York and California teams made all sorts of headlines.
But his lifetime stats of .256, 155 home runs, 540 RBI, 27.2 WAR (Baseball Reference version), and all those All-Star nods argue that he was a star.
1966 Topps Earl Battey (#240)
Battey was roughly a contemporary of Bailey’s, logging 13 big league seasons from 1955 through 1967. Offensively, he topped out for the Twins in 1963, hitting .285 with 26 home runs and 84 RBI.
By then, though, Battey was already a two-time All-Star with three Gold Gloves under his belt. He’d garner four more All-Star nods before his career ended, and he even received MVP votes three times.
Along the way, Battey appeared on several cards, many of them pretty striking. I like this one as a prototype of the standard catcher’s glamor shot, gazing heavenward and making boys everywhere want to spend some time on the diamond.
It would make a great “movie poster” for an entire Topps product line, if you ask me.
1973 Topps Gerry Moses (#431)
Gerry Moses was a relative unknown to me before Bruce Benedict introduced me to him while I was putting this piece together. Heck, his first name is still an enigma — Topps called him “Gerry” through 1974, then switched up to “Jerry” in 1975 for his last card.
Baseball Reference and Wikipedia have him as “Jerry” today. For our purposes, though, it’s 1973, and that nifty card up there shows Gerry Moses.
As it turns out, Moses played in the majors for parts of nine seasons and hit a pretty catcher-like .251 with a total of 25 home runs and 109 RBI. He made his lone All-Star team in 1970, the same year he hit .263 with six home runs and 35 RBI in 92 games for the Red Sox.
That performance got him traded to the Angels in the offseason, and by 1973, he had also spent time with the Indians and the Yankees. That’s where we find him on this dusty, August-vibe baseball card. Moses looks like he’s been left high and dry on a play at the plate, still waiting for the ball to arrive long after the runner behind him slid in safe.
Of course, there could be other interpretations.
Whatever the actual story unfolding here, this is still a pretty nifty near-action card of a catcher who once made it to the All-Star Game — even if no one remembers. And even if Moses was on the move again after the 1973 season, first to Detroit, then to San Diego, then to the White Sox.
1982 Fleer Bruce Benedict (#429)
Our birthday boy hardly ever turned up in conversations about the best players in baseball, and maybe not even in convos about the best players on the Braves.
Still, Benedict played his entire 12-year career with Atlanta and was their primary catcher the majority of the time from 1979 through 1984. In two of those years, 1981 and 1983, Benedict also made the National League All-Star team.
Even during those years, though, his batting lines weren’t all that spectacular, save for a .298 average in 1983. Interestingly, Benedict’s career-high in home runs came during that strike-shortened summer of 1981, when he popped 5 Ruthian long balls.
All told, Benedict hit .242 with 18 home runs and 260 RBI over the course of his career. His real stock in trade, though, was behind the plate, where he posted a solid 9.9 defensive WAR and threw out 32% of would-be base stealers.
Benedict’s career spanned from the hobby dark ages of the 1970s into the three-company era that started in 1981, and then stretched all the way to 1989, when baseball cards grew on trees.
So there are plenty of choices when it comes to Benedict cards, but it’s tough to go wrong with the one above, showing the Braves catcher in his “office,” getting ready for another day at work.
Yeah, even though it’s a 1982 Fleer card.
1983 Topps John Stearns (#212)
Stearns made headlines in 1978 when he set a modern record by swiping 25 bases as a catcher, a mark obliterated by John Wathan four years later.
By the time Stearns set the record, he was already an All-Star, garnering his first nod in 1977, when he hit .251 with 12 home runs, 55 RBI, and nine steals for the Mets. He would be picked for the Midsummer classic again in 1979, 1980, and 1982.
That summer of 1982, or maybe that spring, is most likely when the shot for Stearns’ 1983 Topps card (above) was snapped. This isn’t really a game action shot, and Stearns’ uniform is too clean for my tastes when it comes to catcher cards, but this one’s hard not to like.
We get to see all of the tools of ignorance in one shot, an intense catcher-face from Stearns, and plenty of early 1980s sunshine to make us feel good about life for a little while. Plus the inset of a batting-ready Stearns, also looking like he feels pretty good about things.
This is the kind of baseball card that gives you a mood boost with a brutal beauty chaser any time you need some good diamond vibes.
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Did it surprise you that any of these catchers were All-Stars once upon a time? And do you know of any other “surprise” All-Stars?
As always, I’d love to hear your picks.
Thanks for reading.
—Adam
Chris Cannizzaro!
Jeff Newman. Made it in 1979. As a kid I was mad Thurman wasn’t there - but Newman had a big year in 1979 offensively but also was just under 50% throwing out base stealers. Later he was one of the guys who went with Tony Armas to Boston for Carney Lansford.