Jorge Posada’s Yankees legacy is usually told through the big, familiar numbers. Five All-Star selections.
Five Silver Sluggers. Four World Series rings.
A .273 career average, 275 home runs and 1,065 RBIs over 17 seasons, all in pinstripes.
That’s the version most fans know, and for good reason. Posada was a switch-hitting force in the middle of the Yankees’ lineup for more than a decade, and his 2007 season - when he hit .338 with 20 homers and 90 RBIs at age 35 - still jumps off the page. From 2000 through 2011, no catcher in baseball drove in more runs or hit more home runs.
But tucked inside that same stretch is a bizarre defensive record that barely registers outside baseball’s deepest trivia circles. It has nothing to do with his bat, and it puts Posada in a club of one other catcher in the sport’s history.
In 2000, Posada turned two unassisted double plays behind the plate. The only other catcher to do that in a single season was Frank Crossin of the St.
Louis Browns in 1914. No catcher had matched it in the 86 years between them.
That kind of play is rare enough to sound made up. A catcher gets both outs himself, with no teammate touching the ball.
Twice in one season is almost absurd. In the scorebook, the first one is marked DP, 2U - double play, catcher unassisted - and Posada got that notation twice in the same year.
The first came on April 17, 2000, at The Ballpark in Arlington against the Texas Rangers. The Yankees had scored in the top of the 11th to go up by one, then the Rangers loaded the bases with nobody out in the bottom half. The winning run was 90 feet away.
Todd Erdos came in from the bullpen, and Luis Alicea, batting left-handed, chopped a ball in front of the plate. Replays suggested it may have grazed his leg, but home plate umpire Jeff Kellogg ruled it fair and live.
Posada moved first, stepping on home plate to force the runner from third and then tagging Alicea, who had stayed in the batter’s box thinking the ball was foul. Two outs, no assists, all on the catcher.
Kellogg initially signaled that the run had scored, then checked with his crew after Posada’s urging and confirmed the plate had been touched. The Yankees survived, 5-4, for their sixth straight win.
Posada knew what he had just done was out of the ordinary. “You will never see that again, never,” Posada said.
“You will never see an unassisted double play by the catcher. I can see one out, but not a double play.
You won’t see it again.”
Joe Torre, meanwhile, wasn’t interested in reliving the danger. “You don’t want to replay that sucker,” Torre said.
Less than a month later, Posada did it again.
On May 12, 2000, against the Detroit Tigers, he recorded his second unassisted double play of the season. This one came on an interference call tied to a strikeout-and-throw-out sequence. The public record on the details is thin, but the official scoring remains, and it completed the pair that made the season so unusual.
The two plays were different in shape, but identical in the history they created. One came on a broken squeeze.
The other came out of an interference ruling. Together, they left Posada alongside Crossin and nobody else.
It’s a strange footnote for a player whose reputation rests mostly on offense, but it also says something about how he played the game. Posada was never known as an elite defensive catcher, and the criticism around his glove has followed him. Still, those two plays show a catcher who could read chaos quickly and make the right move before anyone else had time to react.
He retired after the 2011 season having spent his entire career with the Yankees. He is not in the Hall of Fame, but his offensive résumé is already secure enough to keep his name in the conversation whenever great catchers come up. The 2000 season alone brought his first All-Star Game, a Silver Slugger and a World Series title over the crosstown Mets.
And yet the oddest line on his baseball card might be the one almost nobody talks about: two unassisted double plays in one season. More than 20 years later, Posada and Frank Crossin are still the only catchers to do it.
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