By DAN McDONALD
Written for the LSWA
It’s been a good few months for Jonathan Lucroy.
Last August, the former Major League Baseball All-Star got the phone call from the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, letting him know that he would be honored with the state’s highest athletic accolade this summer.
That happens June 27 in Natchitoches, culminating three days of festivities with Lucroy and the Class of 2026. For participation information, visit LaSportsHall.com or call 318-238-4255.
Less than two months ago, he was back at UL’s M. L. “Tigue” Moore Field, where the ex-Ragin’ Cajun standout catcher received that program’s greatest honor with the retiring of his No. 21 jersey, putting him in elite company from his days as a collegian.
During that same time frame, he was selected as the catcher on yet another Milwaukee Brewers All-time Team, honoring the top player at each position for the nearly 60-year-old franchise. Legendary Brewers announcer and former major league catcher Bob Uecker had christened him with that honor long ago.
And this past spring, the hugely young high school baseball team he coaches at Grapevine Faith Christian School near Dallas had a surprisingly successful .500 season.
“Only two returning varsity players,” Lucroy said. “We will be good next year.”
That isn’t a surprise to anyone who knows the Eustis, Fla., native, since his passion for baseball is rivaled only by his drive to succeed at whatever level the game takes him.
All in all, an excellent few months. But still not as good as his summer of 2014, when he was the best catcher in baseball. That claim isn’t hyperbole … the numbers back it up in a big way.
That season, his fourth in the major leagues, Lucroy finished fourth in the voting for National League Most Valuable Player, the first catcher in Brewers history to finish in the MVP top 10 voting. A guy named Clayton Kershaw won the NL MVP that year, and no other catcher finished in the top five in the voting in either league. He led the NL in doubles that year with 53, becoming the first catcher in MLB history to lead his league in that category and breaking the mark of 47 set by Texas’ Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez in 1996 – and no catcher has come within 15 of Lucroy’s tally since that 2014 season.
He was the Brewers’ MVP that year along with earning the club’s “Good Guy Award” for the second straight season, and was runner-up for the Gold Glove Award. He started the All-Star Game behind the plate for the NL – the first of two times he’d earn that distinction – and proceeded to go 2-for-2 with (naturally) two RBI doubles off Jon Lester and Chris Sale.
That year he helped lead a Stars and Stripes Honor Flight with World War II, Korean War and terminally ill veterans flying to Washington, D.C., to visit the city’s memorials. He also was a personal guest of Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
Now that was a good year.
“I had the great privilege of managing Jonathan for five years at Milwaukee,” said Ron Roenicke, who took over as Brewers manager in Lucroy’s first full year with the club in 2011. “He’s a great man of character, a hard worker and was a great teammate. And he could really hit … he could hit the other way, he could pull the ball and he could hit with power. That record, 53 doubles for a catcher, that speaks for itself.”
“To play on a high level in college, and then to do what he did in pro ball, it takes the physical talent,” said Anthony Babineaux, UL’s assistant coach under Hall of Famer Tony Robichaux during Lucroy’s collegiate career. “But it’s more than just the talent. It’s a lot of intangibles, it’s the type of leader that he was and the type of teammate that he was, and it’s the extra things he did off the field and on the field.”
It wasn’t a perfect path to college stardom or to a third-round MLB Draft selection. In fact, Lucroy didn’t have many scholarship offers out of Umatilla High School, and only happened to catch the eye of a Cajun assistant coach who was recruiting a pitching teammate. And in his freshman season, Lucroy played only part-time at catcher behind senior veterans Justin Morgan and Adam Massiatte. He only caught six games, with most of his first season spent as designated hitter.
“There were a lot of upperclassmen on that 2005 team and it was a very good team with older guys that were the voice of the team,” Babineaux said. “Luc respected all those guys, but he also earned their respect in a hurry with what he was able to do on the field and how he handled his business.”
Lucroy wound up hitting .373 with five homers and 48 RBI that year in earning Freshman All-America honors as DH, and went on to set UL records for RBI (184), doubles (54) and total bases (414) in a career while hitting 35 homers, batting .356 and slugging at a .612 clip. He was a two-time All-Sun Belt pick in a league that had several talented catchers, and helped lead the Cajuns to two league titles and the 2007 NCAA Regional finals.
