Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 686: Catcher Game-Calling, Now Slightly Less Mysterious

Episode Date: May 29, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to BP Director of Technology Harry Pavlidis about his recent discoveries about game-calling and our new understanding of what catchers are worth.

I keep calling, calling, calling, taking the number I'm calling, calling, calling, taking the number I'm calling, calling, calling, taking the number I'm calling, calling, calling. Calling, calling, calling. Good morning and welcome to episode 686 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. Hello. And we are joined for the first time in a couple hundred episodes by BP's Director of Technology, Harry Pablidis. Hello, Harry.

Hello. So we talk about catcher stats on this podcast, or I talk about catcher stats, and Sam listens sometimes. And so you have been one of the driving forces behind all the new catcher stats that we've gotten to play with over the last couple years. And you have a new one this week. And it is kind of the, I don't know, maybe it's the last piece of the puzzle. Maybe it's not. We can talk about that. But you wrote something for ESPN Magazine this week about game calling.

And you came up with a game calling stat and you rated game calling and this has kind of been the final frontier for catcher stats we've had framing we've had throwing we've had fielding batted balls but we have been missing this game calling element which pitchers and catchers tell you is very important. And now we have numbers. So tell us how we have these numbers. How did you put a number on game calling and what does it mean exactly? What does game calling encompass? These final frontiers are frightening because there's a lot of unknowns.

So the process really started, oh gosh, about a year ago when I did a piece with ESPN about framing. And we talked about what was going to be next. And I said, we hope by sometime early in this season, 2015, that we would have something on game calling. And it turned out that it wasn't quite so early. But what happened was it was kind of a side effect of DRA, which as we produce DRA, was it was kind of a side effect of DRA, which as we produce DRA, there's a core calculation that we figure out the value of expected versus actual outcome of each plate appearance. I should say that is deserved run average with the new BP pitching stat, which you can hear Jonathan Judge talk about on a recent episode of Effectively Wild. Okay, continue. I was going to put that plug in, but that's good.

That's very good. So it was pointed out to me during the project that, like, hey, by the way, we can do something with that. I'm like, well, let's do it. So we took it, so Judge and, I guess, Dan Tarkoff, as well as Greg Matthews and Rob Arthur and Rob McEwen and all those guys they they said here use this you know this this will actually produce useful data on catchers and i took that to do a

little bit of work but it was really pretty much everything that needed to be based on all the accumulated work from dra to come up with a first calculation of what the catcher added beyond what else he was doing and that we knew about. So all these contextual controls, we kind of turn around and at the end take a quick detour. Instead of calculating DRA, we've set up going through all those final steps and complexities there. We kind of stop and say, what's the value here? So once you do that, we start to go, well, what is this, you know, what is this actually here so once you do that we start to go well what is this you know what is this actually measuring you know that's you know what are the skills and the attributes really the second part and that that's where the thing with the espn was helpful because they got

me access to a catcher and then they poked and prodded me to act like a journalist and talk to some of my industry connections about it and discovered quite a few things about what we're measuring, what we may not be measuring, what we think we're measuring. And it's quite a learning experience. Okay. So if I can take a stab at summarizing what this is telling us, this is essentially, this is the remaining gray area after we have, this is like is like you know you calculate how much dark matter is in the universe because you you know how much non-dark matter exists and you know how much matter exists and so the rest of it is just dark matter and so this is like the

dark matter that was remaining for catchers after accounting for everything else so framing and batted balls and run saved and everything so you can you look at pictures what was their impact yeah what was their impact on batter events outside of the ability to frame and block the pitcher and then all the things yeah exactly so it is it is dark matter there's no doubt and and that's been one of my one of my laments about anything i've ever heard about game calling. MGL, you know, Mitchell Lichtman, the great, you know, sabermetrician from the book, co-author of Tango and Dolphin. And of course, Max Marshy, who is now with the Indians, but formerly of Baseball Perspectives,

who really was one of the real leaders in these things. And he was one of the first people to say, oh, and by the way, game calling, you know, A.J. Krasinski is a monster. It sounds much better, Max's accent. But, you know, the notion is that he calculated these things. And MGL, they both have said it's pretty much what's left over. And so we said, OK, that's a start. So Brooks, Dan Brooks and I, we started talking about what could be, what are the components of game calling?

