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Buster posey house11/29/2023 Posey contributed to more than a few of those wins: His 3.5 WAR ranked second among Giants position players (behind only the similarly resurgent 34-year-old Brandon Crawford) and fifth on the entire team (behind three pitchers he caught).Īnd then, shockingly, he hung up his spikes. As ever, his Giants followed Posey’s lead: Given only a 9 percent shot at making the playoffs in FiveThirtyEight’s preseason forecast, they proceeded to win 107 games - the best record that season. 889 OPS, the second-highest of his career. But he responded with a vintage Posey season: a. After Posey spent 2020 away from baseball during its abbreviated COVID-19 season, it was unclear how much he would be able to bring to the Giants in 2021. He was also at the forefront of the most recent - and maybe the most improbable - chapter of the Giants’ run. (You can probably guess what they ended up doing anyway.) Beating the odds in October again and again, San Francisco became just the ninth franchise ever to win three championships in a five-year span, and Posey was in the middle of it all. (They won anyway.) And the 2014 Giants were 14-to-1 to win the World Series on the eve of the postseason, despite their winning track record and another strong 5.1-WAR season from their catcher. (They won anyway.) The 94-win Giants of 2012 were 7½-to-1 to win it all going into the playoffs, in spite of Posey’s 7.6-WAR MVP season. The 2010 Giants were 10-to-1 to win the World Series even after Posey’s 3.9 WAR helped lead them to 92 wins and a division title. Much like their best player, those Giants teams didn’t always get the respect they deserved from pundits and prognosticators. Most total wins above replacement (as a position player or a pitcher) among San Francisco Giants players, 2010-2016 Posey was the backbone of the Giants’ dynasty Over that span, no player on the team added more wins above replacement (using the version) than Posey did: Using Bill James’s Dynasty Score system, we define San Francisco’s run as extending from 2010 (the first of the team’s three World Series wins in the decade) through 2016 (the team’s last playoff appearance before this year’s out-of-nowhere run). It was also no coincidence that Posey led the way for the Giants to build their unconventional dynasty of the early-to-mid-2010s. It was no coincidence that Giants pitchers carried an ERA 10 percent better than average with Posey behind the plate, stealing all of those extra strike calls. According to FanGraphs, only six other catchers 1 added more total pitch-framing value than Posey, whose framing alone was worth 129 more runs (or roughly 13 wins) than an average catcher. And his ability to frame strikes on the edges of the plate was probably his most valuable skill of all. Among the 299 catchers to log at least 500 innings since 1995, Posey ranks sixth in fewest passed balls per nine innings. While his career rate of gunning down would-be base stealers (33 percent) was only slightly better than the average for the post-strike era (29 percent), Posey was better at the less-flashy parts of the catching craft. Only seven other qualified catchers in MLB history can put the same note on their offensive resume.Īnd on defense, Posey was perennially one of the best in baseball behind the plate. 900 OPS only once (in his MVP year of 2012), but he was at least 8 percent better than an average hitter in all but one full season of his career, according to OPS+, finishing with a career batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and OPS at least 10 percent better than league average. At the plate, Posey never hit more than 24 home runs in a season and cracked a. Perhaps that was the nature of being a catcher - one of the most thankless roles in all of sports - and perhaps it was because much of what Posey brought to the Giants involved less-visible traits, such as consistency and a solid all-around skill set. Throughout his career, Posey had a tendency to fly under the radar relative to the other great players in the game. But rather than returning for an encore, the 34-year-old decided to hang up the cleats to spend time with his wife and four children, capping off a career that packed a lot of Hall of Fame-worthy brilliance into a short period of time. After missing the 2020 season, Posey had just put the finishing touches on a terrific comeback by helping to lead the Giants to the winningest season in the franchise’s long and storied history. When longtime San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey announced his retirement on Thursday, it marked the end of the line for one of baseball’s most unassuming great players - and a stunning end at that.
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