Ranking the Best Catchers in Mariners Team History

Without any baseball actively going on, we’ve all got a bit more time on our hands. Sure, we can argue with Baseball America about their prospect rankings, how they got some right (#1 farm system overall) and some wrong (Kirby not in the top 100). We can also pester MLB Pipeline to get theirs out. You can peruse MLB Trade Rumors all you want… but there just isn’t that much actively going on. So what should Mariners fans do in the meantime?

Well… how about pulling every single season in Mariners history off of Fangraphs, adjusting players so they fit into just one position (or UTIL if they truly were), combining it all together, and taking a look at where players line up WAR wise throughout the history of the Mariners franchise.

Yup, that’s what I went ahead and did. It took a while, but I’m glad I have that document now, as it’s a lot of fun to look at. Especially when you see some random names on there that you’ve completely forgotten about.

So, I’m going to go through and look at the best players at each position based on FanGraphs WAR. I usually use Baseball-Reference, but Fangraphs makes it easier to pull franchise numbers. I’ll also be using WRC+, which stands for Weighted Runs Created, which you can get a solid explanation of from Fangraphs themselves.

I thought about starting with pitchers since they are “1” on the scorecard but moved them to the end so I can save the best for last. We’ll go around the rest of the field in scorecard order, which means we are starting with catchers.

There was a decent fight for 5th, and I thought it was interesting that Omar Narvaez almost made it. Even though he wasn’t in Seattle for very long, he still had a 1.9 fWAR. There are some guys from the olden days, like Bob Kearney, Bob Stinson, and Tom Lampkin, but the Mariners just haven’t had that many good catchers in their history. So let’s jump in and see who takes the #5 spot.