Sequencing is one thing. You know, you can maybe see these guys call pitches differently do they make different selections at different times are there other skills are there other attributes of their game impacting their pitch selection so they may not call a slider when it's optimal like hey you can get this guy out because he'll expand the zone for a slider but i'm not going to throw because i'm scared it's going to be in the dirt and go past you so the catcher doesn't call it or the pitcher shakes it off or, you know, something, you know, you don't get the, so you end up throwing a fastball and in a non fastball situation or pacing, you know, if these guys can't get on the same page, they're not going to go as fast.

And I'm going to say that again, pacing is something. So what, then what makes a catcher good at it was something, you know, can they read swings? So can they look for, identify the holes in a batter swing and how they're reacting within the game? How much do they prepare watching video? Those are the kind of things we thought, like, okay, what are the things we can measure? But when we kind of found a sophisticated way to measure dark matter, I kind of was like, okay, this is actually pretty good. And, you know, then the next thing is to go take that that finding take those dark matter numbers and and say what is it in here and we haven't really embarked on the

on the fun research but in talking to folks we it was surprising you know that some of the things that i figured it would be important are but it's more about just letting the pitcher execute and letting the catcher worry about the sequence. And that's really the Dodgers philosophy, according to A.J. Ellis, who I spoke to for ESPN. And A.J. I spoke to because over the past three years, he has the most value as a game caller. has the most value as a game caller. And so the magnitude of it, can you tell the total impact of a catcher just by looking at how different combinations of pitchers do with different combinations of catchers? And you see how it works, right? And so that you see that catchers have a certain amount of impact and you can tell how much

of that impact comes from throwing or framing or whatever and you know that that doesn't account for the entire difference and so there is some leftover amount and what is the leftover amount what is the the range of game calling what's a good game caller worth 10 to 15 runs of game calling value would be a lot above average. So it's a one to two win at the extreme range skill, while framing can be much, much larger. So it's a big skill. It's important. It comes out very well in our measurements, but framing comes out much, much larger does that surprise you at all because i if you know if 10 years ago we had

you had told me that you had figured out how much all of these component skills were worth and that one of them was worth a ton and another one was worth a little less i would have guessed that game calling would have been worth more just because it seems like what we think of as game calling a lot of times is basically the ability to turn a not very good pitcher into a better pitcher and that just seems like i'm not completely convinced framing game calling are really distinct although we do find that they vary separately people so players who are consistently good at framing may have good and bad game calling seasons which is a little bit strange but it seems to move independently of framing you have guys who are just consistently bad at one but good at the other.

So I feel pretty comfortable, at least in the PitchFX era, that when we have framing calculated that way, that we've distinguished it. In the Retro sheet, the pre-2008 era, where we had pitch-by-pitch data but not location, it's, I think, much different, where I think it's really polluted. So one thing to consider is we're also one thing that considers we're in the framing golden age i think we're pretty much seeing peak value would be my guess and so it may have had a larger impact in the past so one of the things we want to try and figure out is if we can suss out why where the differences are using present day versions of

retro sheet data to compare, you know, okay, we have differences in framing. Are they explained by game calling between the two systems and try and figure out how we can try and maybe tune the older data and try and see if the impact was larger in the past, but presently in the past few years, while it's been the golden age of framing and we can best, I think distinguish framing from game calling, it seems much smaller. Now for some catchers, it's going to be bigger than anything else,

because they may be about average here or there. So for a guy like AJ Ellis, it pulls him from being, you know, if he could hit over 200 would help, but it pulls him from being a bad catcher to being a good one. He's not a good framer. He's okay. He's pretty good, I guess, above average or average at throwing. But it's his game calling skills that actually make him a plus behind the plate overall. So for some guys, it can make a difference. So he's one of the guys who gets the most value from it in our current measure. It's pretty surprising, except for when you consider that Clayton Kershaw loves pitching to him.

And it's not just because he's catching Clayton Kershaw. That's tough to say. It's not just because he's catching Clayton Kershaw. That's tough to say. It's not just because he's catching Clayton Kershaw that he's excelling at this. Yeah, that was going to be my next question, because it makes total sense that it would be AJ Ellis at the top of this leaderboard, because you'd think that he must be doing something well, because these guys like pitching to him, and he doesn't frame, and he doesn't really hit. So it has to be something. And maybe this is that something. Exactly. And that's why it became the hook for the story, right? It's like, geez, this is a guy who I have, you know, published statistics that have maligned him. It was great to talk to him about that. Because he laughed and said, I'm aware of that. And it's great, because it changed my focus. I now concentrate on

framing a pitch. And I was like, what do you mean? He says, you should just react. So I'd be very, very focused on what pitch to call and making that decision and thinking ahead. And, you know, so all those mental things that he had to do to decide what pitch to call, you know, and hint, that's why it's so hard to measure. It's so complicated. But then, you know, he would just react to the pitch coming in. And then when we started publishing leaderboards where it's like he's minus 15 runs a season or something framing, he said he started concentrating. And he started actually having his brain more engaged throughout the pitch.

