Jonathan Lucroy’s 2014 season is the first installment of the Brewers All-Time Team series
We’re going to be starting a series that will run for a few weeks that we’re referring to as the Brewers All-Time Team. The catch here is that it’s not based on any individual’s career, but it is a Brewers team built of the best individual seasons at each position in the history of the franchise. A couple of arbitrary rules I used while putting the team together:
- Players cannot be used more than once. For example, you couldn’t use Robin Yount’s 1982 season at shortstop and his 1989 season in center field.
- To qualify for a position, the player must have played more games in the given season at that position than at any other. For example, I can’t use Paul Moltior’s 1987 season at third base, because he played 40 games as a third baseman and 58 as a DH.
These guidelines make for a few interesting choices, and in at least one case there’s a situation where a player makes the team with a season which is not actually his best, but which allows for the best overall team.
I chose to do the eight positions on the field plus one starting pitcher and one relief pitcher. There’s no DH, which I’ll get into when it becomes necessary to address.
Have fun. Catcher is up first.
Catcher: Jonathan Lucroy, 2014
153g, .301/.373/.465, 131 OPS+, 53 2B, 13 HR, 69 RBI, 66 BB, 6.4 bWAR, 7.4 fWAR
By 2014, Jonathan Lucroy had already established himself as an All-Star-level player, even if he hadn’t yet made an All-Star Game. It was a little bit of a surprise. Lucroy wasn’t a non-prospect—he was in the Brewers’ top 10 in the seasons leading up to his debut in 2010—but he wasn’t a top 100 guy, and his minor league record was not exactly indicative of a player who would turn into an above-average major league hitter. The Brewers also had another catcher in their system at the time, Ángel Salomé, who was about the same age and who many thought would be better than Lucroy.
But Salomé didn’t work out, Lucroy played solid defense in a platoon role in his rookie season, and by his second season in 2011, he became the team’s clear starter. He showed a bit of a promise with the bat that year, too, and started 11 of the team’s 13 games in the postseason.
In 2012, Lucroy surprised everyone by becoming not just an average hitter, but a good one. I’m sure there were people out there who thought Lucroy could be a fine hitter in the majors, but I doubt there were many who thought he could hit .320 with power. That’s exactly what he did in 2012, though he missed two months in the middle of the season with the infamous luggage injury. He had a 132 OPS+ in 96 games, and then he had a 116 OPS+ in 147 games in 2013 and led the team with 82 RBI. Meanwhile, he was at the vanguard of the “pitch-framing” movement, which led some evaluators to rate him as one of the league’s best defensive players, and Fangraphs felt his 2013 season was worth 6.6 WAR.
That brings us to 2014. It was, in general, a season that Brewers fans try to forget; they had a 6.5-game lead on July 1 and still led the NL Central in mid-August but collapsed down the stretch and ended up losing the division by eight games. For Lucroy, though, it was a season to remember. He hit .301 (and was as high as .341 in mid-June), got on base at a .373 clip (thanks to a career-high 66 walks), and slugged .465, which translated to a 131 OPS+. He led the majors with 53 doubles, which tied Lyle Overbay’s (still standing) team record and more than made up for the fact that he hit only 13 homers. He also played what Baseball Reference’s dWAR considers the best defense of his career, and he finished the season with 6.4 WAR via BRef and an even more impressive 7.4 via Fangraphs.
Lucroy was the NL’s starting catcher in the All-Star Game and he finished fourth in MVP voting, the best-ever finish for a Brewer catcher. It was a historic season in another sense: Lucroy’s 53 doubles are, by far, the most ever for a catcher: among players who played at least half of their games at catcher, Lucroy had six more doubles than second place (Iván Rodríguez had 47 in 1996). Only two other players—Yadier Molina in 2013 and Joe Mauer in 2010—had even 43 doubles in a season in which they played half their games at the position. (If you’d like to be picky about it, Lucroy did play some first base but he also broke the record for “doubles hit in games in which a player caught” on the second-to-last day of the season.) Lucroy also won the Fielding Bible’s award for the league’s best defensive catcher (the NL Gold Glove went to Molina).
Injuries led to a down season in 2015, but Lucroy got off to a good start in 2016 before Milwaukee decided to capitalize on his trade value. They shipped him to Texas at the trade deadline, a trade that brought them Lewis Brinson, the key piece in the Christian Yelich trade.
For the purposes of this exercise, Lucroy’s 2014 season is head and shoulders above any other catching season in team history, and it’s the peak of a four-year stretch in which he averaged 6.4 WAR via Fangraphs. That’s superstar stuff, especially for a catcher.
And while this isn’t what I’m necessarily here to talk about, he’s also undoubtedly the best catcher in team history, and it’s not close, a fact which some might find surprising. There have been a few big names at the position: Hall of Famer Ted Simmons, first overall pick B.J. Surhoff, and two others who aren’t Hall of Famers but who are among the best 30 or so players in the history of the position, Darrell Porter and Jim Sundberg. But none of those guys played with the Brewers during their prime; Simmons came in after his best years, Porter before, Surhoff never really hit until after he left Milwaukee, and Sundberg, while he had one of his best years as a Brewer, was only with the team for one season.
Also considered: William Contreras’s 2023 & 2024 seasons, in which he was the league’s best offensive catcher; Ted Simmons’ 1983 season, in which he hit .308 with 39 doubles, 13 homers, and 108 RBI; Ellie Rodríguez’s 1972, when he inexplicably had an OPS+ 45 points higher than he’d ever had before and played good defense; and that’s about it, really. (For the sake of your sanity, do not look at the players the Brewers trotted out at catcher between Dave Nilsson’s retirement in 1999 and Lucroy’s rookie season in 2010.)