Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1061: Losing Lucroy

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the White Sox signing Luis Robert, the Twins’ turnaround, and small-sample successes such as Anthony Swarzak and Chad Pinder, then discuss Jonathan Lucroy’s perplexing defensive decline and the state of catcher framing in 2017. Audio intro: Of Montreal, "Rose Robert" Audio outro: Brian Eno & John Cale, "Empty Frame" Link […]

Rose Robert, I'd like to welcome you to our affair We'll write a lovely little story, just you and I As time goes by, me and my Rose Robert People stare when we walk arm in arm along the thoroughfare The gentlemen don't know whether to bow their heads or tip their hats Instead I'm being Rose Robert, Rose Robert Hello and welcome to episode 1061 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

My name is Ben Lindberg, I'm a writer for The Ringer, and I'm joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs fancrafts hello hi what's on your mind uh well let's see we have a little bit of well we just discussed pre-podcast it's not louis robert it's i guess louis robert follow up yes as i saw reported on twitter evidently that's uh that's not what i would have gone with but his prerogative it's yeah i kind kind of like him less now just as a player. I feel like in my head, I feel like he's worth less just because Luis Robert doesn't sound like the name of a successful athlete, but I guess neither does Albert Pujols.

Here we are. Luis Robert. God, I can't even say that. He's a Cuban teenager. He has been discussed before. I just wanted to bring him up. He has some place in, I guess, effectively wild lore. Because if I can find this old quote, we talked about him before when he was available.

There were two quotes from scouts. One saying that the 19-year-old was quite a five-tool guy that can be in the big leagues soon. And there was another evaluator that said, quote, Robert. Robert. Gosh. soon and there was another evaluator that said quote robert robert gosh it's just it's not it doesn't work it doesn't it's he still has time he still has time right you can change your name as you climb the organizational ladder anyway quote yeah sure from mlb trade rumors back in uh february quote an international scouting director for an al team goes even further calling robert quote the best player on the planet and that's Robert, quote, the best player on the planet, and that's no exaggeration. Well, the best player

on the planet, with no exaggeration, signed recently with the Chicago White Sox. They beat out the St. Louis Cardinals in bidding for Robert. It just drains me of energy. He signed for something like $25 to $30 million. He's going to be the last big-time Cuban investment like this.

The new international spending rules are going in place for the next signing period. So I believe Robert is the last high-profile player to sign like this. The White Sox will pay a 100% overage tax, which means that they just successfully signed the best player on the planet. And that's no exaggeration for roughly 50 million dollars which when you look at the fact that the angels are giving mike trout three times that much way to go white socks i guess they succeeded here there's another article where robert god talks about his recent past and he's he's pretty well spoken for someone who's so young and i don't have a big follow-up here but he said uh this is from a Ben Badler article that was just

posted at Baseball America this is from May 20th Robert Escort is saying when I went to the Can-Am League home of the Ottawa champions when I went to the Can- he didn't say that part when I went to the Can-Am League and played there I saw a lot better pitching Robert said the quality of the pitching was better I did well there and I took that confidence back to Cuba it was pretty easy from then on I like that quote because Robert's basically saying Cuban baseball, no problem. Piece of cake. I learned a lot from the Can-Am League, that hotbed of international talent. In any case, I guess we will find out fairly soon if Robert is the best player on the planet. And that's no exaggeration. Let's see, what was Mike Trout doing when he was 19 besides getting very, very close to the major

leagues? Yeah, he made the major leagues, right? Did he not debut until he was 19 besides getting very, very close to the major leagues? Yeah, he made the major leagues, right? Did he not debut until he was? Yeah, right. So when Mike Trout was 19 years old, he did debut in the majors and he was, you know, fine. One Ben Lindbergh wrote an article about his experience there. Trout, incidentally, I did not realize that that fall, actually, I guess I did realize because you mentioned this in your article, Tr bad in the fall league that year however in double a he had a 958 ops so he was outstanding we'll see where robert reports to in the white socks organization it's not like there are a whole lot of players in front of him on the position player side and that's exciting i guess but there's also quotes about this from john maalek saying you know we just weren't comfortable

going that high there's a history of players who have not succeeded despite these big investments and it's impossible to translate the performance etc etc etc so still the same issues as always teams are no more confident scouting Cubans as always except for that one evaluator who seems to like Luis Robert very very much yeah in fairness Robert, Trout and Harper were not from Cuba. So maybe that would have changed their timelines a little bit if they had been from Cuba. Perhaps they would not have debuted as early as they did. So I guess it's not necessarily fair to compare debut dates, It's not necessarily fair to compare debut dates, but it is probably fair to compare the fact that Trout is maybe the best player ever. So that in itself probably tells us that he's better than Louis Robert, but we'll see.