So it was a fascinating thing. So this is, I mean, pretty amazing where the guy's like, it's good to be, have these things measured as he put a call, you know, he said called measuring the unmeasurable. He says it's very good because it puts a value on these things, but also because it made him more aware of the importance of it. Although in his case, framing wise, it hasn't seemed to change the numbers that are, there are some some guys who you know like chris ianetta this year had that same kind of epiphany and now suddenly he's gone from the bottom of the leaderboards to the top of the leaderboards in one off season or spring training of working on this stuff whereas ellis is still in the red well he is still in the red but you know one could

posit that with leg injuries as he's had he's maybe resisted some of the decline that we seem to see with guys. There's a strong reason to believe, and it's something that we want to probably get to this offseason to measure, is look at as guys get hurt, how their framing goes. There seems to be something there where the lower body goes. That seems to be a big part of the aging process, and that seems to make it harder to frame. So maybe you're not getting as low. Maybe you're not as stable. But so guys like that you know i always kind of say it's okay maybe he's hurt everybody's getting better also it seems they're cutting

off the lower end but whether or not it's coming out the numbers he's found that important because he keeps them more mentally engaged and i think that and that is you know that's a little scary so i mean the so the knee-jerk critique to this would be, of course, AJ Ellis shows up as a good game caller. He's catching Clayton Kershaw, and he's catching Zach Greinke. He's catching the rest of their staff, and he's catching their bullpen. Yes, that too. So it's all there, and they throw to other catchers.

Right. So, yeah, I mean, you're familiar with that critique. Every time I've ever written about catcher defense, I hear that, too. So what is the response to that? It's that he's we've done everything in our power at this point to control for that. And the methods we've used have been proven reliable in other areas. So AJ measures well year after year. Most guys do. The correlation year to year in the metric we're using is higher for catchers than it is for

pitchers so it's not a bad number so it's not a pure clean metric so the who's on his staff i think we do a plenty good job controlling for that we're always as you guys probably know and stuff i've talked to you guys before about is i'm always looking for better ways to do that and that's why we got into some of the things with dra and our newer framing model with called strikes above average csa or sissa uh that really focus on those things so i i feel comfortable with our measurement of that black banner i realize that we have the good thing is it doesn't just aj ellis who's like his pictures are totally yadi tends to come out good over multiple years he's always at the top but in some years he seems to drop for some reason and i'll kind of talk about some of my thinking on that for in a minute but it tends to align with reality

it tends to align with who we've heard about and and then and the range of it is what we expected to find uh so to me it is easily the most questionable thing that we measure in all the things that we publish and do. But it's not the, well, he pitched with, he caught with that staff. That's not, that's not what concerns me. Concerns me is not every catcher calls pitches. There are teams that, this is what I learned doing the research process and getting, you know, nobody would go on the record about this stuff. But what I learned talking to three different executives from office leaders that there are teams in baseball that 100 percent of the pitches are called from the bench, Major League Baseball. So I didn't know that.

So, so, so, Harry, do you if you know those teams, when you look at their catchers, do they still know? I don't know who they are. I, honest to God, don't know who they are. I wish I did. Because if we knew who those teams were, and it shouldn't be that hard to figure out, they're going to be looking in at the dugout even when there's not a runner on base, right? I mean, as it is, the catcher looks in at the dugout because the base runner, the running game is often called from the dugout. Yeah, but what if it's the guy with the flashlight in center field no you're right you would probably look you know or they're you know that's probably

probably the case yeah so if we let's say we figured out those three teams and then we looked at their catchers and they still had big spreads in pitch calling or pitch whatever we're calling yeah gain value is like the best way to it. It's not just calling it. And this is what Ellis kind of explained to me and what the other executives told me as well. It's not just what pitch they're asking for. We know these guys have to do a lot of things. So I know what you're going to ask is that these guys might still be a difference.

Yeah. So you may have Caleb Joseph and what is it, Nick Hundley is the other guy on the Orioles? Is he still on the Orioles? No, he's on the Rockies. Yeah, but he was before, right? He was, yeah. Yeah, so there's a big difference between those two guys. And let's say we find out that Buck's calling most of the pitches,

all the pitches something. So, okay, there's still a difference even if we control for that. They're on the same team. What is it? It's like, well, it's the comfort level. There's something about these guys don't like pitching to me or they like pitching to him. It's real. So Ellis told me that the trust and communication, I said, what is game calling?

