Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 205: Catcher Framing Questions/A Hypothetical Pitching Problem/Post-Start MRIs

Episode Date: May 17, 2013

Ben and Sam answers listener questions about catcher framing, a very unusual reliever, and cautionary MRIs.

Thank you. Thank you. Good evening and a very warm welcome to You've Been Framed. Good morning and welcome to episode 205 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg with Sam Miller. Ben Lindberg with Sam Miller. Normally we do the email show on Wednesday, but we mentioned this past Wednesday that we had so many good emails that we might do two this week, just to kind of clear out the backlog a little bit. And we have decided to go through with that plan. So we have collected a bunch of emails from the last, I guess, the week or

maybe even longer back, and we're going to get to them now. So there were a couple about catcher framing, which is something that we've talked about at least a few times on the show. I wrote a thing for Grantland this week about catcher framing, and that seems to have inspired a couple of questions. So the first one is from Andy. He said, Ben, I recently read your piece for Grantland about pitch framing, and it makes a lot of sense. As a pitcher myself, nothing makes me happier than when a catcher steals a strike for me.

But with the recent discussion about how bad umps have been and that there needs to be something done, there have been talks about robot umpires and with that an automatic strike zone. My question for you is, if baseball were to institute an automatic strike zone, would the quest for a good pitch framer become worthless as there is no pitch that can be stolen? And the answer is, yeah, pretty much. I guess so. Yeah, pretty obviously, right? I mean, it's the entire premise. But can I ask you a spinoff question real quick, though?

Sure. Somebody mentioned in, I want to say the comments of one of your pieces that, you might be able to fill me in on this, but the hypothesis that robot umps would help either hitters or pitchers, because either hitters or pitchers are currently more worried about either getting or losing strike calls due to umpire error. And I don't know if you know this, but you've looked at catcher framing more than most people alive. Not all, but more than the average. Do you have a sense of who benefits from umpire error more? So I'm not sure. I've heard informed people, I guess, express both points of view.

informed people, I guess, express both points of view. There are people who think that it would be a boon to batters and others who think it would benefit pitchers. I mean, talking to people about framing specifically, the consensus among catchers and coaches seems to be that that receiving skills are more about not losing strike calls than they are about gaining strike calls uh outside the zone so i guess i don't know in that sense i mean i guess you benefit more from from a good framer maybe uh just from not not losing strikes and you wouldn't be losing strikes anyway if the zone were standardized and called by some sort of robot. So I don't know exactly what effect that would have. There are so many unintended consequences, I think,

of the robot umpire idea, and it's probably a pretty sound idea on the whole. Not the least of which is the robot revolution that will end us all. Right. Of course. I would certainly miss the framing skill. I asked Russell Martin this question. I mean, what would it mean for catchers if there were robot umpires? And he sounded sort of sad about that idea. I mean, he thinks it's kind of an art. It is something that he has dedicated many, many hours to becoming good at. And so it would change things completely if suddenly that were just not a factor at all. If all a catcher really had to do was literally catch the ball one way or another

and just prevent it from going to the backstop, but not have to make it look a certain way, that would change a lot. I guess, I don't know, maybe you would start to see better hitting catchers because they just wouldn't have as much of a defensive burden um so that could happen i don't know what it would what it would do to to offense but i i did kind of at the end of my grantland piece i kind of got into that a little bit and and talked about uh you know how i would sort of be sorry to to see framing go at this point now that I've become aware of it and become interested in it and and and I mean I don't know it's a it's interesting

to think about and I think if there is no no robot umpire imminently. One of the things I kind of speculated about was that framing might just kind of bring an end to itself in that the more attention is paid to how much impact this can have on a game, the more people will, I guess, be upset about umpires and there will be even more of a groundswell of support for for taking pitch calling out of the umpire's hand plus if if teams just devote all their resources or devote more resources to having catchers who can receive the ball properly then i mean imagine if every

team had not necessarily a jose molina but someone who was, say, above average in the current landscape. Suddenly, I mean, what would that do to strikeout rates, which are climbing already and are already too high for some people's taste? If you had a good framer on every team, then that would kind of get out of control so i feel like one way or another uh maybe the clock is kind of ticking whether it's that the attention paid to this is going to hasten the arrival of some sort of standardized strike zone or uh that it will just change the game in in certain ways that will force major league baseball to think about changing a rule of some sort. Yeah. Thoughts? Yeah, no. Okay. I asked, I asked cause I didn't know.