And Trout has actually gotten better since that quote. So maybe even now that scouting director or whoever it was would change his tune slightly. I wanted to ask you, the Twins had 21 hits on Monday night, which came in the wake of you writing a post about how the Twins have learned to hit, I believe. I have not read that post. I just saw the headline. So good timing on your part. What was the upshot? I don't blame you.

See, the headline had the word Twins in it, well i don't i don't blame you see the headline had the word twins in it so i don't know why you would read it but in any case it took some convincing but as long as the twins are around or north of 500 they are worth writing about the idea was i was looking at players whose plate discipline has improved the most from last season as measured by things like swinging at pitches in the zone and not swinging at pitches outside of the zone i know that you have written a few times that you will take a ratio of in zone swings to out of zone swings. I do something similar, but I just subtract out of zone swing rate from in zone swing rate. I don't think it really

matters. You'll end up with similar results. So I was looking at an analysis of which players have improved in that regard the most from last season. I was uh I kind of had a hunch I would find Joey Votto and I was thinking maybe I'll write an article about Joey Votto except in the top five players who have improved the most since last season three of them happen to be twins and so that got my attention and it turned out that every single twins player with at least 50 plate appearances in each of the last two seasons, improved at least a little bit in this measure, which means one of two things. One, something is weird with the calibration.

The twins numbers are just wrong. I hate that explanation because there's nothing I can do about it, so I ignored it. And the other explanation is that they all got better, at least a little bit better. So we've seen Miguel Sano, who's just freaked, like, flipping out. He's hitting everything. He's amazing. Well, I guess he's not hitting everything. He's still striking out a bunch. But like flipping out he's hitting everything he's amazing well I

guess he's not hitting everything he's still striking out a bunch but everything else he's hitting extremely hard he's like dominating the exit velocity leaderboards and he's dominating the general offensive production category so Sano has shown much better discipline but he's not alone pretty much everyone in there even Byron Buxton has swung it better pitches. Jorge Polanco is up there. He's also had better discipline. And I already forgot the other player who is doing super well relative to last year. But across the board, the Twins are showing better discipline. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not, that over the offseason, they hired a new hitting coach. I am never real comfortable crediting hitting coaches with these things because it seems like so much work is done with independent hitting coaches or peers from the industry anyway but something is going on and the twins have a better approach they are walking more and striking

out less than they did last season and that's interesting and now that they have jose barrios up in the majors and looking like a sensible version of jose barrios as opposed to what he was in the majors last season there's there's of something here. There's a group of position players and a pitcher, which is better than a few weeks ago when there were zero pitchers. Yeah, I'm always interested in how much a team can improve in one winter and how much a new regime, for instance, can improve a team in one winter when that regime is dramatically different from the previous one. So we've seen a couple case studies of that just this season in Arizona, in Minnesota, two sort of old school GMs were replaced by the typical new school GMs. And we got to see these teams doing things differently. And I don't know how much of the Twins' improvement this year from worst team in baseball to over 500 for now, you can credit to that. But I always think back to this quote of Phil Birnbaum's, the sabermetric writer who wrote, I think,

a few years ago that you gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart. So just going from like last to decent is easier than going from decent to best or whatever, going from really good to best. And so that kind of applies in the Twins case because it just seemed like they were doing things so wrong in some ways, whether it was not really pursuing strikeout pitchers or not effectively pursuing strikeout pitchers and coupling the pitch to contact staff with a lousy defense and having the worst framers over the previous five seasons and just all these things that it's fairly easy to correct. It's fairly easy not to have a terrible framer these days. And it's fairly easy, I guess, not to design your team such that the defense and the pitching staff are completely mismatched the way the Twins were. So I don't know how much credit you can give Derek Falvey and Thad Levine and the new order in Minnesota for this, because it's not like they signed an entirely new team.

They signed Jason Castro. Of course that helps with the framing. They promoted barriers again, but that's something that was going to happen again. So, you know, and they didn't do something weird, like try to play Miguel Sano in the outfield,

which was something that, that happened last year for a mercifully brief period. So I guess they just haven't done anything obviously dumb like that. It's not like they've made incredibly brilliant moves. It's mostly the same team that was there before, but they've kind of polished it and deployed it in a smarter way.