What is that makes you good at game calling? And that question may sound familiar to Ben. And he said, trust and communication. And I was expecting it to be some more baseball kung fu, but it wasn't. It was totally soft. It was absolutely like so it was about, you know, we might go fishing and get to know each other and build that rapport. He talked a lot about how vested he is in the pitcher's success. And that, you know, that they know that he goes and puts in the work and that when he makes a call, it's with the pitcher's best interest in mind

based on his level of preparation and decision-making. And some pitchers, as he told me, it's totally different. Kershaw dictates what the game plan is going to be for a game. They go through the same process of video meeting with Honeycutt, and then Clayton says, here's how we're going to go about it. And that's it. Clayton doesn't want to talk until after the game. That's the end of the conversations with them.

The rest of the game is AJ diverging from the plan constantly. He's like, it's mad scientist out there, his words, during the game. Now, you don't experiment in all situations at all times with all pitchers. But he's like, you're trying different things. You're saving things for later. You're figuring out what to do and how to do it. So you're constantly diverging from the plan but the pitcher has to trust you and Kershaw doesn't want to hear about it or talk about it he'll just let him go Granke is the polar opposite for that guy it's a non-stop conversation between innings during

innings during at bats where Granke is constantly saying discussing what they're doing how they're doing it why they're doing it which isn't totally surprising based on how we know who Zach likes to work in a very cerebral way where he even will go in a dugout, look at pitch effects data and adjust his grips and his technique in-game. So there's that whole range that Ellis has to deal with, and the reason he deals with it well is because he commits himself to their success. And it was an but of course is the fundamentals of baseball and he said brad

awesomest taught him a lot of the preparation steps and the checklist he has came from awesomest and it's like this is what you do before the game is how you get ready and on the day i talked to me he had just spent 90 minutes going through diamondbacks video before just the whole lineup so he had you know 10 to 15 minutes of video on every guy in their lineup, where he's sitting at bats. That's a lot of, if you think about just watching condensed pitch after pitch stuff and paying, that's a lot of focus, a lot of mental energy being put into it. And then during the game, he's talking to his pitching coach.

So a lot of it is directed by, you know, the pitcher. A lot of it is directed by the pitching coach who, in Honeycutt's case, he goes down to video and will make directional changes on the game plan during the game that way. Some teams are signaling from the bench. Ellis is calling his own game. The only thing that I've seen him get signs for was if they want him to throw behind the runner or potentially walk a guy, he'll check those things,

like you said, with runners on base. But he calls everything himself. so they're one of those every team i talked to said the same thing it's a soft skill if the catcher's not good at it we'll give him more and more pointers if he doesn't adopt those pointers we'll just start calling the game from the bench so it's really like i'm like what are we measuring here and that's really the biggest thing here is what are we measuring? And then there's the whole, you know, massive luck factor. You think Babbitt's a problem for pitchers. It's a little harder for catchers too, but they have a role in that. They actually have a role in how all these things play out and it buried a lot of noise, but we found a pretty good signal. And now we want to start looking for the covariates. What are the things that go with it?

Because one of the things that I said, okay, so, so after this whole conversation about psychology and soft skills with HALs, I was like, so I'm like, Hey man,

like, how do I like measure this and stuff? And he's like, uh, pacing. I'm like, Oh, bless your heart,

man. I'm like, I'm like, good. Because he's like, you'll see it there. He's like,'m like good because he's like you'll see it there he's like and big innings also he's like his prediction is that good game callers will not have as many innings real out of control or have the pitcher get ripped out like basically if a guy managed

to get four innings out of his starter instead of one and two thirds just by calming him down and getting to say just you know you've given up seven runs, but it's cool. Remember that time in Boca when we were fishing? And, you know, that was awesome. It's probably not going to be as simple as looking and saying he calls more two-seamers than this other catcher, or he calls more inside pitches or something like that. I think you yourself have published things about you know

one yachty calling or right like back-to-backs yeah uh i think there was something i forget which pitcher well i think wasn't passata like not calling sinkers for somebody or something like that you will find that i think well i found something where i was working at uh kurt suzuki when he was with the nationals when i was working for the Washington Post for a while we I noticed that he was calling in an ordinate bound of fastballs where Ramos and the other catchers at the time there was a lot of different guys catching with the team at that time so it made it interesting to measure that we're calling breaking pitches these guys had always thrown breaking pitches in particular I'm talking about Gio Gonzalez and Steven Strasburg and and the

