Yadier Molina’s Hall of Fame case has never really depended on whether people admired the swing. It’s the rest of it - the defense, the control of the running game, the way he handled pitchers, the command he brought to every inning - that keeps pushing his name into the all-time conversation.
St. Louis recently honored Molina for his career, and he now owns a Red Jacket.
He put it on for the first time in front of the same crowd he grew up alongside. But that’s only the first stop on the post-playing tour.
Cooperstown is next.
Molina has long been viewed as one of the greatest defensive catchers ever. He shut down basestealers with that arm, smothered pitches with a chest protector that seemed to absorb everything, and ran a game with the kind of authority that made him impossible to ignore. The legend of “Yadi” only grows with time, and modern analytics have started to catch up to what people around him always saw.
ESPN analyst Paul Hembekides took that idea and pushed it even further in a recent appearance on the Just Baseball Media podcast.
“I view him as one of the top-100 greatest baseball players that ever lived,” Hembekides said. “Granted, it is a non-standard opinion, and I’m comfortable with that, because the batting line was below average.”
He didn’t stop there. Hembekides pointed to the parts of Molina’s value that don’t always show up cleanly in standard metrics.
“I don’t believe that WAR properly values catchers, just in general. I think especially in Yadier Molina’s case, the combination of baserunner prevention, stolen base prevention, his ability to manage pitching staffs-we can see the enormous delta between his catcher-ERA, if you will, and those who backed him up. And the fact that we know he was a premium framer-this is one of the greatest players of all time.”
Then came the line that will land hardest with anyone who watched Molina for years.
“He’s the greatest defender of the 21st century,” he announced. “Despite the fact that the batting line is ordinary, and despite the fact that we watched his entire career, I actually still view him as a fairly underrated figure historically.”
That’s the kind of assessment Cardinals fans have been making for a long time. Molina’s impact in St.
Louis went well beyond the box score. He shaped what happened behind the plate, influenced the pitchers on the mound, and served as a clubhouse leader throughout his career.
There may never be another Cardinal quite like Yadi. There might not ever be another player quite like him, either.
The case for Cooperstown is already there.
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