“He always had the hitting,” said two-year Cajun teammate and long-time friend Blaine LaFleur. “He quickly made us all realize how good a hitter he was. I don’t think any of us could compete with him hitting. But what made him special was that he was just relentless to the cause, you couldn’t stop him.”
Hitting almost came naturally. The intricacies of catching every day, and being his UL team’s defensive leader, took a lot more work.
“His catching skills were good, but honestly they weren’t where they needed to be as an everyday catcher for us,” Babineaux said. “Those obviously very much improved as he went on, and that’s because he absolutely worked on it every day. Nobody worked harder than he did to make himself a great defensive player — his receiving, blocking, throwing out base runners, stealing pitches – and that continued in his three years in the minors and after he got to the Brewers.”
Lucroy moved from Low-A to the majors in just two seasons, in large part because of his defensive improvement. One metric ranked him as the major league’s best in “stealing pitches” – receiving and framing pitches in a way that influenced plate umpires’ called strikes – for two seasons.
“Jonathan took a lot of pride in his defense,” Roenicke said. “Even though he was a great hitter, that was really important to him. I think catcher is the hardest position there is to play in baseball, and Luc worked really hard to make sure he was a good defensive catcher. I know the pitchers appreciated what he did.”
Another key to his later success was learning to call pitches during his college career, a talent that is rapidly vanishing with the advent of coach-to-player communication technology.
“Coach Robe did a lot of the pitch calls,” Babineaux said. “But I know during Jonathan’s career he sort of turned that over to him. Robe really liked his catchers calling pitches, and he knew they had to learn to do that if they were fortunate enough to advance in the pro ranks. He was able to retain that knowledge that Coach Robe gave him on how to set up hitters, and it was a show of respect that our pitchers knew the fingers that Luc put down was the right pitch to throw at the right time.”
Lucroy was the face of the Brewers franchise in his final two years there before spending two years with the Texas Rangers, helping that team win the AL West in 2016. Injuries and the COVID-shortened pandemic season in 2020 hampered the latter part of his career, but he was still valuable enough to clubs seeking veteran catching presence and needing help with pitching staffs to spend time with seven other MLB teams before he retired in 2021 after 12 big-league seasons.
His final stop was in Atlanta during that 2021 season when the Braves won the World Series. Although he did not see action during that postseason run, Lucroy was respected enough to be invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch for Game 2 of the 2021 National League Divisional Series when the Braves played his longtime Brewers club.
Even with all those collegiate and professional honors, Lucroy said his proudest and most memorable moments in baseball came from his two appearances for Team USA in the 2013 and 2017 World Baseball Classics. He still proudly displays the gold medal he helped Team USA capture in 2017.
“There’s something about wearing that USA jersey,” he said. “Coach Robe always told us that the name on the front of the jersey meant more than the name on the back, and I thought about that every time I looked down and saw ‘USA’ on my jersey during the World Baseball Classics.”
While defense was the key to his longevity, it was the bat that remained the most memorable part of his game. His .356 batting and .612 slugging marks in college, a .325 mark in summer collegiate baseball and a career .274 batting and .416 slugging mark along with 1,134 major league hits are a testament to that.
“Even in his freshman year, you knew he could hit,” Babineaux said. “There’s a lot of guys that hit home runs, and then there’s some that get so much lift on their ball when they swing the bat. Jonathan was one of those guys. His fly balls were just some of the highest I’ve ever seen, the ball would just lift when it left his bat. You know the power was there, and you had a good idea that the catching would advance to a high level, and once those two matched up it was just a matter of time before he made it to the big leagues.”
Roenicke well remembers one of his 108 career home runs.
“We were facing Cincinnati and Aroldis Chapman had just come up as their closer,” he said. “We were in a tie game and Chapman came in, he was throwing 100 plus miles an hour before everyone started throwing 100, he was the hardest thrower we’d seen. Luc saw 11 pitches between 100 and 102 and he kept fouling off balls until he got to a 3-2 count and Chapman tried to throw him a slider on the 12th pitch and Luc hit a homer to win the game for us. That’s the kind of hitter Luc was.”