And that has thus far helped them go from absolutely terrible to pretty decent. Yeah, I know one of the uh analyses i would end up talking about like every single winter when i would write about the terrible seattle mariners was that you would go through and look at the season that just was and you would find all the black holes on the roster and you'd be like okay well maybe the team won't be able to add stars but at least they can plug up those black holes and of course the problem that you run into especially when you are a bad and backwards organization like the Seattle mayor, is that you just end up having new

black holes that reveal themselves. But, you know, one of the ideas with war and elite talent is that there are fewer and fewer players available as you get higher and higher talent levels. But that just means that it's easier to find decent players and that you should be able to plug any sort of troublesome areas with at least decent talent what's interesting about the twins at least on the position player side is they didn't really change much from last season they kind of kept a lot of the same players around aside from jason castro so for them it's kind of more internal development slash also robbie grossman who's good now i guess i don know how that happened, but he's sort of like a much lighter hitting, but higher walking JD Martinez, I guess, where the Astros thought they had something and then they didn't. And then he went and was good somewhere

else. So maybe in the most desperate of all mid August days, there will be posts to be written about Robbie Grossman. But you look at the twins and Miguel Sano internal young really good Robbie Grossman he's gotten better Max Kepler Jorge Polanco Brian Dozer I guess is not so young but still internal guy Joe Maurer still internal guy but there's there's so much youth here and the twins are five games over 500 and Byron Buxton still has a 45 WRC plus like he's been better lately but he hasn't been good. Jose Berrios has made a couple really good starts, but so far only two. So the twins have gotten to this point where they are competitive, in fact, leading the American League Central and so far only Sano

of their like big three young talents has been super good. So if Buxton improves and he we at least know he can play good defense and if Berrios stays in the rotation, there's something here. And maybe because the Twins did so little over the offseason in terms of bringing in new talent, it was easier to write them off. Maybe I'm guilty of that as well, but there was enough youth in there that really it's kind of felt like they would go as far as Sunil, Buxton, and Barrios could take them. And well, now one of, or I guess you could say all three of them are starting to make contributions. Yeah, Zach Cram wrote about them for The Ringer today, too. If anyone wants more Twins information,

be focused on the defensive turnaround. All right, so I just went to Fangraphs, and I noticed two new Instagraphs posts, which have to be by you. I haven't clicked on either one, but titles are What in the Heck Has Gotten Into Chad Pinder? and One Guy Gets More Chases Than Andrew Miller. Those have to be Jeff Sullivan headlines. I'm guessing Daily Prospect Notes 523, probably not a Jeff Sullivan Instagram post. Is there like a Instagram post to Fangraphs post

exchange rate for you? Like if you do two Instagram posts, is that equal to one main post in your workload? Yeah. The idea is that every, every week I write two full size posts and then Friday I will have one, uh, one post and a chat. The way that that evolved is that on Mondays it ends up being one front page post and two Instagram posts. This was an idea Dave Cameron and I came up with because Instagrams in theory are easier than front page posts and also we wanted to give a jolt to the Instagram section. Well, I don't know if the Instagram section has really gotten a jolt and I'm not sure if coming I don't know if the Instagram section has really gotten a jolt, and I'm not sure if coming up with a topic for an Instagram post is actually easier than coming up

with a topic for a front page post. But here we are. This is what we do. So Mondays can be quite long, but we've got Chad Pinder content and much highly sought after Anthony Swarczak content. Anthony Swarczak content. So if you are curious about a very interesting young offensive Oakland athletic and a journeyman middle reliever who's succeeding with the White Sox, I can tell you right now, or at least as of Monday afternoon, Chad Pinder, who I don't know if anyone knows who that is. He hasn't been a non-prospect, but he hasn't been a great prospect. He kind of like sounds like a second baseman, you know, in the way that most of the A's do. And in fact, he is a second baseman, but he has ranked second on the early season average exit velocity leaderboards. So it goes Miguel Sano followed by Chad Pinder, exactly as you would expect. Chad Pinder also

has dramatically cut down on his ground balls from last season, combining performance in the minor leagues and the majors. So Chad Pinder could be one of those fly ball revolution guys. And as for Anthony Swarczak, look, you don't have to click the post. I don't expect anyone to click the post. It's a post about Anthony Swarczak, but you notice his name is not in the headline because no one's going to click on a headline about Anthony Swarczak. You're going to click the one about Andrew Miller. But Andrew Miller currently ranks second in baseball in the rate of pitches out of the zone that get swings. That's what you'd expect. Andrew Miller has this. That's just the way that he pitches. He warps the way

that hitters see the strike zone. Well, what would you believe that number one in front of Andrew Miller is Anthony Swarczak, who is a minor league contract spring training NRI acquisition by the White Sox in January. I guarantee you Swarczak signed with the White Sox because he thought, well, this is one of the few places I could get an opportunity. He's 31, I think, almost 32. He's just like a middle reliever with the white socks who already have david robertson and injured nate jones well the white socks seem to have fixed tommy canely and now they have anthony swarczak throwing exclusively fastballs and sliders exclusively to one quadrant of sort of the strike zone he throws everything low and to the glove side he's a righty everything goes

down there and hitters don't know what to do. He's dominated righties. He's dominated lefties. And all of a sudden, the White Sox could trade David Robertson, Nate Jones, Tommy Canley, and Anthony Swarczak, and very legitimately sell them all as like good high leverage relievers, which is bizarre. But this is where we are. Anthony Swarczak, he's really good now. I don't know why, but that's what's happening. Don't invest in relievers. Well, I joke about you writing about pop-up relievers, and I joke with Michael Bowman about how many relievers we have on our other podcast. And that is, I guess, the hidden benefit of every team having like 12, 13 relievers.

