Why greatest catcher in MLB history Johnny Bench 'didn't reach the level I could have'

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida – When ex-con ballplayer Harry Decker invented the first catcher’s mitt around the time pitchers started throwing overhand in the 1880s, it didn’t look like much more than a leather pancake with a dent in the middle.

For eight decades or so, the biggest change in how that piece of equipment looked and how it was used involved thicker padding.

Then Johnny Bench broke his thumb again.

"And I thought, ‘This is stupid,' " Bench said.

After two broken thumbs from foul tips in three seasons, the Cincinnati Reds’ legendary catcher switched to a newly designed hinged catcher’s mitt, pulled most of the padding out, started tucking his throwing hand out of harm’s way, and then started picking balls out of the dirt and doing things athletically at the position that had never been seen.

To be fair, Chicago Cubs catcher Randy Hundley, one of the league’s best defensive catchers, already had used the new mitt first, the year before, but nobody did what Bench did with it.

"He was probably the best all-time as far as what he did and how he transformed catching," said San Francisco Giants manager Bob Melvin, who tried to follow Bench’s lead during a 10-year big-league catching career that started two years after Bench retired.

"It was groundbreaking."

When the legacy of the Big Red Machine is measured for its impact on the game and lasting power 50 years after the 1975 World Series championship, no other player among its all-time lineup of superstars can claim greater individual impact on how the game has been played since – even a half-century later.

Pete Rose’s hitting, versatility and “Charlie Hustle” aggression on the field – and transgressions off the field – left indelible marks on MLB history. Joe Morgan and Tony Perez are in the Hall of Fame. George Foster was an MVP.

But so outsized was Bench’s influence on the most important non-pitching position on the field that Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Brennaman describes him as “the greatest player at a given position in the history of the game.”

Nobody in the game argues with that. Even catchers. Especially catchers.

"It defined the position for everybody," said Seattle Mariners manager Dan Wilson, the Reds’ 1990 first-round draft pick who later became an All-Star catcher with Seattle.

Johnny Bench early career path rivaled Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle

The catching revolution started almost as soon as Bench’s career did. He was entrusted with calling every pitch of every game he caught from the day he was drafted in 1965, was handed the reins of a veteran pitching staff as a rookie two years later, and when he had to figure out a better way to do things because “my big thumbs are going to stick out here and break,” the Binger High School valedictorian tailored the toughest position on the diamond to fit his body and skills.

And from eye test to metrics, history suggests nobody has done it better.

"I mean, he’s called up at 19 years old," said Rangers manager Bruce Bochy, another former big-league catcher and Bench disciple. "At 19, he was running things. That’s what’s amazing."

But here’s the thing: That’s not even close to the most amazing part of Bench’s story and legacy.

In the five full seasons plus 26 games that he played in the majors before he turned 25, Bench earned five All-Star selections, five Gold Glove awards, a Rookie of the Year award, two MVPs, two league home run titles, drove in 512 runs, hit 154 regular-season home runs, four more in the postseason and played in 12 World Series games.

Forget the comparisons to all-time catchers.

The 6-foot-1 power athlete from small-town Oklahoma was on a career offensive path that rivaled Willie Mays and Bench’s idol, Mickey Mantle, with as many MVPs as the two others had combined before age 25 and eerily similar power numbers.

Combine that with the things Bench did behind the plate, along with the workload, and that career arc starts to look like the stuff of unicorns and Ohtanis.

Until the day they saw the spot.

Until the day a few months later they took some of Johnny Bench away.

“I didn’t reach the level I could have,” Bench said. “It sounds insane.”

'It was never Johnny Bench anymore'

On his way to a second MVP award in 1972, a lesion on Bench’s right lung was discovered on an X-ray during a followup to a routine examination in August, and 53 years ago the only way to determine whether it was malignant was exploratory surgery.

Bench kept it to himself and played the rest of the season and postseason, including a tying ninth-inning home run in a winner-take-all Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, knowing potential life-altering surgery was scheduled for December.

There was no such thing as arthroscopic surgery in 1972. The best the doctors could do for the famous ballplayer and his chances to play again in a best-case outcome was to limit the massive length of incision – to a foot or more around his chest to his back (instead of all the way to his neck), through bone, muscle and nerves.

The lesion was benign. And Bench lives a healthy life on a golf course to this day with his family.

But Bench can never know what might have been.

“I always describe greatness as here,” he said, holding his hands up, a few inches apart. “That’s the difference in greatness. That’s the ball being hit here or out here. Because I could get to that.”

After recovering from the invasive, damaging surgery, “I was much shorter" to get to the ball, Bench said.

“I was good,” he added. “But it was never Johnny Bench anymore.”

