Time Traveler Tuesdays: Mets' Catchers of the 1960s: It's really the club's coming-of-age story
- Manny Fantis
- Apr 14
- 4 min read
If the story of the 1960s Mets is told in order, it makes the most sense from behind the plate. The decade opened with an expansion club so raw it lost 120 games, and it closed with a championship team that no longer looked improvised at all. In between, the men in the catcher’s gear changed from symbols of chaos to guardians of a contender.
The first catcher in Mets history was also the franchise’s first expansion-draft selection: Hobie Landrith. That choice carried a certain logic—build from the man who handles every pitch—but Landrith’s stay was brief. He appeared in just 23 games before a June trade. So the inaugural season quickly became a scramble behind the plate, with Choo-Choo Coleman, Chris Cannizzaro and others splitting time on a club that lurched to 40-120. Coleman, hitting .250 with six home runs in 55 games, gave the early Mets some badly needed personality and production, and his memorable nickname helped turn him into one of the first folk heroes of a famously battered team.
The next season pushed Coleman closer to center stage. He appeared in 106 games, more than any Mets catcher, but hit only .178. Jesse Gonder, in a shorter look, batted .302 and hinted that the position might someday offer offense as well as endurance. The club improved only a little, from 40 wins to 51, and the catcher’s spot still felt unsettled—less a plan than a continuing search for one.
By 1964, Gonder had become the most substantial early answer the Mets had found. He caught 131 games and hit .270 with seven home runs and 35 RBIs, while Cannizzaro, in 60 games, hit .311. For once, the position offered real offense. But the tradeoff was instability on defense: Gonder was charged with a league-leading 21 passed balls. The Mets still finished 53-109, and even one of their better catching seasons of the decade came with a reminder that this franchise was still learning how to build itself.
The carousel turned again. Cannizzaro reclaimed the regular job and caught 114 games, but hit .183. John Stephenson supplied four home runs in 62 games, Hawk Taylor added four more in only 25, and there was even a brief cameo from Yogi Berra, who appeared in four games at catcher. The whole arrangement felt distinctly early-Mets: veteran names, temporary fixes, flashes of usefulness, and another last-place finish at 50-112.
Then came the turning point. Jerry Grote arrived and immediately gave the position something it had mostly lacked since the franchise was born: permanence. In 1966, he caught 120 games and hit .237, numbers that did not make him a star but did make him a stabilizing presence. The Mets improved to 66-95, and for the first time, they avoided both 100 losses and last place. That mattered. The catcher’s spot was no longer a patchwork shift; it was becoming a foundation.
Grote held the job the following season as well, again catching 120 games. His batting average fell to .195, and the club was not yet a winner, but the important development was continuity. For the first time in the decade, the Mets were no longer auditioning a new primary catcher every few months. They had one. That alone made the franchise look more serious than it had in the chaos of its first half-decade.
The breakthrough came in 1968. Grote caught 124 games and hit .282, the best offensive season of his Mets years in the 1960s. J.C. Martin added depth in 78 games, giving the club a steadier secondary option than it had enjoyed in earlier seasons. The Mets climbed to 73-89, and Grote’s year was good enough to make him a Mets All-Star. By now the catcher’s story had changed completely: where the early Mets shuffled through possibilities, the late-1960s Mets could point to a real first-string catcher and credible support behind him.
And then everything the position had been moving toward arrived at once. Grote hit .252 with six home runs and 40 RBIs in 113 games. Martin appeared in 66 more, Duffy Dyer chipped in 29 appearances and three homers, and the Mets entered October with the deepest, steadiest catching group they had fielded all decade. In the World Series, Martin’s Game 4 bunt became part of club legend. Through it all, the indispensable figure was Grote, who caught every inning of the 1969 postseason as New York went 100-62 and completed one of baseball’s great turnarounds by beating Baltimore for the championship.
Read straight through from 1962 to 1969, the arc is unmistakable. The decade begins with Landrith as a symbolic first choice, passes through a rotating cast of short-term answers, and ends with Grote anchoring the staff of a champion. That is why the history of 1960s Mets catchers feels bigger than a position-by-position review: it is the franchise’s whole coming-of-age story, seen from a crouch behind home plate.
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