There's bound to be an interesting one here or there. relievers just there's bound to be an interesting one here there and like anthony swarczak has pitched how many innings he's pitched 19 and two-thirds innings so not if he were yeah i'm no i mean sure it's fine if if he were a starter though that would be maybe three starts or something like that and we might not even notice if he did that over three starts, if it weren't his first three starts of the year, or even if it were, but because it's a reliever and he does it over six weeks or however long we've had a season, it's more notable or it's worth writing about. It's a higher percentage of his season. And so it's a boon to people like us, I guess, just given that we have all these players to choose from now. And we also have these stats that become significant and telling in small samples. So you can write about Chad Pinder after 30 something batted balls without feeling like a fraud or something, just going by his slash stats or whatever, because his underlying numbers are

also impressive and you can do the same for Anthony Swarczak. So I guess this is nice if you are obligated to churn out as much content as you are. Yep. I'll also note, I nearly wrote a post about Tyler Clippard. I just avoided that one just by the skin of my teeth. But I don't know if people remember the Yankees obviously had a little bit of a bullpen sale last summer and they kind of hung around in the race still. And Gary Sanchez was a big part of that because he was freaking insane for the last two months of the season. But they also added Tyler Clippard to the bullpen and Clippard to that point hadn't been very good. What was he with Arizona or something earlier

last season? I don't remember exactly where it was. It doesn't matter. But Clippard went to the bullpen and Clippard to that point hadn't been very good what was he with Arizona or something earlier last season I don't remember exactly where it was it doesn't matter but Clippard went to the Yankees he stayed with the Yankees he's still with the Yankees now and oh by the way he's super dominant and ever since he joined the Yankees since the start of last August he has an ERA of two his strikeouts have come back his contact rate this year is really low he has for some reason the lowest contact rate this season on his fastball, which is not a good fastball, but that's what's happening. So Tyler Clippard, another not really pop-up reliever, but reliever formerly of interest who is of interest again.

This is all to say that I've avoided writing the Kimberley Jansen post that would be actually interesting and that people would care about. Yeah. Well, as someone pointed out, he did allow a home run and his FIP is now positive, or it was after we talked about him over the weekend. So slightly less fun. You know what? And how many times have people tried to get me to write a Jason Vargas post? Well, guess what? Nine runs in his last 10 innings. Jason Vargas is just Jason Vargas. He's the same guy. Nothing has changed. He's not worth a post. Never has been, never will be.

All right. So let's talk about something that both of us have written and talked about a lot, but not a whole lot lately. And I realized that when we got an email from a listener the other day who asked us if catcher framing was real, basically, like if it's a real skill, if we believe in it, that sort of clued me in that we haven't really talked about it or written about it much at all this season. And there are a couple of things worth noting. I wanted to talk about one of them because I just

wrote about it and there'll be an article up by the time you are hearing this probably, but it's someone that we've both written about a bunch over the years. Jonathan Lucroy. Yes. Who, yeah, is having another extremely anomalous receiving season. And I tried to figure out what is going on here because it's kind of amazing. As recently as 2013, Jonathan Lucroy led the major leagues in runs saved from framing, according to Baseball Perspectives' stats. This year, he leads the major leagues in runs lost from framing. So he has gone from best to worst in the span of four years or so, and it's been a gradual descent for him. He was incredible early in his career.

He has gotten less incredible over time, but he was at least above average up until this year and has suddenly completely fallen off a cliff. And the Rangers have the worst team framing stats in the majors. Hasn't hurt them lately. They win every day, but still they do. hasn't hurt them lately. They win every day, but still they do. And their pitchers have been behind in the count more than any other team's pitchers, but the Rockies, I think. And that's not entirely Lucroix's fault, of course, but it is partially Lucroix's fault, presumably, if he is consistently not gaining strikes or losing strikes or however you want to say it. He is putting his pitchers behind in the count. And he has, according to BP's numbers, cost the Rangers about eight runs so far, which is a lot in this day and age and this early in

the season. And he's like a few runs or two and a half runs worse than any other catcher and also very bad on a rate basis too. So this is odd. And of course, he got off to an extremely slow start offensively. So if you look at his BP, wins above replacement player, which does account for framing, unlike the wars at other sites, he's been about replacement level so far. And of course, his offense has gotten much, much better. He's probably going to be above replacement level soon. And the other win value stats will probably have him as a pretty decent player before it's all said and done. But it's hard to be a very valuable catcher, no matter how you're hitting, if you are the worst framer in the majors.

