The Top 10 Mike Piazza Stats
The Best Numbers from a Hall of Fame Career
In 1988, the Los Angeles Dodgers selected a little-known catcher named Mike Piazza in the 62nd round with the 1,390th overall pick. When Piazza is inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame today, he’ll be the lowest draft pick ever enshrined.
Piazza is arguably the best offensive catcher to ever play the game — especially in the power department. With help from natural language searches from StatMuse’s MLB platform, here’s a collection of 10 of the best stats from Piazza’s career.
1. Mike Piazza fell one home run shy of 400 as a catcher, but that was still good enough to set the all-time mark for homers at the position.
2. His career slugging percentage is .043 percentage points higher than any other catcher.
3. He has the exact same lead in career OPS by a catcher.
4. Piazza has 35 career multi-homer games, eight more than the next highest catcher.
5. He leads all catchers in career Weighted Runs Above Average (WRAA), a stat that calculates the number of offensive runs a player has contributed to his team compared to a league average player.
6. He also leads all catchers in career Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+), which calculates weighted runs created per plate appearance, adjusted for league and park and scaled such that 100 is league average.
7. Piazza hit 220 home runs while with the Mets, good enough for third most in franchise history.
8. Despite only playing 726 games with the Dodgers, Piazza is still in their franchise top 10 for home runs.
9. As age caught up to him, Piazza took off the catcher’s gear and covered first base and DH, where he crossed the 400 home run plateau — becoming one of just 15 players to hit 400 career homers and finish with a career batting average above .300.
10. Finally, if you look at isolated power from a catcher, he again runs away from the pack.