Yeah. All right. So the other, the other framing related question is from Danny. He says, good evening gentlemen. Jason Parks mentioned on this week's fringe average podcast that he could see teams investing more in their catching prospects focusing more on their game calling and pitch receiving slash framing skills if you were a gm would you make this a higher priority than developing plus hitters plus hitting catchers also what is the average salary of a roving minor league catching coordinator? And how much above average would you, particularly Ben, offer Jose Molina to be your coordinator when his playing days are over?

So this is interesting, I guess. I did talk to a few catching coordinators for that article, and I did not ask them how much money they make. for that article and I did not ask them how much money they make. Maybe I should have asked them how much money they make as the last question of my interview in case it offended them. I would guess. Yeah, I'm going to Google real quick. So sorry to everybody. Yeah, I don't know. I would guess it's not a very large amount. I do think that teams will be investing more in this particular skill. And that was kind of one of the things I talked about, that the Yankees seem to be very focused on this. Brian Cashman said that they're big into framing the other day on the radio. And of course, they went into the season with Francisco Cervelli and Chris Stewart, who are known more for their defensive skills than their bats. And then I talked to a bunch of people with the Astros, particularly

Mark Bailey, who's kind of the Astros catching coordinator. And he told me how Mike Fast, the former BP offer and other members of the Astros front office had sent him all these studies and stats and showed him the video of good framers next to bad framers and how he was just kind of completely converted. That in the past he had sort of considered a catcher's arm strength before anything else, but that now he was reevaluating that and really had just kind of become convinced that this is as important as the stats and the studies say it is, and that he is just right now kind of coming up with ways to implement that and try to churn out a wave of catchers who are good at this. And I don't know that every team is doing something like that, but I think that is probably the way things are, are headed. Certainly.

Well, I'm going to give a quick, um, uh, counter argument, which is that I asked, um, the angels about this. And, uh, they told me that, that, uh, this has just been standard practice for them for, uh, you for them for a decade or more. And in fact, Mike Socha said that this was standard practice for the Dodgers when he was coming up through the system. And catcher framing was a huge part of what they worked on and what they were instructed in. And so like every Angels catcher who's come up for the last decade has been drilled on this since, you know, from rookie ball on. And of course, as we all know, catcher defense is a priority for playing time in the Angels organization.

And yet the Angels catchers don't fare particularly well. I mean some are okay, some are worse. You know, Mathis was plus and Napoli was negative. And Iannetta is negative. Yeah, I mean Iannetta is imported so you might exempt him but um it's not as though uh working on these guys from the crib uh so to speak um turned them into jose molina's and i my guess is that uh jose molina uh well he certainly has he certainly i would say has a lot more value in the framing he actually does than in any framing that he would be able to teach. And my guess is that the difference between Molina and any other catching coordinator who made this a priority or a catching coordinator who didn't make it a priority would be fairly limited.

My hunch is that maybe the rare outlier like Molina excluded, this is more of a trait that you're born with that maybe improves as you age, but that like most things in baseball is extremely difficult to really teach at an impact level at this high of a level. And incidentally also, Socha says that Molina's own origin story

about uh what was it the yankees in 2009 or whatever yeah he said tony pena worked with him in 2008 and and made him better yeah so there you go so i mean quite possibly he did uh but socia says that um that melina was a great framer when he was with the Angels. He started from a very high point, even if he did take a leap forward, which is perhaps true or not. Yeah, I have no idea whether Jose Molina wants to be a catching coordinator. Who doesn't? Who wouldn't? Right. I have read some stories about him kind of tutoring other catchers i read something about him working with with the race catchers