So I wanted to see what is going on here because as you have written, you wrote in your Hardball Times essay last year, part of it is just that framing values have become compressed all over baseball because the bad teams have gotten better, the bad framers have gotten better, or they've been replaced by good framers. And there's just less variation between teams now than there was several years ago. There's less of a gap between the best framers and the worst framers today than there was several years ago. And so even if Luke Roy were doing exactly the same thing he was doing in 2010, 11, 12, and had exactly the same technique, his framing value would still be lower just because those things are relative to the average catcher and the average catcher has gotten better. And so that's probably a big part of the reason why we haven't talked about framing at all this year is

just because it's not really as sexy a subject anymore. Everyone's aware of it and there's just less of a separation between teams. So it's rare that you get one guy making as huge a difference as he would have several years ago when we were just starting to discover this stuff and writing about it on a weekly basis, seemingly. What's really interesting, there's so much you can say about Luke Roy. I mean, he's got some sort of injury background. There's the framing stuff. And even offensively, there aren't very many players who have changed more than he has.

Even he had, as you mentioned, he had, he got off to a terrible start at the plate and his, he's batting three 57 in may, his offense has taken off, but he's still turned into this weird, like almost extreme ground ball hitter,

which is not at all what he's supposed to be but at the same time doesn't walk doesn't strike out he's basically stopped striking out last year he struck out for uh the most that he had since his sophomore season he struck out just over 18 percent of the time not bad and he walked just about nine percent of the time he's cut his walks in half and he's cut two-thirds off of his strikeouts so he's hitting everything and he's cut two thirds off of his strikeouts. So he's hitting everything and he's hitting it on the ground. And I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what's going on with Jonathan Lucroy. I nearly wrote a post about just him last week until I decided to make it more about the Rangers overall because they've had a handful of supposedly really good players who have had strange under

productive seasons. But Lucroy at the plate, fascinating, because you never see these big strikeout dips. But then the framing thing is just far and away the most interesting, and maybe the most interesting because it's the hardest to explain. His decline has been fairly steady. I think, what, the last two years he's been right around average, maybe a little bit better. But he had a steep drop-off, and then he was something like average,

and he stayed at something like average, a little bit better but he had a steep drop off and then he was something like average and he stayed at something like average a little bit better and now yeah like you said he's he's been the worst framer in baseball and i think there's enough there's enough disagreement over the true value of framing in that it's hard to see in the team numbers that if it's so hard to understand how something is really important it's even more difficult to understand what it looks like when a player gets worse. Because we only see those trends in the numbers. And I don't know, when Mike Fast was was writing up his original pitch framing research, and he had some videos of I think, Jose Molina, and I'm not I don't remember if it was Ryan Domet, but let's just assume it was Ryan Domet. Yeah, it was, I think. Yeah, of course it was, as the what not to do examples.

And Mike Fast pointed to like head movement and some arm movement. And there were little things that Fast pointed out that I think have stuck with a lot of people as little clues of what to look for. So I know whenever I'm looking at framers, I'm always watching the head now. And there could be any number of things. There's posture that you have to look at. And I've never watched baseball from an umpire's perspective. I've certainly never caught a pitcher because that sounds horrifying. But I guess I just don't know what you actually are supposed to look for. And I can't imagine why Luke Roy would get worse. I don't have an answer for it. At one point,

I was tempted to say that maybe it was in some way related to a concussion he sustained because you know concussions can do any number of things sure i don't have an answer because he's he's still going to be calling pitches low he's with the rangers now but he used to be with the brewers so it's not like the pitching staff has gotten worse you know he used to catch bad pitchers all the time and he was great so i just mean, you you wrote up the article. I haven't read it yet. It's not live yet. But could you come up with anything? else at making low pitches look like strikes and getting that call. And so I looked at his called strike rates relative to the league's year by year by location. So I looked like lower third, middle third, upper third of the zone and compared it to the league. And so, yeah, back at the beginning of his career, there was a giant gap between his called strike rate on low pitches or in the lower third of the zone and the leagues.

And now, for the first time ever this season, he is actually worse than the league average on low pitches, which is crazy because that was his skill. That was his signature skill. signature skill and the Rangers are throwing lots of low pitches which you would think would be good for Jonathan Lucroy if he were still the same Jonathan Lucroy but they've thrown I think the second most it was pitches in the lower third of the zone something like that but he's not taking advantage of them the way he once was and he's gotten worse on pitches in the upper third of the zone too so he's significantly worse on those. And he is still a little bit above average on pitches in the middle third of the zone. So it seems like the more he has to move either up or down, the worse he has gotten relative to the league. And we know that framing is a skill that declines over time. It didn't really in Jose