Tony Perez on Johnny Bench: 'He was the best'

Good? Bench made nine more All-Star appearances, including the following season (amid occasional boos as he struggled to compete again). He won five more Gold Gloves, had two more top-4 MVP finishes, another top-10, four more 100-RBI seasons and was the World Series MVP in 1976.

Bench finished his career with single-season and career records for home runs for a catcher. But the days of 40 homers were gone well before he had a chance to leverage his athletic prime. Bench hit 30 twice after the surgery.

Insane? That Bench accomplished what he did after the surgery might be as impressive as any of the unicorn stuff he did at 19 or in his early 20s. 

Nobody knows more than Bench what he lost on that operating table. And nobody knows more than Reds teammates how much they needed what he gave them after that as that team went from Big Red Machine in name only to the two-time champion that secured its place in history.

“Johnny was the captain, not only with the pitchers,” Perez said. “Johnny was the guy Sparky (Anderson) gave the signs to, so Johnny was the captain of the infield. He was great."

Perez added: "People ask me, 'Who’s the best catcher you’ve seen?' Johnny Bench. I know a lot of good ones. A lot of guys are great. I played with him, and he was the best."

Even if Bench knows he never was able to reach the career ceiling the pre-surgery years promised.

“It’s not egotistical. You could talk about this or that or whatever, but I’ll always talk about the team first,” Bench said. “Individually, I had a thing called inner conceit. I was better than the situation.”

That much was clear when Bench was 19 and challenged veteran pitchers as a rookie when they didn’t have their best stuff or tried to shake him off. Or told the manager, Dave Bristol, that same season he needed to move up to cleanup for a team that wasn’t driving in enough runs.

When Bench hit that playoff home run off the Pirates’ Dave Guisti to help send the Reds to the 1972 World Series even as he wondered if he had lung cancer. And when Bench hit three home runs and drove in 10 across 11 World Series games to help win back-to-back championships years after the surgery stole so much of his power.

Because when the moment was big, Bench still believed he was bigger.

“That was where I wanted it,” he said. “Pete would always say, 'You could hit .300.' I’d say, 'You hit .300, I’ll drive you in 100 times.' That’s what I lived for. I was cocky. That’s what it is. It’s all confidence."

High school tragedy molds Bench

The funeral for teammates lost in the bus crash was held at the school auditorium in Binger, Oklahoma, in April 1964.

“I wouldn’t go close to a casket,” Bench said.

Bench hurt his shoulder in the rollover of the bus carrying the Binger High baseball team. He also helped save a teammate by following advice he remembered from his dad, who had driven a truck, to get to the floor of the bus, pulling the other boy with him.

Bench was 16, a junior in high school, his life full of possibility, his mind filled with questions impossible to answer.

“I became very phlegmatic in a lot of ways, I guess,” he said. “I realize that these things are going to happen in our lives. And what we have to do and how we have to handle it after that is the way we turn our lives into what we need to be."

And then came the night barely two years later when the headlights of a drunk driver in one of those big Oldsmobile 98’s sped toward Bench’s Ford Galaxie 500 on the wrong side of a four-lane highway.

Bench swerved, and the next thing he remembers was waking up as he was rolled into the ambulance.

“The doctor said, 'Son, you’ve got the biggest bones I’ve ever seen in my life. You’re the only person I know who could ever walk out of here. But you’re going to pay the price,' " Bench said.

Bench’s car was totaled, his body intact. His character galvanized by a stolid, stoic outlook that belied his youth.

“I became a fatalist in some ways,” he said. “That’s just what it is.

“Life happens. And life doesn’t happen.”

Sparky Anderson found ally in catcher

By the time Sparky Anderson got the Reds job as a no-name, first-time big-league manager ahead of the 1970 season he found what might have been the ideal ally on his roster in the toughened, tested, “cocky,” All-Star, “ground-breaking” catcher.

A uniquely equipped, emotionally mature, young leader at the forefront of what became a four-man Alpha-dog crew that also included Perez, Rose and Morgan.

“We set a standard,” Bench said. “Not only professionalism but being on the field and the way we managed ourselves.”

Anderson identified Bench immediately, bringing him into the fold for team decisions from in-game pitching moves to personnel decisions.

In turn, Bench’s first message to Anderson when he got the job: “I said, ‘You keep your feet out of the aisles on the plane and don’t trip anybody, and we’ll make you a star,’ “Bench said.

Anderson used to tell that story more colorfully.

Whatever the language in the moment, it speaks to a relationship that grew beyond any Anderson had with his players, the running joke around the team that they were more father and son than manager and player.

Never mind that Bench’s prophecy came true.

“Sparky was my mentor, my friend,” Bench said.

It turned out to be a key building block to the ascension of a team that went from broken October promises in the late 1960s and early ‘70s into a team for the ages in the mid-70s.