just the other day so so maybe uh but that's not necessarily a guarantee that i mean the fact that he is so good at this doesn't mean that he will be able to teach the skill effectively. Obviously, good hitters do not automatically become good hitting coaches, so there's no reason to believe that he would necessarily be a great catching coordinator. If he were, I guess that would be worth something, but not a vast sum, I guess. But you're right. I mean, it's certainly, it's a skill that has always been valued. It's not as if it has just suddenly dawned on a bunch of baseball men that it matters how you catch the ball. They have always been aware of that. But it does seem that with, at least with the teams that are a little more into the numbers, the fact that the numbers are so big just makes it more of an emphasis or harder to dismiss, I guess. Certainly, Socia seems to have been putting an emphasis on this before anyone else was on the internet when we were all making fun of him for starting Mathis

over Napoli, he knew something we didn't, clearly. So that's framing. And I think the reason that I like talking about this so much and writing about it and the reason people ask so many questions about it, I feel like, is that it's just kind of like at the sweet spot where it's kind of like at the cutting edge of baseball analysis. And yet we are kind of almost as capable of analyzing it in the public sphere as people inside the game are, which is true of very, very few things now, I think. There are very, very few areas that are kind of still being worked on and where there's still stuff to learn, and yet we are just about as capable of learning those things

and studying those things as someone who is inside the game. So that sort of sets it apart, and it's also something that you can talk to old school people about, and you can talk to new school people about, and get all kinds of interesting perspectives. So that is why I keep coming back to it week after week, I suppose. I think the thing that's great about catch-a-framing as a discussion topic is that the entire act, every relevant detail is before you on it on your tv yeah you don't you don't you're not at the mercy of of camera operators uh you you don't miss the split second where the the key thing is done like you would for you know a short stop breaking for a ball or whatever uh it's just it's right there it's like completely self-contained it's like uh you know like uh it's it's almost like uh in a way uh trying to to watch a short stop play

defense is like playing some super complicated video game and then watching catcher framing is just like um like one of those two button flash games that are like 10 times more addictive and that take away your entire day. So this is just this wonderful two-button game. It's so simple. Okay, next question comes from Eric Hartman. He says, I have a thought. Sorry, I believe it's actually pronounced Ari Chartman. His last name, I believe, is Chartman.

That is not true. It's Ari Chartman. I don't believe that. in brooklyn new york uh he as he says i have a hypothetical question for you guys would there be room on a mlb roster for a pitcher who could only throw one inning every five days but is guaranteed to never give up a run yeah so. So, I mean, first of all, as you noted, I think you had just written about, was it Guillermo Quiroz? Yes.

You had just written about the Giants' third string catcher. You noted that if the Giants can carry a third catcher, then they could certainly find room for a pitcher who never gives up a run. Right, who basically never plays. But this question is interesting because, for one thing, I think that there are two details, well, I guess it's one detail that we need to actually know, which is, does Eric mean this pitcher can only throw one inning every five days, but it's the exact same fifth

day, just like a starting pitcher pitches every fifth day or can he pitch, uh, once in every five game span or can he pitch, um, like, could he, and, and what are the five game spans?

Is it that he can never pitch once he pitches one inning, he's done for four more days. Or is it that like between games one to five of the season, he can pitch one game, and between games six and ten, he can pitch one game? So he could theoretically pitch back-to-back days? I took it to mean that he cannot pitch back-to-back days, that when he pitches, he is shut down for the next four or whatever. So then theoretically, he might go nine or 10 days.