Molina's case, because he was just a framing god and amazing. And if he could somehow be on the field right now, I'm sure he could still frame. But for most guys, there have been some aging curves at Baseball Perspectives, and they've shown that it's a very gradual decline until you get to like 32, 33, and then it starts getting a little more steep. And Lucre is close to turning 31, but his decline has been happening, as we said, for years now. So it's strange. It's a very precipitous decline. was last excellent and who are still catching now, they're mostly still at least fine or, you know, either average or close to average or good. Guys like Russell Martin, Jeff Mathis, Brian McCann, Chris Stewart, Yadier Molina, all those guys are older, significantly older than Lucroix, but they have retained their framing ability more so than he has. So it's definitely an atypical

decline. And yeah, I looked at the areas of the strike zone where he seems to have gotten worse. It's up and down. And I wondered whether it had something to do with A, the pitchers, because maybe the pitchers command has been bad. And as you said, the Brewers' command couldn't have been great either when he was there. But maybe that's something, except that for one thing, the stats try to take that into account to some extent. Maybe they do so imperfectly. But the Rangers' backup catcher, Robinson Chirinos, is having his best ever framing season with the same pitching staff this year.

His innings have pretty much been well distributed across same pitching staff this year. I think his innings have pretty much been well distributed across the pitching staff. So whatever is affecting Lucroix there is not affecting Chirinos. So that's one data point that suggests that it's a Lucroix thing more so than a Rangers pitching thing. And I wondered whether it might have something to do with the strike zone. I don't know whether the change in the strike zone over the last several seasons could have something to do with LeCroy's decline in that early on he was incredible at getting low strikes, but then the strike zone moved downward and expanded. And on the surface, it seems like maybe that would help him, but maybe it would actually hurt him because he was such an outlier in his ability to get low strikes that if the zone gets bigger, lower, and other catchers are then able to get strikes in those regions too, maybe his ability in that area stands out less than from the typical catcher. So that is a theory at least about maybe the gradual decline up until this year is just that he hasn't stood out so much in that respect. But that wouldn't explain the drop off this year because I got updated numbers on the strike zone from John

Rogel, the researcher at Fangraphs and the Hardball Times. And he says that the area of the strike zone under a certain height that is primarily called strike so far this year has been the same as last year. So there hasn't really been any recession in the low strike this year. So that can't explain it either. So then you just get back to Lucre just not being as good. And that is a hard thing to pinpoint via video. And I agree, like if you're comparing Molina and Domit or something, the absolute extremes, it's very easy to see the differences in how they receive pitches. But when you're comparing a guy to himself, it's a little harder and you're not watching every single pitch he caught. It's a little harder and you're not watching every single pitch he caught. So, you know, I compared a couple of pitches that were almost the same and he got a strike on it in 2013 and a ball on a almost him back in 2013 when I was looking at it all the time. And I compared that to some of the pitches on which he has not gotten called

strikes this year that he should have. And it looks like there's more movement because if you go back and look at Lucre in 2013, he was just incredibly still. It was unbelievable how little he moved. Like even if the pitch was outside or down or whatever, like his head wouldn't move. His body wouldn't move. He wouldn't lean in either direction. He would just kind of twitch his glove and twitch it toward the strike zone. And before you knew it, it was just there and it was a called strike. And it was like he was a statue.

And in the examples I looked at, he seems to be moving more now and his head is moving and he's leaning and his shoulders are tilting and his glove doesn't seem as steady. I don't know whether I'm just seeing what I want to see because I know what the stats say or whether I'm just kind of cherry picking examples here because I'm looking at strikes he shouldn't have gotten from 2013 and balls that he shouldn't have gotten from 2017. And if you look at any catchers highlights versus low lights, it will sort of skew your perception of how good they are. But it does look to me like he is worse. And I think to explain the stats, he basically has to be worse, and I don't know how a guy who was that good just gets dramatically worse in the span of a few years, unless it is injuries. As you mentioned, he's had a series of injuries. He had a fractured finger. He had some minor hamstring issues. He had a fractured toe. Then he had the concussion. So maybe it is just an accumulation of wear and tear. And one thing I looked at, I was able to get some command effects data from Sport is released. And so if you look at the

average glove height of the catchers on Lucroix's teams year by year, it does increase. So like in 2011, the Brewers catchers had an average glove height of 17.8 inches, which was the lowest in baseball. And I don't have this year yet, but the Rangers post-Lucreux trade last year had a glove height of 21.5 inches, which was about four inches higher. So if Lucreux is not getting as low now, that might help explain why he isn't getting the low strike as consistently and maybe he's not getting as low because his body doesn't work as well i don't know maybe he's got fatigue he's got the hamstring issues he's got various accumulation of innings that maybe have made him less mobile or not able to crouch as consistently low as before and so that could have something to do with it. That's kind of my best theory other than just general more movement, but it does seem to have produced dramatic results.

