Framing Issues

The Hardball Times posts an article on pitch framing, noting the high value of a called strike, and how the practice is becoming more common:

Jeff Sullivan declared last year in these very pages that “framing was doomed from the start.” His thesis was a sound one—once teams recognized the outsize value of framing, they would begin to develop and employ catchers who were good at it. This would compress the range from the best to the worst, thus making framing just another standard tool in the toolbox, rather than a market inefficiency to be chased down and taken advantage of. “The market is going to end up flooded with good-receiving catchers,” Sullivan declared. “By then we’ll no longer recognize them as good-receiving catchers. Pitch-framing is sufficiently important that baseball teams will prioritize it right into insignificance.”

Teams are indeed doing that. The Minnesota Twins, one of the worst teams with regard to framing, hired Jason Castro last offseason. No player has crossed the ridiculously high four percent CSAA threshold since 2011. On the bottom end of the leaderboard, only one catcher has dropped below the ignominious negative-three percent threshold in the last four seasons.

So the advantage is disappearing, but it should be disappearing due MLB fighting against framing. Good pitch framers cheat hitters, and poor pitch framers cheat their own pitchers. Since teams are now invested in the odious practice, the league should send a sheet everyday to home plate umpires noting the pitch framing abilities of the catchers in the game, and video of umpires making bad calls on the catcher receiving the ball so they know what to look for.

This is a pattern recognition problem for the umpire. The way to fix it is training that forces the umpire to ignore the noise of the catcher’s glove. I would think with VR software, the umpire could train a few minutes a day to break their poor recognizers, and call the ball, not the glove.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2j7T33m