Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 84: Jose Molina and What the Quantification of Catcher Framing Might Mean

Episode Date: November 16, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the finding that Jose Molina’s receiving was worth 50 runs and talk about what it’s implications for baseball might be.

You know, we're talking with Jose Molina, new catcher for the Rays. You know, and again, no disrespect to the guys that were here last year, but, I mean, you're known for being a great receiver of the baseball, framing pitches, you know, and it's a very fine art, and you have to know, you know, what a certain umpire is like, and you obviously know the American League umpires. Tell me a little bit about that art of framing pitches and being a great receiver.

How important is that in the game of baseball? Well, it is huge. You know, the first thing, I mean, you frame the ball to make every pitch look like a strike. You know, the umpire is going to tell you what the pitch it is, if it's a stride or ball. But at the same time, as a catcher, you have to try to make every pitch look like a strike. If you go that way, it will make everybody easier. A lot of umpires don't like the pressure of close pitchers, and so next pitcher, they may give it to you.

I'm not saying they're all like that, but there are some like that. Plus, you have to make sure that your pitcher hits the spot. If you don't hit the spot, then nothing matters, pretty much. And a lot of practice, a lot of repetition of receiving the ball. And that's how I learned this game. How to catch is just simple, just practice. Good morning and welcome to episode 84 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Baseball Perspectives podcast. In New York, I am Ben Lindberg.

And joining me, as almost always, is Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. Hello, Sam. That's the second time in a row that you've introduced me by noting that I have almost always been there for you. Is this a thing that you're now passive-aggressively pointing out to me? Well, I've almost always been there for you. Is my review coming up and you're laying the groundwork? There was that one time. But you brought a topic today, which is... So did you did too, right?

No. It's Friday. Okay. you brought a topic today which is so did you did too right uh no it's friday um it's okay though i have one it's your the topic is actually you so uh it's your talk about that for a while okay it's your piece about um jose melina oh the Molina topic. Okay. Yeah. So we can just pretend we both came with that. Sure. So in case anybody missed it, you should go back and read Ben's piece that he wrote, I believe, Wednesday about catcher framing and Jose Molina, who is probably your favorite player right now, I think. Yeah, possibly. Other than maybe, who is it? Brian Booney. Brian. Brian. Brian Booney. now i think yeah possibly um other than maybe who is it uh brian bruni brian brian bruni uh yeah uh david robertson and jose molina are probably my favorite players right now just

because of the things that they do uh you haven't written your david robertson piece yet i saw that you requested some stats about him but yeah i haven't written a David Robertson piece yet. I saw that you requested some stats about him. Yeah, I haven't written a long thing about him. I don't know that it's anything new really, maybe, but there is interesting stuff about him. Maybe I'll just make my topic for today David Robertson. We can talk about the two players who fascinate me. So Molina, though, is the sort of epitome of the catch framing revolution, and he routinely rates basically at the very top of our catcher framing metric. And this year, according to Max, is it Marquis or Marchi? I believe it's Marchi.

Max, is it Marquis or Marchi? I believe it's Marchi. Tweeted that he had been worth 50 runs above average this year with catcher framing alone, which is probably more what I want to talk about than what you wrote. You showed Molina's greatest frames, which was amusing and entertaining and all that. But I'm more interested in sort of the larger topic, which is the idea that these numbers could possibly be correct and what they mean for player evaluation. 50 runs is essentially 50 runs to give you an idea is the difference between Miguel Cabrera and Miguel Olivo this year. Right. So what you're essentially saying is that Molina is an MVP candidate.

Yes. And if he does this routinely, what you're essentially saying is that Molina or a catcher like Molina is a Hall of Fame candidate over the course of a career. Yeah. Well, I mentioned in the article that if you just add five wins onto his total, which basically was replacement level without the framing, then you get a player who is over five wins. And there are very, very few of those. There were 15 of them, according to our stats this year. Well, and this is 50. Isn't this 50 runs above average? Well, and isn't this 50 runs above average? Yeah, but I think it's the same, talking to Colin, because you do the replacement level adjustment after you add the runs. So it's not actually higher than that above replacement.

And replacement level defense, in a lot of of cases is just average defense. I don't know whether that's the case for framing. But so I said that if you just added those runs onto his total, then he would slot in between Adam Jones and Giancarlo Stanton as like the 12th most valuable player and the most valuable player on the raise. He didn't get a single MVP vote today. Not one. One thing I didn't mention in the article was that Yadier Molina, I think, would be probably the best player in baseball, if you added his framing, because Yadier Molina was

second among all catchers with, I think it was about 35 runs or something compared to— And Molina does this every year too. So, what—well, according—I mean, every year being like the couple years that— Right. —we figure this out, but— Well, that's how you know that—or that's one thing that at least gives me confidence in these numbers, that there is a high correlation from year to year.

