About a month ago, Doug gave us an accounting of the best players at each position who never played in a World Series. The list included a Hall of Famer or Hall of Fame-worthy player at every position except catcher, where Jason Kendall and his 38.3 WAR took the honor. Doug noted in the comments that Joe Torre never won a Series as a player, and was far better than Kendall, but Torre played more than half his career at positions other than catcher.
It probably doesn’t mean much beyond coincidence that no superstar catcher has ever gone a whole career without winning a World Series, but it leads one to suspect that a team with a great catcher might be better equipped to win a title than a team with a superstar at another position. I certainly wouldn’t be the first to posit this, as many writers before me have trumpeted the importance of a catcher as an on-field leader, manager of pitchers, influencer of umpires, and a stifler of baserunners who gets to bat every couple of innings too. Both keepers of WAR admit that catcher defense is an area of weakness, and that there may be things catchers do on the field that show up in neither the box score nor the advanced metrics.