The Great Players (1)

Johnny Bench

Johnny Lee Bench was born in Oklahoma City on 7 December 1947. After his father had identified that his son’s best route to achieving their ambition of him becoming a major-league ballplayer was as a catcher, he was selected by the Cincinnati Reds in the 1965 amateur draft and made his major-league debut on 28 August 1967 against the Philadelphia Phillies. The following season, Bench succeeded Tom Seaver as the 1968 National Rookie of the Year, having completed the season with a .275 batting average, 15 home runs and 82 Runs Batted In. But it was as a catcher that Bench truly excelled. He is considered to be one of the best catchers the game has seen and was the pioneer of one-handed catching now prevalent in the modern game. Not one to mix his words, he once boasted “I can throw out any runner alive”. His career total of 10 Gold Gloves (won consecutively from 1968-77) certainly goes some way to evidencing such modesty. In 1997, he was voted by onto the Major League Baseball All-Time Team as Catcher over and above illustrious names such as Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella and Carlton Fisk. He was selected for the All-Century Team in 1999 and played in 14 All-Star games.

His best season statistically was 1970 when he won his first National League MVP (his second followed in 1972), leading the league with 45 home runs. He was also a key member of the Red’s 1975 & 1976 World Series Championship teams, which were fondly nicknamed “The Big Red Machine”, boasting a powerhouse line-up including Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan as well as Bench himself. Catchers are notoriously subject to enormous physical strain with knee injuries being particularly prevalent due to the awkward crouching position they assume behind the plate. Thus, in 1978 Bench began to play more and more regularly at first or third base to ease his knee problems. He retired in 1983, becoming a broadcaster and after-dinner speaker. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989 in his first year of eligibility, fulfilling the prediction of Ted Williams who had signed an autograph for Bench in 1969 which read “To Johnny Bench, a sure Hall of Famer”.