Yeah, that's interesting. I know last year and continuing into this year, Luke Roy has had sort of his best like throwing seasons as a catcher. He's been the best at throwing out base runners. And you wonder sometimes if there's a connection between being aggressive with the running game and waiting on pitches to catch them but without knowing anything more that seems unsatisfying because for that wouldn't really

have an effect when there's no one on base or when there's a non-runner on base and also so much of that has to do with the pitcher anyway i know whenever we talk about rapid unexplained declines the first thing that comes to mind uh it could it can be weird to think of how lucroi could get worse as a framer but you know sean figgins pretty reliable 300 hitter then with the mariners he became something less than even a reliable 200 hitter happened almost overnight things just happen and even though you could look at sean figgins in 2011 and he would look like 2009 sean figgins uh the numbers wouldn't and sometimes the differences between being really good and really bad are subtle with Luke Roy I can think of two

possible explanations one of which you touched on one you wonder if there's more movement in his catching now it's possible that as he's gotten older it's just a matter of his reaction time is a little bit slower so he's anticipating worse the problem one problem well he's making more contact than ever before as a hitter as we sort of discussed earlier whether that's overcompensating i don't know but certainly you think of contact as a hand-eye coordination skill and if someone is making more contact than ever and it's not like his hitting has been terrible then that seems to suggest he's okay but. But I don't know, maybe there's something there. He has changed a lot offensively. But as you said, there is clearly no way for me to know about that glove height thing. You are the one who does actual journalism. I do not. So if Luke Roy is indeed holding his glove a little

higher, that certainly could suggest that there's just something in his knees that don't allow him to get so low. I don't know if the trend for Luke Roy's teams is sort of mirrored his own framing trend, but that is an interesting explanation. It could be that maybe the Brewers pitchers wanted to throw up in the zone more. They didn't want to live down in a way like they constantly did in Luke Roy's heyday. Because I think one thing we always would observe is that even when Lucroix was at his best as a pitchframer, the Brewers pitching staff was still bad. And there was something a little weird about that, although it, I guess, could have been worse.

But just because, I guess, there is a gradual average aging curve, as always, it by no means suggests that every single player should adhere to that same gradual aging curve. And it's possible Lucroix is just getting older older faster than your standard nearly 31-year-old. Yeah, it seems like framing should age more gracefully somehow. I don't know why, just maybe because the guy's just sitting there. It seems like you should be able to sit there even if you're older and slower. But of course, it's not really just sitting there.

It's also anticipating where the pitch is going to go adjusting to pitches that don't go where they're supposed to go getting your glove in the perfect position to present the pitch and maybe bring it back a bit toward the strike zone subtly so there is all this reaction time stuff that you could easily see being affected by the same processes that affect other aspects of play. So I guess you just have to have a mental adjustment to think of it that way. But it is sort of disappointing because I always enjoyed watching Lucroix be amazing at framing. And I guess the best that we have today is Yasmany Grandal, who is really good. I don't know if he's quite as good as Lucre was at his peak or that Molina was at his peak. It's hard to say because if you put Grandal back in that era, maybe he would look just as good because the competition was worse. But I don't know that this was what the Rangers wanted or expected when they traded Brinson and Ortiz to

top 50 prospects for LeCroy last year. Maybe they'd still be happy with LeCroy as an okay framing catcher who hits. If he is a terrible framing catcher who hits or doesn't hit as well, then obviously that's not really what they had in mind probably when they acquired him. And it's also of interest because the Rangers are making a wildcard run, so it has some bearing on the playoff race. And it also has some bearing on Lucre's free agency, which is coming up at the end of this season. So it does seem as if teams have paid a lot of attention to framing with free agent catchers in the last couple of years. So you wonder if this doesn't reverse itself, is Lucre going to be one of those guys who gets a lot less than we would imagine that he's not going to have nearly as many suitors or suitors who are willing to pay as much as they would have otherwise. And you actually did

some Lucroi-related research, I think maybe early last season, about what happens when guys get dramatically better or worse at framing. And you found that for the most part that tends to stick and there have been examples of guys getting better and then getting worse again or vice versa but for the most part when a catcher does make a major improvement in this area he holds on to it at least for a while so that would suggest that there is less hope than you might think of Lucroix rebounding. So I don't know if he'll end up as the worst, but even getting to average would be a pretty big improvement for him now. Yeah, I think the research basically said that if you get a lot better,

then it either sticks or you're Chris Iannetta. Maybe one interesting comparison, we've got Brian McCann. He's a little older than jonathan lucroy and mccann was another guy who who stood out he was excellent as a framer earlier in his career with the braves he was just eyeballing the numbers fantastic in 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 he was still fantastic a little bit worse 2013 he got worse by according to baseballball Prospectus, 14 runs, but he was still above average. 2014, he stayed the same. 2015, he got worse by another about 12 or 13 runs to the point where he was a little below average. And at that point, if you were just looking at the numbers after 2015, you could have said, well, here's Brian McCann. He's declining. He's getting older,

