Before you respond or vote, please take the following into consideration:
Since the HOF committee for 19th century players is now anything pre-1980, here is how Charlie Bennett stacks up. I used the following statistics to show his dominance behind the plate: WAR, dWAR (Defensive WAR), rField (Number of runs better or worse than average for all fielding), WAA (Number of wins a player added to a team above what a league average player would add), and finally a stat showing how his bat was better than some of the numbers might show, OPS+.
NOTE: I used the following criteria to assemble these leaderboards:
1871-1980 - Since this is the HOF Committee Bennett would be put into
Played 80% of games at Catcher
Minimum 1000 games played at Catcher
It's also good to note that Buck Ewing played only 47% of his games at Catcher and King Kelly 36%, while Bennett played 88%
In my opinion, Bennett was the best Catcher of the 19th Century, and even if that were in question, he was clearly the best defensive Catcher of the era and ranks among the best of all time at the position when compared to all eras.
His defensive stats are absolutely incredible and his offensive stats, while on the lower side, are a bit deceiving as his OPS+ is quite high.
In my opinion, Bennett should be the next Catcher elected to the BBHOF from the pre-1980 committee, with the only other player in the argument being Wally Schang.
The 19th Century does not get enough attention, especially Catchers, and electing Bennett would be a slam dunk in my opinion.
It's also good to note that Charlie Bennett, who ranks 34th all time in WAR per 650 PA, his 5.9 being between Larry Walker's 5.88 and Frank Robinson's 5.93. He averaged over 8 WAR per 650 PA over an 8 year peak.
Bennett's career fielding percentage at Catcher is .942 compared to the league average of .909, a whopping 33 points above average!!!
It also doesn't hurt that Bennett was a pioneer of the game, being one of the first catchers to get right behind the batter, and may have been the first to invent/use a chest protector.
In the most grueling era for players, especially catchers, Bennett stands out most among his peers.
I would love to hear why or why not you think Bennett should be in the HOF.
I'll leave you with this excerpt from the excellent book 59 in '84 by Edward Achorn (
https://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Nine-84.../dp/0061825867):
Detroit’s Charlie Bennett, regarded by many of his contemporaries as the game’s top defensive catcher, entered the 1883 campaign with severely chapped hands—the result, he said, of working too long in frigid air in his off-season job. Unfortunately, when he started catching that spring, his hard hands cracked open, and the cracks, pounded daily by fastballs, refused to mend. Bennett, who had a mother and sisters to support back home in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and could not afford to go without a pay packet, “caught many a game” that season “with blood dripping from his fingers’ ends.” That August, when he could stand the pain no more, he finally sat out and gave his split palms time to heal.
Bennett usually kept on working, though, even in “the most intense agony,” recalled Lon Knight, a teammate for four seasons. In one game, a ball split open Bennett’s thumb from the base to the tip, clear to the bone. A doctor ordered him to sit out until he had healed, warning Bennett that he was liable to contract blood poisoning that might well force the amputation of the thumb, or even his arm. But the catcher stubbornly played on, game after game. “Between each inning he would have to sponge the gash in his thumb with cotton soaked in antiseptic which he carried with him in his pocket, in order to remove the corruption which was continually flowing from the wound,” Knight recalled. Eventually, it healed over, but his hands permanently bore the scars of his trade. The Sporting News surveyed the damage in 1887: “His fingers have been battered almost to pieces . . . until he has not a whole or straight finger in the lot. Every joint is swollen and misshapen.”