KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Buster Posey hit .311 with 22 home runs, 89 RBIs and an .854 OPS this year. He was worth nearly six wins above replacement level. It was the second-best season of his career, behind only his MVP campaign in 2012. The Giants do not have a more important everyday player, yet they are world champions for the third time in five years after a postseason run in which Posey had 69 at-bats without an extra-base hit.
As the playoffs wore on, Posey’s performance at the plate got worse and worse. He was 2-for-5 in the wild-card game, 7-for-18 in the division series, 4-for-20 in the National League Championship Series, and then 4-for-26 in the World Series, finishing with an 0-for-4 night in Game 7 that included a pair of strikeouts.
Even with those diminishing returns, Posey still was incredibly important to San Francisco — and that’s not just lip service paid by his Giants teammates.
“(World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner) and Posey are a pretty good combination,” said Alex Gordon, the Royals’ offensive star of Game 7. “They know how to pitch. Posey knows how to pitch hitters. I give both of them credit.”
As a team, the Giants had a 2.87 ERA in the playoffs, holding opponents to a .214 average. That speaks to the work done by the pitchers, of course, but the common denominator for the staff is that every pitch was thrown to the same catcher. Posey also had a deleterious effect on Kansas City’s vaunted running game — the Royals had only one stolen base all series, by Gordon.
When people talk about defense, they usually focus on the outfield or the infield, but catchers have a big part to play, as well. Posey’s contribution to a team whose success is based on pitching and defense cannot be underestimated, even when he’s not hitting, as he wasn’t in the playoffs.
“If you go back and look, his average always went down in the postseason,” said Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti. “I told him, on the middle of the field — I gave him a big kiss, and I said I know how tough it is. He wants to hit so bad, are you kidding me? The guy never took an inning off catching and calling pitches this whole month. You can see the damage it does to your average. … This guy is one of the great hitters, and he scuffled, but look what they’ve got to go through to call these games, four hours every night. I take my hat off.
“Posey’s a main reason (for the pitching staff’s success). Every guy that comes here, they can argue, ‘I should throw this, this, and that.’ Well, that guy in there, that you’re gonna be throwing to in about two minutes, he’s got a pretty good idea about what you need to do to get this guy out. So, it wakes them up.”
The Giants gave Posey more time off from catching this year than he has had in the past, using him at first base in 35 games, but he still was behind the plate for 929 innings. But because of how involved he is with the pitchers, Posey’s impact can be felt even when he is not behind the plate.
“He’s such a core guy, because he doesn’t look at himself as just a hitter, or just a catcher,” said right-hander Matt Cain, who missed most of the year due to elbow surgery. “He looks at himself as a teammate and a guy that wants to help out guys. He can be brutally honest, which is good for us, because we need to know. He’s back there every day, seeing what we’re doing, seeing what we’re throwing, and that’s how we have to learn.”
Posey gets a benefit from getting to deal with many of the same pitchers year in and year out, as the Giants have had remarkable stability in their staff. At the same time, the pitchers have been able to work with him to keep getting better all the time and make their best pitches at the best times. A player who was Rookie of the Year in 2010, and still is only 27, commands the kind of respect often reserved for 15-year veterans.
“He’s a big reason why we do what we do,” said Jeremy Affeldt, a bullpen cog for each of San Francisco’s three championship teams, and the winning pitcher in Game 7. “He’s a very smart game caller. Sometimes he doesn’t always call it by the book, but he reads swings. He’s a good hitter, he understands hitting, and to be able to do what he’s done — there’s no coincidence that we’ve won three world championships and he’s been behind the dish for the last pitch of every single one. Our trust in him, he’s earned that trust, and I wouldn’t want anybody else behind that dish.”