thinking was you know I talked to you know you know wagner and kilgore um who were both the beat writers at the time for the post adam wagner and um adam kilgore james wagner james wagner adam corey i knew i had it wrong uh like wait a minute that sounds totally backwards so they were like oh yeah those are the guys who don't hold the runners on like geo doesn't hold runners on he's the left he's like yeah but he doesn't pay any attention so they're like and suzuki doesn't have a good arm so i'm like maybe he's cheating so i think he was like traded back to oakland shortly after that so we never got to ask him it might be a tough question to ask him but he was a guy by the way pitchers love him bad framer not a great

thrower pitchers love him comes out well on yeah and there are other guys like that on this list i'll i'll link to this article at bp in the blog post and also in the Facebook group, but you can see the leaderboard there, and there are guys there like Pruszynski, who you mentioned already, and Sal Perez, who are widely regarded as great defensive catchers or at least have endured as catchers and have not rated well framing-wise. So this sort of explains that. This article is only positive. It only gives us the good game callers.

Can you tell us anything about bad game callers? Sure. We want to go negative here. All right, this is... Wait, before you... I didn't realize I was doing the Jerry Springer show. Let me pull up my report for last year and tell you. Yeah, go ahead. Before you get

to the negatives, I just need to know if Jeff Mathis' reputation is assisted further. I don't know. Maybe he'll be a negative. I need to know. We'll find out. Last year, the top guys by accumulation, so Sal led with, I got 11 runs

I think, this is what i'm looking at right here so south diana navarro yadi aj salto maki who end up flipping down at the bottom sometimes guys flip it's kind of annoying uh derek norris up there he flipped again okay guys were at the bottom last year's like darno turinos montero zunino was down low castro jason castro will rosario tower flowers aj persinski he's up and down all the time hosie and luke roy tend to Montero, Zunino was down low, Castro, Jason Castro, Will Rosario, Tyler Flowers, AJ Pruszynski, he's up and down all the time. Posey and Lucroy tend to always be bad. A few runs negative

every year. Again, it can change for some of these guys over the course of a year or two. Some of these guys stay consistent. Alex Avila is usually really good. Lucroy's been generally pretty bad. Miguel Montero was generally pretty bad, but

that was with Arizona. I think he's, if I'm not mistaken, I don't have good numbers for 2015 yet, but he's doing pretty well based on what I can tell. It's hard to tell, really, with the rain. Everybody's squashed together this early in the season. Well, I mean, if certain teams call... Exactly.

Who knows? If some pitchers just don't want to go with the plan, maybe he can step up for guys. Maybe, you mean, if certain teams call. Exactly. But, yeah, some pitchers just don't want to go with the plan. Maybe you have to stack for guys. Maybe, you know, one thing I haven't control for is, like, you know, maybe just look at starting pitchers and reading pitchers separately because, you know, one is much more planning and management. The other one is much more reactive and situational. And maybe it's a completely different world to measure. So maybe you need to look at those things as well so so do you have historic stats for jeff mathis to make sam happy

when was his last year he's still active he's not making much of an impression these days yeah he's still he's been with the marlin uh with the marlins for the last three years he caught 64 games last year 73 the year before he catches 60 or 70 games every year since 2006. Let's see. Yeah, you're right. He is playing. Good for him. That's fantastic.

It's really always happy for people to be playing baseball. All right. So let's see. What a lengthy and impressive career. This year, like I said, I have no idea. Up and down, mostly up. This year, like I said, I have no idea. Up and down, mostly up.

He would probably be middle to top quarter of the league, probably, most years. He's had a couple of years where he ended up kind of low. His lows weren't that low. His low years were negative one run. His normal years were, then all his other years, he had three years. This is going back to 2008. Basically, three runs, eight runs, three runs, other years, he had three years, this is going back to 2008, he had one, two, basically three runs, eight runs, three runs,

three runs, negative one, eight, negative one. So, for the most part. So this improves Mathis' case. All right, wait, natural follow-up. I need a historical for Mike Napoli. Like, wow, first baseman's game calling impact.

Yeah, that'd probably have to be pre-PitchFX mostly. No, no, we got 2008 through 2012. Yeah, 8, 9, 10 is the years I want. So he's one of these guys who was like whipsaw. Like really bad two years and then really good one year. Which year was he good? All right, so 2008 he was pretty much dead average. 2009 and 2010, bad.

Yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute. Those are the three years. All right, Socia. And then 2011, really good. So from 2000 to 2010. He flipped like 20, 30 runs one year to year. That's insane. All right, new staff, though.

So, I mean, new staff. Mike Sochi can't be blamed for whatever good he did in Texas. All right, so from 2008, can you add up from 2008 to 2010, Napoli and Mathis? Okay. You want to know the answer? Yes. I do. It's a big difference.

They caught a pretty much equal number At bats We have Mathis at just under 8500 And Napoli at 8350 So 15 runs for Mr. Mathis Negative 33 for Mike Napoli Oof So she looks smarter

Every time someone does something with Catcher defense Every day Okay so smarter every time someone does something with catcher defense every day every day okay so what does all of this now that you've put numbers on all of these things and you've either added them to wins above replacement or you soon will be what does this do to catchers relative to other positions is a is a top defensive catcher who can also hit the leading MVP candidate? Always. That was already the case thanks to framing.

So Posey and Lucroix and Molina have had MVP caliber seasons. Coming up in your 2015 All-Star Game program, you can see who the most valuable players have been over the past few years combined thanks to small prospectus so the guys like posey is definitely always a perennial guy luke roy as well they both seem to lose value from game calling though so it doesn't seem to help them but the best guys like sal perez you know he's a bad framer so he's kind of capturing capturing, recapturing some of that, you know, Alex Adil is kind of, you know,

I don't think it's going to turn him into an MVP candidate, even though he's had some really good years. So there's, I'm going to say not anymore because it maybe makes a difference to how we look at certain guys and maybe how certain rankings sort out in the end. But I think it's framing, which has really been the thing that makes the catchers the top value and you have three out of like three out of the top 10 guys

in baseball are probably catchers even though nobody would think of that maybe it's even more because russell martin you know right now was really good grandal has been really good hosey's been really good and so those guys even though they might not all game call great, although Grandal has been this year, they frame so well. And then they hit really well, and they get all that positional adjustment value that's just the value of just purely being a catcher. And by the way,

here's one for the advanced listeners. I wonder if, and I can't get over this, that since we're suddenly finding all this extra value and I know it sums out to zero, that are we somehow making, do we have to go back and look at positional adjustment again? Because part of the theory there is that you're capturing defensive, you know, the value of the position, which is something defensive. It's like just by having that player there and measuring these things that previously don't show up in any place outside the pitcher's line, do we have to adjust positional adjustments? That seems like it might make sense.

And so you've seen some evidence that the average catcher today is better at framing than the average catcher was five years ago. And you can separate that from umpires and just the way the strike zone is called generally? The really bad guys have basically lopped off that's why it the awareness that started when when marchie and mike fast started publishing things and dan turken coffee even several years ago when teams started recognizing this around 2008 2009 basically when pitch fx came out, the guys who did really poorly got worse. We haven't cracked that nut yet in a real analytic way, but anecdotally and just from talking to players

and looking at how much has been invested in coaching on these things, like the Cubs with their machine that Baseball America had a nice little story on, that they can actually throw you pitches that are meant to be okay throw me this pitch at this location so i can practice receiving it that you know those things didn't exist so the skill is getting better so the rising c may be there but from our measurement of it's a zero-sum game you know so and the most extreme year seem to have been like just slightly in the rearview mirror. So it just seems the guys who are bad get better. Some of the older guys do get worse.

And the really, really bad ones just get chopped off, the Dumits and the Santanas. They're not allowed to catch anymore. So it's a combination of these things. But there's no longer any question in my mind that the measurement and writing and analysis on this has made a difference to players, to the coaches, and to front offices. It's kind of neat that it's impactful. I mean, that's pretty much the most you can ask for in doing baseball research, that it's actually having an impact. But it's kind of freaky at the same time. All right.

All right. Well, I look forward to the continued writing and analysis and digging into this dark matter that we now might know how big it is, but we still don't know exactly what it is. Hopefully we will sometime in the not too distant future. And hopefully this will all be on leaderboards that we can sort endlessly. And thanks for coming on to tell us about it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right, so Harry is on Twitter at Harry Pav. If you have questions about the methodology, you should definitely direct them to him and not to us because we will probably just refer you to him. And you can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. If you want to read this story, you can go to the blog post at BP or go to the Facebook group at

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We appreciate your reviews and ratings and subscriptions to the podcast, and we hope you have a wonderful weekend. We will be back on Monday. Go Sonoma. Stomp, stomp, stomp.