Bench was quite graceful...and not just for a catcher. Was he the greatest defensive catcher ever? Well, he's on the short list anyway. But I always thought his offensive value, over a career, would have been magnified if they had let him play 1st or left or 3rd. But if you goback and look at those Reds teams, you find a bunch of Lee Mays and Tony Perezes playing first and some Bernie Carbo's an Geroge Fosters in left and some Tory Perezes and Pete Roses at 3rd. But even in his 13th straight year as a fulltime catcher (1980), and on gimpy knees, he still whacked out a 123 OPS. What would his numbers have looked like if they had put him at 1stbase in '74 and left him there?
Guys I watched: I always thought Mike Schmidt was incredibly athletic and graceful, but not in a striding/gliding sort of way. In an, from here to there, explosive sense, he was incredibly graceful, cat like. If Ichiro and Junior and Ackley are cheetah-like graceful, Schmidt was a male lion. When he moved, it wasn't over a great distance, but it was something to behold: Wait, wait, wait, NOW, BOOM!
Dale Murphy, too. He tracked down balls in CF with that huge stride and he looked like something large and powerful, yet very smooth.
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