and that's going to be about it for him. In 2016, he got all the way back to where he was. be about it for him in 2016 he got all the way back to where he was in 2014 he improved by about 13 runs and so far this season he has been about average so clearly there is a little bit of volatility and you can have you're gonna have players bounce back i don't know exactly why mccann bounced back but if memory serves he was with the same team in 2015 and 2016 so it's not like there would have been a dramatic change there. Sometimes things just happen. We still don't understand pitch framing that well, but certainly you don't.

There's enough of an established, consistent relationship between the numbers that there's probably a reason that McCann looked worse in 2015 that isn't just random noise. And there's probably a reason that Lucroy looks worse now.

And if he goes into the market as a 31 year old contact hitting low power ground ball hitting bad framer, well, that looks a lot worse considering just a few years ago, he seemed like maybe the best catcher in all of baseball. I love Jonathan Lucroy just like you do. I want the best for him because he was so underpaid relative to what he was earlier in his career. But I guess I'd say it's not bad luck. If this is what he's going to look like, then that's kind of on him. And it just so happens he's going to hit free agency at the very wrong moment for his career. Yeah. And maybe also worth noting, I didn't focus on it in the article. I just mentioned it as an

aside. But Buster Posey has also had a very big drop-off in framing this year, and he's beenoff as Lucre has had just starting from a higher point because Posey was elite last year I think he maybe had the either the most framing run saved or second to Grandal possibly but right up there and this year he's been exactly average and he's 30 now so I don't know maybe the same thing that happened to Luke Roy is happening to him. So that's another thing that Giants fans can be sad about, I guess. Just clearing the path for Austin Hedges to emerge. Hedges maybe not really hitting so far, but his framing to this point is up to the standard that I think many expected. Austin Hedges may be the pitch framer of the future. One of a few, I guess. There's Christian Vasquez. We don't need to sit here and ruminate about all the other young pitch framers in the game.

But interesting, I was not aware of Posey. I know he's had something of an offensive resurgence relative to where he's been before. And people have delighted at that. But I guess it's hard to talk about getting better in one area. And then you sort of need to acknowledge that he's gotten worse in another area. So Luke Roy, at least not alone. Yeah. All right. So we talked about framing. It is real. We do value it, but unfortunately we do not value Lucroix the way we once did. By the way, this has just been now post episode based on a couple of comments I got on my article. I know that some of you are

probably wondering this now. Is it possible that Lucreys framing has gotten worse because umpires became aware of his reputation for being good at framing and have been extra vigilant or even vindictive about making sure that he didn't steal extra strikes from them? It is possible. I don't think there's a great way to either prove or disprove it. I'm sort of skeptical that that could be the bulk of the reason. For one thing, I don't know why Lucreys framing would suddenly take a hit in 2017 because of that, since I think he was really celebrated for framing a few years ago, not so much in the last couple of years. And there have been a lot of other guys who got press as good framers who haven't declined at all or nearly as much as Lucroy. Jose Molina got a lot of attention for framing, but he was great right up until he retired.

Russell Martin's gotten a lot of press. Yasmani Grandal's gotten a lot of attention for framing, but he was great right up until he retired. Russell Martin's gotten a lot of press. Yasmini Grandal's gotten a lot of press. He still frames well. So it's a reasonable theory. Maybe it matters on the margins. I don't really buy it so much as a primary cause, but I can't rule it out. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners have already pledged their support.

Include Matthew Whitrock, Matt Edigson, Sean McAvoy, Andy Leisner, and Jeremy Kessler. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Badman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. We talked to Levi Weaver about the Rangers and to Tim Haley about the Marlins and John Carlos Stanton's dissatisfaction and contract situation. Also a friend of the podcast, former Effectively Wild guest, C. Trent Rosecrans, who covers the Reds, of course, for the Cincinnati Inquirer. Since it

seems like we talk about the Reds on this podcast now, I think it's probably okay to tell you that Trent's doing a cool narrative podcast now. He and Zach Buchanan do one just talking about the Reds for the Inquirer, but Trent's doing one now called Great American Dream, where he follows Reds minor league prospect Shed Long on his minor league journey. So there are episodes about the language barrier, episodes about learning how to live in the minor leagues, every aspect of minor league life. It's a cool idea. They're doing it every two weeks. They have an upcoming episode about race and African-Americans in baseball. So check it out at cincinnati.com slash series slash great American dream. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you soon. of the sea were the signs of the dove But the wrong way out And the wrong way out We pushed the empty frame of reason

at the cabin door No we won't Be needing reasons anymore