12/09/2022
Want to double your Ks, reduce your walks and increase wins? Focus more on framing.
In The Diamond Appraised, sabermetrician Craig R. Wright wrote that “the mark of the master is the illusion whereby balls become called strikes,” arguing that “learning to catch the ball so it looks like a strike may do more toward preventing runs than throwing out the extra base runner once a week that is the difference between the best- and worst-throwing catchers.”
To illustrate, each MLB team plays 162 regular season games a year. Pitchers average around 146 pitches per game or 23,652 pitches per season.
Looking at opportunities for throw downs, the league average for steals is only 1.1 per game or 178.2 per season. Therefore, the opportunity to even try to throw out a runner is only .75% or less than 1% of all pitches thrown in an entire season. On top of that, the average “caught stealing” percentage or success rate for throwing out a runner in the MLB is less than 30%.
Longtime catching instructor and current Rockies scouting and player development assistant Jerry Weinstein agrees with Wright’s assessment. “It used to be ‘block and throw,’ and basically catch the ball instead of picking it up after it stops rolling, so how you caught it didn’t seem to be a priority,” Weinstein says. “Now we’re understanding [that] how you catch it is really critical.” The difference is today’s technology and the detailed data it yields. “It’s the old deal, you can’t improve it unless you measure it,” Weinstein continues. “And nobody was interested in improving it because they didn’t realize the importance until people started measuring it and they started showing them how important it was.”
