Greatest catch of all time?

Absent the importance of the game, the best one I ever saw was Yaz (for the moment) saving Billy Rohr's no-hitter in April of 1967. There's a great still photo of it somewhere and, if I could post pictures of it, I would.

 

You forgot:

Jeffrey Maier vs. Baltimore, '96.

 

I agree that it is now an afterthought in the short-attention-span theater, second-place-is-first-loser mentality of our idiotic culture.

We simply are too impatient, and we routinely sacrifice intelligent discourse to meet this end.

But, it is the greatest catch, all factors accounted for, that I have ever seen.

Michael, over the shoulder catches aren't that difficult. Rarely do you see a major leaguer botch such a grab. A full run vault up the fence, where you catch the ball between 12 and 13 feet above the ground.... catches where the ball is closer to the wall are routinely botched because of improper positioning or a mistimed jump.

 

I'd love to get a anonymous ballot of Edmonds, Griffey, Jones... all major league outfielders in spring training to ask what catch was more difficult.

 

I saw the thread title and was thinking Lynn Swann on the sideline in Super Bowl X. And Cris Carter used to make amazing catches regularly ...

Oh, we're talking baseball. Chavez's catch last night was fantastic, but I've never seen anything as good as Matthews' catch earlier this season. That was unreal.

 

Greatest catch of all time? No contest:

 

How about Bobby Richardson snaring Willie McCovey's line drive to end the 1962 Series? San Francisco had the tying run on third and the winning run on second with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7. How's that for clutch?

 

Russ Hodges' call on the Mays catch was nearly as overplayed as the call on Thomson's home run. And while Brooks made some plays in the '70 Series, he also made some of them in their 1966 sweep of the Dodgers.

I'd get a little more pithy about it, but Hank_Scorpio and Hockey_Goon would have a conniption.

 

Hands down the Edmonds catch in KC. Edmonds' wall crash cements gamer status
ST. LOUIS — He was the last man standing in the clubhouse as the clock bled toward midnight. No teammates, no trainers, no press. Just Jim Edmonds in the middle of the room, alone with his battered body, surrounded by vacant stalls and the ghostly images of Cardinals jerseys suspended in air.
Everything must've hurt. His head. His wrist. His foot. His feelings.

"I've heard a lot of sarcastic comments about me diving too much," Edmonds said. "I've just had a lot of negativity in my career, and I really don't give a damn. As long as the guys on my team appreciate what I do, that's all that matters to me."

This was after a Game 4 gone bad, a game putting the Mets back in the NLCS. Edmonds was asked if his extensive body of acrobatic work had ever drawn an appreciative word from the likes of Willie Mays, the founding father of center fielders who turn fly balls into the greatest shows on earth.

"No," he said, "I think I've actually gotten the opposite over the years."

It's a trend Edmonds should've buried for keeps in the sixth inning Sunday night. The Mets had already exploded for six runs to take an 11-3 lead when Jose Reyes drove a ball to deep center, a ball that 99.99% of humanity would've let hit the wall.

At 36, Edmonds hit the wall instead. He hit it despite playing with an injured foot and whatever lingering effects he feels from the post-concussion syndrome that wrapped his late summer in a fog.

At the intersection of the two most exciting plays in baseball — a Jose Reyes triple and a Jim Edmonds wipeout — the center fielder decided the pain was worth the minimal gain. In the middle of a blowout, in the middle of a New School age of athletes preserving their health for the next absurd contract, Edmonds went running for an Old School cause.

He caught the ball, he crashed into the wall, he crumpled to the ground and gingerly placed his glove hand on his stomach. Minutes later, almost defiantly, Edmonds blasted his second homer of the series.

"I'm supposed to go catch the ball," Edmonds said. "That's my job, and I don't care about the score. If I don't catch the ball, I wouldn't still be in this league."

He's been performing these Evel Knievel stunts for 14 seasons, the big-league fences making like his Snake River Canyon walls. The launches and landings were always easier when he was a kid in Anaheim, Calif.

"The wall there was just the softest wall you could run into," Edmonds said, "and I'd run into it full speed. That gave me the attitude where I didn't have any fear of really getting hurt. But those walls have all gone away now. There's cement behind those pads and the pads aren't really thick."

So Edmonds is asked to explain the sensation of running full speed into the Busch Stadium wall. "It's like running into a parked car," he said.

Nobody has ever dented those parked cars like Edmonds, who has a shot to join Mays, Mike Schmidt and Ken Griffey Jr. as the only men to hit at least 400 homers and win at least 10 Gold Gloves.

You could argue that Mays was the better center fielder, and that Tori Hunter is the best at Spider-Man-ing the walls. You could even argue that Edmonds, right now, is the second-best center fielder in the NLCS, a half-step behind the younger Carlos Beltran.

But you can't survey Edmonds' prime and reduce him to a showboater who hams it up for ESPN producers desperately hunting for late-night clips. Grizzled scouts and coaches who have whispered about Edmonds' allegedly over-dramatic lunges likely choked on their pretzels and cigars when the Cardinals center fielder took one for the team in an eight-run game.

Under any circumstances, never mind those framing Reyes' deep fly, no conscience-free stylist would ever imperil a recently concussed brain.

The Game 4 catch might not even crack Edmonds' top 10 and sure doesn't equal his signature 1997 catch against the Royals' David Howard, the one that left Edmonds in a fully extended dive with his back to the plate and his head aimed at the wall, the one umpire Dave Phillips would say made Mays' 1954 World Series catch "look routine."

But this latest catch said something that needed to be said: Nobody can fake running into a parked car in an 11-3 game.

Ian O'Connor also writes for The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News.

 

That ball was hit right at him, Double J.
If Richardsn didn't get the glove up, he's probably dead. He didn't have to move anything but his glove...great reaction, not a great catch.

 

Considering the circumstances, it was better than Mays' catch. That was a four-game series sweep. This was Game 7, tie game, sixth inning. This was over the wall on the dead run for a double play. It was a line drive, not a high fly ball. That never happens.

In people's minds, nothing will ever top Mays' catch because of the nostalgia that's now attached to it.

 

great thread. we all know you can never definitively answer the question. but if we're having the discussion, i think you have to define the parameters. namely, does the context matter? if chavez does what he did last night but in a 10-0 drubbing in august while his team is in third place, is that less great? if you say yes, then why? chavez still did exactly the same thing.

i agree that chavez's catch was incredible but we see catches like this once or twice a year. gary matthews, jr., had one earlier this year but i don't think he threw anyone out in the infield (but you said greatest 'catch' not greatest play).