It's not just—it's not like looking at Babbitt or something for a pitcher that fluctuates from year to year. A good framing catcher one year tends to be a good framing catcher the next. It seems to be a real ability or a skill that is persistent. So if you had an MVP vote this year in the National League, did you vote? Did you get a vote for anything? No, no votes for anything.

If you had had the NL MVP vote and you had known this information about Yadier Molina, would you have voted for him? Number one? I think so. I think I would. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just out of curiosity, best guess. I mean, this is obviously just going to be a guess, but what year do you think it will be that people start voting for a hypothetical Yadier Molina in a hypothetical MVP race like this. I didn't even see all the voting results. Where did Molina, because he was one of the five finalists.

Yeah, I think he was third or fourth. He got two, I believe he got two votes from two New York writers. First place votes? Yeah, first place votes. And I saw that one of them wrote an explanation of it, but I didn't read it. I wasn't anticipating it. Yeah, so he hit 315 with 22 homers, and everyone has a sense that he's really good at defense. I think that reputation probably comes more from his throwing than his framing,

but people already are giving him credit for that. So I don't know. Yeah, I probably would have voted for him. I guess it will be probably a long time before I would expect a significant number of award voters to look at framing or to incorporate that into their calculus for their vote. I don't think that will happen anytime soon really. But it would be interesting. So I've got a few kind of issues that this raises. Issues isn't quite the word because they're not negatives, but things that I think about.

One thing is the idea that this is essentially cheating. Mike Fast and Dan Zimborski. I think I got that one right. I do not know. In my head, I said Zimborski, but I have no idea. They kind of were talking on Twitter about this idea where Dan was saying that it's essentially like cheating the IRS by disguising your income. And Mike is of the opinion that it is merely um reporting accurately your income to the irs and um you know like looking for like you know every deduction that you can but not not doing anything illegal and mike's sort of position was that that the it primarily

manifests itself in in not losing strikes that that the framing is actually about not losing strikes and that the guys who do worse are losing strikes in the strike zone by being fidgety and not catching it quietly. The images that you showed of Molina, though, while specifically chosen for this, they showed Molina getting strikes on pitches that were nowhere near the strike zone and, in fact not

only with framing but the sort of moving the glove after the fact and trying to sort of bring it back into the strike zone. That works much better for gifs. You can't really show a gif of a guy not getting – not blowing a pitch. It's not as fun to watch. Yes. Well, although it is kind of fun. Watching a guy blow a pitch is very yes that can

be fun too but what you know not do that would not be do you do you think that there's any ethical issue here at all do you think this is the sort of thing that uh if players um saw it happening uh realized what a big deal it was uh if if the if the the metric itself gained mainstream popularity do you think there would be a backlash at all against these type of catchers? I don't know. Possibly. I feel like any backlash there is, and there was even some in my article in the comments section, was not directed towards the catcher but just towards the system of fallible umpires who can be influenced by these things. I don't think anyone blames Molina necessarily for working within the framework of a system with a human umpire who cannot perfectly assess exactly where a pitch crossed the plate. So, I mean, I think he's just working within the constraints of the current system.

And some people see it as another reason why we need robot umpires, which I guess is a valid thing. I would kind of miss it now that I'm aware of this. And it's one of my favorite things to watch in a game and to look into statistically. I would miss it now if there were no opportunity to do this. Yeah, that's sort of the second angle that I was thinking about, which is that this is a statistic that we don't really have the ability to go back and measure retroactively, which is kind of – it's always sort of a bummer when you have stats, especially as we try to incorporate this into warp for instance

to have this real discrepancy between the information we have about modern players and unmodern players where unmodern in this case is like four or five years ago it's it's kind of hard to to know exactly what to do with that because this isn't insignificant information and it's not even like defense where obviously we have better uh understanding of defense now than we do um you know looking back at a guy 70 years ago but you can do a decent enough job um replicating it you can't replicate this at all before before a couple years ago and now uh i think that if this regardless of what uh you know regardless of how much this catches on I think that probably robot home plate umpires are an inevitability within, I don't know, 20 years.

And if this really changes the way people view umpires and catchers, it could speed it up. This could be a stat that only exists for like i don't know 10 years that's kind of a weird thing has there ever been a stat that only existed for 10 years like game winning rbi i guess was the thing yeah you could i mean you could you can go back you could go back and look at winning rbis it would be uh i don't know i could actually see this being a case uh in fact i had a friend who uh before i a couple years ago before catcher framing metrics took off i had a friend who would would argue that this actually this phenomenon is why we should have human umpires because it shows what a part of the strategy it is it is not

merely an arbitrary failing that has been introduced into the game uh umpire umpire error but it is actually part of the strategy it's part of how a player can stand out it's an integral to the game it's part of the environment and uh so i suppose it's possible that if a guy like um melina either melina takes on sort of cult status for his ability to do this uh there will be probably people who um who who use that as justification for why um you know we shouldn't get rid of umpires because you would essentially be chopping the legs out from underneath a pretty good player. But I don't know. I tend to think that's not how it will go.