Bench set a tone as much as anyone on that team for cool in the heat of the brightest stages, reinventing himself as a player in his mid-20s even after reinventing the position to suit his strengths, and, mostly, by playing whether creeping arthritis, bone chips or a the powerful shoulder barked.

“The definition of a leader is somebody that is on the field, is on time, doesn’t ask for any other quarter,” he said. “And when it was time to be on the field, Pete, Joe, Tony and myself were there. If we were on the field, they had to be on the field.”

Bench set standard for MLB catchers

Until Bench started one-handing the position – while still finding a way to get rid of the ball quickly enough to throw out baserunners more often than his peers – young catchers were taught to keep the throwing hand close to the mitt and to block pitches in the dirt with their bodies and chest protectors. That meant shifting their bodies to get in front of outside pitches in the dirt, not backhand them.

And the brighter his star got, the more Bench aggravated a generation of coaches trying to teach young catchers.

Not to mention the occasional NBC broadcaster with big-league catching pedigree.

“(Joe) Garagiola said I was going to ruin catching,” Bench said. “Because, well, yeah, I backhanded balls out of the dirt. I didn’t block them. But I was so good at it. It was just a natural instinct.”

And ambitious young catchers across the country watched with wide eyes, eager to follow. And ignore their coaches.

Bochy, the four-time World Series-champion manager who grew up in Florida and caught for parts of nine seasons in the majors in the late 1970s and 1980s, said he skipped classes in high school during spring training to go watch Bench play.

“Johnny was the guy," Bochy said. "I was a big Reds fan, a huge Johnny Bench fan. He probably inspired me as much as anybody to catch and wanting to do this.”

Melvin, the Giants manager, said: “Johnny Bench was everything to me. Every glove I had growing up was a Rawlings Johnny Bench glove.”

As a Tigers rookie for Sparky Anderson in 1985, Melvin got his first start in Seattle, and while game-planning with Anderson and starting pitcher Walt Terrell that afternoon, Bench showed up to talk to Anderson ahead of a national radio broadcast.

“It’s my first big-league game, and all I can do is just look at Johnny Bench,” Melvin said. “I don’t even think I heard the scouting report. That’s how much of a Johnny Bench fan I was.”

Missing the scouting report wasn’t as costly as it could have been, Melvin said, because the veteran Terrell called his own game, and the Tigers won.

“Great game for me. I got a couple of hits,” he said. “Hopefully, I impressed Johnny Bench that day.”

That’s the impact Bench had on catchers then, and to this day.

Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson has a framed, signed Bench jersey in his home.

“It’s an honor just to have been able to meet him and play in the same organization as him,” Stephenson said.

The position continues to evolve long after Bench’s 1983 retirement, with methods for pitch framing and recently popularized down-on-one-knee defensive stance.

In fact, he might have been one of the first to do that, too.

“I did that about my third game (in the minors). I got on my knee in Tampa, Florida, because the other catcher had gotten down on one knee,” Bench said. “Because the umpire’s always yelling at you, ‘Get lower! Get lower!’ Hell, I got big thighs. So I put my knee on the ground for a pitch.

“And I come back to the dugout and (manager) Jack Cassini said, ‘Don’t ever do that again! That makes you look lazy! I never want to see that again!’

“That was good because I couldn’t get up and down like that anyway.”

Talk about a legacy that continues as an unbroken thread more than a half-century later.

“There was so much mystique around him,” said Wilson, who had the chance to meet Bench as a young catcher coming through the Reds system. “To be able to have a conversation – even just to meet him – was huge.”

The 'bridge' that Bench built

Sit down for any length of time for a conversation with Bench and, as one writer put it, he might start to interview you.

On one recent morning, as the talk explored career, life, mortality and legacy, Bench recited favorite lines from a poem about the impermanence of fame and talked about the power of support systems and mentorship, even beyond baseball – within family and an eclectic circle of friends.

Then he quoted from the century-old poem, “The Bridge Builder”:

“In the dusk he crossed the swirling stream and when he got to the other side he built a bridge to come across.”

The rest of the parable insinuates the value of a bridge the builder will never use, having already crossed the stream.

“You look at guys and how they catch, and certainly the way they move the ball now,” Wilson said. “None of that would be possible without Johnny. There are rare athletes that change the game, and Johnny was certainly one of those that changed the game for catchers.”

It’s been almost 60 years since that last broken thumb. Fifty years since the Big Red Machine’s success secured a place in national sports folklore for Bench and the rest of that team.

And they still talk about what a kid from Binger did.

“I built a good bridge,” Bench said.

This story is part of an ongoing Enquirer series this summer examining the legacy of the Big Red Machine 50 years after the first of back-to-back World Series titles.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: How Big Red Machine legend Johnny Bench changed catcher position