I mean, the interesting element of this, I think is really trying to figure out how, how well, how well you could actually, or how properly you could actually leverage him. I don't know if you remember, cause it was a very forgettable piece,

but I did, I did a piece last summer about, uh, how, how, how well you could actually leverage Billy Hamilton as a stolen base only threat. Like if you committed to using him only as a base runner, only as a pinch runner, but you could use him every day once basically, how well could you do it and how many runs could it be and it's actually not that easy to properly leverage a guy even if you know he's going to be

safe on every stolen base because you don't know whether the situation in the fifth is as tense as it's going to get or whether to hold on and so then maybe you don't use them in that inning in the fifth or that opportunity in the fifth and and then the game gets out of hand and there's never a leverage situation so you end up wasting all kinds of opportunities and and if you compare how much value you get out of him um based on what you know at the time versus what you would have done if you had known everything or if you were making the decision after the game and could go back and do it retroactively it's actually actually, as I recall, it was a pretty big difference. And so this guy, who can only throw one inning but never gets up a run, is extremely valuable if you're omniscient.

Right. And so it seems like you feel going into this exercise, you think, I would find highly leveraged opportunities to use this guy and it would be a pretty awesome thing to have and a big deal. But I think what you would end up doing is like wasting him sometimes and missing chances to use him sometimes. Yeah, well, you'd always be reluctant to use him. You would. Because you've got five days, right? You would want to save him for the most because

you can always imagine another situation in the next five days is going to come around but but then if you wait and that next situation doesn't come for four days well now you've you've started the clock so much later so using this guy would almost be more hassle than it's worth i mean you would you would almost i i well you would, I don't know if you would probably a competent manager wouldn't, but I personally, as a person who would get obsessed with the, uh, uh, you know, kind of academic value of this exercise would think of nothing else. I would single-mindedly focused on the odds of, of whether I'm using this guy correctly. And, uh, I would look up and I would see my starting pitcher batting for himself in the 11th inning.

So, I mean, I think that there is room for this guy, but it's not the slam dunk that I initially thought it would be. Yeah, I think... How many innings do you think this guy... Right, that's the other thing. I mean, the typical lefty specialist, like a super lefty specialist, like a Joe Patterson or a Randy Choate or something,

probably doesn't pitch more than one inning every five days, right? Well, yeah, I mean... I mean, he can pitch back-to-back days or whatever, but... An extreme, yeah, an extreme lefty specialist will probably throw 40 innings a year, like a LaRusso Lugui would probably go between 35 and 45 innings a year. And so this guy would be going 32 or 33 if you used him on the dot. I mean, more likely you probably would get like 26, 27 innings out of him.

Yeah. Which is close to— And he runs in that time. He would never allow a run. I mean, it's tempting. It's tempting. I think there's room for this guy, but I'm not sure that I would be as excited that he fell into my lap

as maybe I want to be. Yeah. I would think it's not an optimal usage of a roster spot, but I would think that in today's game with giant bullpens already, I would think the temptation would be too much and that he would get a job somewhere. What would you pay him? Well, I mean, I'm barely willing to give him a roster spot,

so I guess I wouldn't want to pay him much more than the minimum, really. Well, I'm certainly willing to give him a roster spot. I have no qualms about the roster spot. I would probably give him two and a quarter million dollars. Yeah, I don't know. I might even go higher. I mean if you – I would – I imagine that – gosh, 30 scoreless innings is probably – I don't know how to do this math, but 30 scoreless innings is probably like a win to a win and a half in warp? Yeah, I guess. Well, I don't know.

How many scoreless innings does an average pitcher have in 30 innings? Okay, so replacement level is what is replaced? Five, an ERA of five or so? For a reliever, I guess it might be lower. Okay, so let's say it's 4.4. So over the course of 30 innings, a replacement level pitcher would give up like 14 or 15 runs. So a pitcher with zero runs would give up, would be worth about a win and a half. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess.

But there's an opportunity cost, I guess, there's there's an opportunity cost I guess to carrying him on your roster yeah but there's an opportunity cost to carrying everybody on your roster I mean that's what warp I mean warp includes that basically right I mean yeah but you have this guy then you also have to I but you have this guy, then you also have to make up the innings somewhere

that he is not pitching, and then you either need to tax your other relievers more or you need to get replacement-level innings for those innings. So that eats into the value, I guess. I guess, yeah. I mean, you're replacing the last guy in your bullpen who's probably actually genuinely replacement level um but you're shifting that guy's mop-up innings onto the second to last guy who's now not a you know there is a you are unfortunately pushing everybody in your bullpen down into a little bit more garbage time. So there is a, in a way, there's like a sort of a reverse cascade effect, right?

