Baseball has been changing its rules a significant amount recently; there has been the no-pitch intentional walk and the three batter minimum, but soon, we will see the automated strike zone get rid of umpires. There’s been a lot of debate with those who want to have the human element of the game and those who want the calls right every time, I’m part of the latter group, but one thing’s for sure, the catchers' value will change due to this and should diminish. The bigger question is though, by how much? Today I will be figuring that out.
For this exercise, I will be using a modified version of fWAR to measure the value of each catcher as it will be easier to see the whole picture of the player. The factor I changed in fWAR to make it easier for me to calculate the final total was from fielding runs to the sum of the individual run values of rSZ, rCERA, rSB, and rGFP. This will change player’s WARs, but the reason for this exercise is to see how much value players lose from having 0 framing runs, so I did it this way. I also made it so catchers had at least 500 innings caught to get rid of small sample size, even though WAR is a counting stat, I wanted to get players that play a decent amount of the time. This gave me a list of 37 catchers who played in 2019 and I will show you their stats here:
As you can see, the WAR does change on players as Roberto Perez moves from 3.0 to 4.7 and J.T. Realmuto moves from 5.7 to 5.1. This is due to the different formula that I am using as stated earlier. It also could be due to only having their catching statistics involved in their WAR and not having any statistics at first base or any other position. I felt that I didn’t really need to change any run values as we are just trying to figure out their value behind the plate. So now that we have this, we can figure out what would happen to the players' WARs.
To figure this out, I needed to set the rSZ (strike zone runs) to 0, as no runs will be credited to players for their framing abilities with a computerized strike zone. Also, if this rule change would happen, the catcher’s value for their position would go down, so the positional adjustment needed to be changed as well. For catchers, their positional adjustment is +12.5, or + .00857 per inning played at the position. I decided to change to positional adjustment to -10 or -.00617 per inning at catcher because I thought that catching would still be more valuable than first base (-12.5 pos. adj.) due to throwing runners out and blocking, but less valuable than corner outfielders (-7.5 pos. adj.) as they have to use their range and can save extra-base hits while the catchers lose their most valuable skill. So, I took the first base and corner outfielder’s positional adjustment and averaged them to get the catcher’s adjustment. The catcher positional value could go up once we get numbers that show how much pitch calling affects a game, but for now, we can’t do that. Here are the new WAR numbers:
Chart is sorted by the new WAR
As you can see, every player’s WAR dropped. The highest drop was to league-best framer Austin Hedges and the two tied for the lowest drop were Omar Narvaez, who is a solid hitter, and Elias Diaz, who didn’t play very much and was already very low. The average WAR dropped from a close to average 1.5 to a dismal 0.3. This shows that taking away the umpire will affect catchers’ value big time, but why do some hold on to more of their WAR than others? Well, that’s because they are a good hitter, good at other aspects of defense, or they were bad framers. Some would think that the automated strike zone would give bad framers more value, but since the overall position value goes down due to the positional adjustment, they lose value but are higher on the rankings relative to other catchers.
For offensive catchers that benefited most, the one that sticks out to me is Mitch Garver as he goes from being the fourth most valuable catcher to second, this is also still with a little bit less than half of the number of innings played as the number one catcher Realmuto, so it could be argued that he would be the best catcher in baseball. The player that sticks out to me most for benefiting from being better at other parts of defense is Robinson Chirinos, as he had a -6 rSZ, but a total run value of 9 with his other defensive stats as he goes up to the fourth most valuable catcher.
Yasmani Grandal really drops off in this as he goes from a 4.2 WAR, the third-highest, to a 1.9, the ninth-highest. This is because he is great at framing, but he loses it and his other defensive statistics aren’t very good. There are even catchers who rely on their framing ability alone to keep them on rosters as they aren’t great hitters. But with no umpires, they would probably never get another job. The two biggest examples of this are Tyler Flowers and the aforementioned Austin Hedges. Flowers had a rSZ of 10 last year, but since he wasn’t as great at everything else, he lost 1.9 WAR to have a -0.6. Hedges felt this effect on an even larger scale, however, as he had the best rSZ in 2019 at 18, but was an absolutely brutal hitter, and I mean BRUTAL, with a wRC+ of 47 and a wOBA of .242. He was still able to play in 101 games though, as he was an outstanding framer! But his MLB career could definitely be over if the strike zone is automated as his WAR drops by an astounding 2.9, as he goes from league average at 1.8 to extremely below average at -1.1 (yikes).
Pitch framing may seem like a small part of the game, but in reality, teams pay millions for this art and it shows in the cases of Hedges and Flowers that you can be a below-average to just plain bad hitter and still play in the majors. The average WAR of all of these catchers is 0.3, which essentially means that an average catcher is not going to add more wins to your team, and suddenly teams would start to pay for catchers who can rake. Sure, there are some catchers who can block really well and can manage the basepaths, but if a guy can hit, that will be worth more than pretty much anything they’d do behind the plate when the computerized strike zone inevitably happens.
It’ll be sad to see some of those quirky types of players go, like Hedges, but it is in an effort to get the calls right and make the game better overall. As we saw here, those little differences in balls and strikes can make a huge difference over the course of a season, and right now, it is important to have catchers who can frame and help their pitching staffs out.
ALL STATS FROM FANGRAPHS
COVER PHOTO FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
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