MLB Articles, Opinions & Blogs

Jim Deacon McGuire – Possibly the Best Catcher Ever

Baseball, MLB article at Knup Sports

Jim Deacon McGuire was a strong armed catcher that played pro baseball for 26 years until his retirement in 1912. Some of his record stand today. He began playing in 1884 with the Toledo Blue Stockings.

He was a calm gentleman on and off the field. He was widely respected by everyone n the game.There re no reported incidences any wrongdoing on his part. He never got fined or ejected from a game. He was steady in his work ethics, sometimes for very bad baseball team.  He has been vastly overlooked by baseball historians. He played through aches and pains all of his career. In his career, he manged to break every finger on both hands at least. once but he kept playing.

 

 

Jim Deacon McGuire Stats

  • 1612 games caught
  • 143 double plays
  • 6856 putouts
  • 1860 assists
  • 1459 runner caught stealing

Since he caught for 26 years, he also allowed the most stolen bases at 2546

Look at it this way, he threw out 990 more runners than Johnny Bench.and he recorded 1062 more assists than Yogi Berra, His best season was 1895 when he caught a major league record 133 games and compiled a .336 batting average with 10 home runs, 97 RBIs and 17 stolen bases.

He played for 13 teams in his career and late manged 3 teams.


Full Name-James Thomas McGuire

Born- November 18, 1863 at Youngstown, OH (USA)

Died- October 31, 1936 at Duck Lake, MI (USA)

 

About the author– Tom Knuppel has been writing about baseball and sports for a few decades. As an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan he began with the blog CardinalsGM. Tom is a member of the United Cardinals Bloggers and the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. He also maintains the History of Cardinals website. More recently he has been busy at KnupSolutions and the primary writer of many sports at KnupSports and adds content at Sports 2.0. Tom is a retired High School English and Speech teacher and has completed over one hundred sportsbook reviews. He also can be followed on Twitter at tknup.

Feel free to contact Tom at tknuppel@gmail.com

 

To Top