I think that exposing umpires' heirs inevitably leads to the replacement of umpires or the support I guess of umpires so yeah anyway it's kind of weird to think that this is a ephemeral measure yeah it has made the game more interesting to me and

I will miss it and I would be in favor of robot umpires or some kind of standardized system. Otherwise, I don't really think there's that much romance in the human element or that losing that would really be losing something important, except now that I'm aware of this, I would miss it. I think we should have replay as much as possible, and we should have automated systems as much as possible,

except that the framing has now given me some pause. And I know that the 50 runs number seems very high, and that was some reaction to my article, was how did he come up with 50 runs. And Dan Turkenkoff, who is someone who has looked into framing in the past, posted in the comment section to my article that he found that the value of converting a ball to a strike was between 0.13 and 0.16 runs, was between.13 and.16 runs,

which means that Molina would have had to switch a ball to a strike 312 times this season to make that number come out, which is every two and a quarter innings or so, because he caught almost 7,000 pitches. So that seems not crazy to me. Having watched a lot of Molina highlights, it doesn't seem crazy to me that he could change a borderline pitch every two, three innings.

It's higher than I would have guessed, but it's not absurd. I would have guessed maybe two per game. So about half of that. But it's not absurd. If you tell me that's the case, then you tell me that's the case.

However, it's the outlier. I mean, he's, he's the extreme, uh, guy who does this. No one else does it like that. Um, so this kind of though goes to my third angle, which is, um, assigning credit for this. Are you comfortable giving Molina those 50 runs, or is some part of this inevitably going to have to be divvied up between catcher and pitcher? Well, I think there are pitchers who have a tendency to get strikes

on the edges of the zone. That's something that Max adjusts for in his numbers, I believe, that some guys, I think it's guys who tend to kind of, they're able to pinpoint the edge of the strike zone or just beyond it, kind of the Tom Glavin type who just lives out there and is able to paint the corner over and over, tends to get a slightly wider zone. So if that's the case, then I don't think you can just give it to the catcher. So I

think you, it's complicated. You need to look and see whether, uh, whether the pitcher has been able to expand the zone with different catchers before you can assign credit. So, no, I probably wouldn't give all 50 runs to Molina. You'd have to kind of look and see, and that's what makes it complicated and why I'm glad Max is around to adjust for these things. But, yeah, that is something that he factors in because you have to look at that. And it's partially a pitcher ability as well as a catcher ability, though I think it's probably more towards the catcher end. Yeah, the interaction between catcher and pitcher

would be an interesting next level to study because certainly uh, certainly I think if a, if a catcher or a, sorry, if a pitcher knew that his catcher had this ability, then it might change where his, uh, you know, mentally where he, he sets his own target for throwing, you know, where, where he considers the boundaries of the strike zone. And, um, and, uh, the catcher is of course, uh, going to know his pitcher and know, uh, you know, when he sets up, he's going to know whether his pitcher is going to be able to hit that spot. And I mean, essentially, a catcher is calling location based on whether he thinks that location is going to get a strike just the same way that he calls a pitch, a fastball or a changeup based on the possibility that fastball or changeup

is going to have a positive outcome. So the catcher's role is nonetheless, you know, has to be accompanied by the pitcher executing the pitch. And so it's hard to know just how much to divvy it up. I mean, I don't know, probably like, I don't know. I think that without thinking about it, my first reaction would be that it would probably be something like split down the middle, but it might not be. It might be almost all on the catcher. It wouldn't shock me. Do you think that there is a player or has there ever been a player who,

I guess, is so underrated or at least the difference in the perception of him by people who are aware of this and aren't aware of this. I mean, has there ever been, because the thing with Molina is that if you haven't heard of, of catcher framing or you haven't heard of it as a quantified thing, you think that he is, I don't know if he's a bad player, but he's kind of like you're, he's the, he's the 25th guy on the roster almost. He's, uh, he's Puerto Rican Jeff Mathis. Yeah, pretty much. He's, uh, I don't,

yeah. I mean, he, he has a reputation as a good defensive catcher generally. Um, but he's not a good hitter and no one thinks of him as anything more than just kind of your typical catch and throw second or third string catcher who's uh you know like the last guy you you add to the roster really um and yet if you're aware of this stuff and if you believe in this stuff then you think he is on almost the short list of of the best players in the league. And I guess that's what fascinates me so much about him. Because, I mean, normally when we say that a player is underrated or he's not fully appreciated, there's not nearly the gulf between the perceptions of him that there is with Molina. It's like, well, you know, people aren't looking at this guy's walk rate or something.