Yeah. But I don't know that I would be too worried about that. I mean, people, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I'd do it. No problem. I'd give them, I'm now up to, I'd give them five million. Wow.

All right, I guess. Well, okay, I guess I could go along with something like that, just kind of given the current relief landscape, I suppose, which seems already sort of inefficient. And I guess if that's the way things are, then this guy has some value. I wish he, I wish he existed, uh, because yeah, I'd probably just write about him constantly. Well, he probably does exist. I mean, well, I guess in a sense, like Justin Verlander could probably be this guy.

It would be a totally wasted opportunity. So yeah, no. So he doesn't exist in a way that you would use him that way. So I also wish that he existed. I wish every weird, freakish thing you can think of existed. Okay. This question is from Wes. He says, done immediately, not wait for him to finally reveal after weeks of ineffectiveness or an injury that he's been hurting or compensating. To take it a step further, what's to stop teams from giving

their pitchers MRIs after every outing and comparing them to preseason baselines? With so little science behind innings limits, why not use MRIs as part of the post-start process to determine if a rehabbing pitcher needs to be constrained or shut down. So this is sort of like the preventative appendectomy topic that we talked about a couple weeks ago. Basically just going out of your way to prevent injuries more so than teams do currently. And last time we just kind of said whatever we thought. This time we contacted Corey Dawkins, the BP injury guy, who we had on the show a couple weeks ago to talk about Chad Billingsley's injury. So I sent him the question and he sent me an answer and I'm going to

read the answer because I think the answer makes sense. So Corey says, there are several factors, I believe. First is that plain MRIs are often not sensitive enough to pick up the chronic conditions that end with pitcher surgeries. For instance, in most cases, a plain MRI won't pick up a chronic injury to the ligament responsible for Tommy John surgeries. The rotator cuff and labrum also show some changes as well. for Tommy John surgeries. The rotator cuff and labrum also show some changes as well. In order to get the most accurate picture, an invasive MR arthrogram would have to be performed where a special dye is injected into the joint. This would require at least a few days rest, possibly up to a week or more afterwards. No team is going to shut down a player for that length of time without any reason. Also, what shows up on the MRI may not be what is causing the symptoms.

With professional pitchers, there are always something that shows up on MRI that doesn't cause the symptoms. Third, purely my opinion only, is psychological. Most players, I believe, wouldn't want that level of detail because it might affect how they approach the game, especially if there is no baseline for it. Is it normal to have some swelling in the rotator cuff immediately after the game? Same goes for the elbow or any other body part, So that makes sense. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense.

I guess MRIs also cost some money. So if you were doing that for every pitcher after every game, that would be an expense. So there's also that. Yeah, I guess the one perhaps possibility for this idea would be almost like an exit interview at the end of every season. If you sent a pitcher out to do this, you wouldn't worry about shutting him down because he's already shut down for the next five months and it might it might be useful especially because um you know a lot of times guys like johnny venters is an example shows up to camp and uh has this elbow soreness and now they you know they lose two months doing the rehab thing with him and rehab when you try to rehab a

sprained ligament in your elbow it basically seems to never work so they're wasting two months on this rehab. They're going to end up doing Tommy John anyway but let's say they don't. Either way, it'd be nice to have been able to do that rehab during the off season and I don't know if it would show

up in this MR arthrogram which I've never heard of, and which is fascinating. But if that's the sort of thing that you could theoretically find with preventative diagnostics, it might still make sense at the end of the season, just before everybody leaves to go home. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe we should ask Corey. Okay. Are we done ask Corey okay are we done yeah I'm done that was a great question by the way yeah very good question good question good answer they should

Corey should do a podcast with Wes it should just be a question where Wes sends Corey questions yeah could be alright we're done you can send us more questions at podcast at baseball prospectus.com we will be back on Monday have a nice weekend