He's actually a better hitter than most people give him credit for or something like that. It's not this massive difference between what two people might think of this player. Well, right. It goes back to what we said at the beginning. I mean, there has never been anybody i don't think who would fit this or at least not in the last i don't know 50 or 60 or 70 years because there is apparently no skill in baseball uh other than you know at the most basic level

hitting and pitching there's no single skill in baseball that has this swing and i mean really what we're talking about is i mean what is what is a guy like a guy like Doman is like negative 30 or 40 runs, right? Yeah. So you're talking about it. You're talking about a 90 run swing. And there, I mean, you know, a 90 run swing is the difference between Miguel Cabrera and the worst player in baseball this year. So that's the gap for one skill. And there isn't another skill in baseball that year. That's the gap for one skill. There isn't another skill in baseball that is that big. By definition, unless we discover something new, yeah sure, you could say that stolen base efficiency was underrated for a long time, but the difference between the best base runner and the worst base runner in any given year is like 16 runs.

And so I don't think you're going to come up with anything like this. like Mariano Rivera or Craig Kimbrell, we could discover that in fact a well-leveraged reliever is as valuable as the fiercest traditionalist argued and that in fact these guys should be MVPs. I mean, you look at the MVP voting today, yesterday, if you're listening to this on Friday, and it's basically these guys, these relievers are afterthoughts. And then all of a sudden, Fernando Rodney is number two on some guy's ballot. And it's conceivable that we would change our opinions about pitcher leveraging and a guy like, you know, a top-notch closer could end up being that valuable. I don't think it's particularly likely, but that would be an example of something where, you know, you might close the gap similarly to this. But no, otherwise, no. I mean, this is sort of a paradigm shifting statistic, and it's hard to cope with.

And I wonder what that will mean when the paradigm does fully shift. I have talked to people with teams who I know subscribe to these numbers or their own version of these numbers. I know Max has also. In my article, I quoted Joe Madden citing that 50-run figure in an interview on a Tampa Bay radio station. And yet, Jose Molina is making how much money? $1.5 million. Yeah. And I mean, I think it was sort of valid because Molina had, I mean, he's 30, he was 37 years old. He is not in the best condition and he'd never played anything close to a full season. And the Rays signed him to be their starting catcher, really, which I think showed pretty strongly that they believed in these numbers.

And he did play. He played in a career-high number of games, I think. And he hit.223 with not much other value offensively. I don't know. He's actually – He wasn't bad. He's had much worse. You could – I mean if you take out catcher framing, he was probably worth his salary this year. I mean he had an 80 OPS plus and he's otherwise a pretty good defensive fielder. I mean at least average-ish

yeah I mean he has a 68 career OPS plus and he was coming off it he was coming off his great offenses where he was better than the league average hitter I mean you're right he wasn't a full timer but 1.5 million for that catcher I mean if you look at what they

just signed what the Cubs signed Navarro for and what the Braves signed Laird for to both be backups this year, I would say that Molina's salary stats suddenly starts commanding more money, or will we get to the point where framing becomes selected as a skill to the extent that everyone can do it? And then it's not so valuable because it's just the typical thing. And if that happens, then I wonder what that means for league-wide offense. That means for league-wide offense. And I mean, I doubt that has anything to do with the increase in strikeout rate so far, but if that catches on and every team has to have a good framing catcher,

then strikeout rates could go crazy. I wonder what that will mean. And it's interesting to think about whether it's a skill that can be taught easily. I mean, you'd think that it's a skill that's easier to teach than, say, throwing or hitting, which rely on these physical tools that you pretty much have to come prepackaged with. Receiving a pitch seems like something that could be taught to a greater extent, or that there would at least be more players who are

capable of doing it well. So I wonder then, will there come a point, I mean, Ryan Domet still caught 60 games or so this season for Minnesota. So will Ryan Domet go the way of the Dodo? Will we never see a Ryan Domet receiver again? I don't know. I wonder. And I also, and we don't know how the skill ages either. We have no idea what the aging curve for framing is, if there is one. I mean, if Molina is 45 years old and hitting 120 or something,

but he's worth 50 runs behind the plate because he can frame every pitch still, will some team run him out there? Or will it just be a good framing catcher just plays until he physically breaks down and can't stay in the lineup? Well, I'm a big believer in the idea that teams put their money where their opinions lie. And I think that the extent to which they really buy this and the extent to which this is really going to change the game will be apparent in the next couple of years. And it will be apparent in how these guys get paid and um how much fighting there is

for players like melina so i think that it will be answered in time and then it will probably be uh irrelevant because of the robot umpires so well it's a good thing that i didn't bring a topic because you brought my favorite topic and i could talk about it every day. Plus, it was apparent to me that you love saying Ryan Domet. You want to say it one more time? Ryan Domet. All right. We'll talk to you next week.