Endangered Catchers
To start off this post, I'll take you back to March 2019 MattChat post: Minor League Balls & Strikes.
Long story short...... a baseball league in the minors was planning a pilot of robot umpires.
Now, 1 year later, we have this:
Catcher Is Baseball’s Most Endangered Position
What's the relationship -- other than these are the 2 guys crouching behind home plate?
Catchers and MLB teams might soon have to get very comfortable with change. Catcher is the one position on the field for which teams have still routinely traded offense for defense: It’s the rare position that has gained in defensive importance this century. But no other position is threatened with having so much defensive value stripped away. An automated strike zone, which MLB has begun to experiment with, would eliminate the value of receiving, and advances in training are already shrinking the gulf in defensive skill at the position.
Over the last decade, first hobbyists then teams have quantified the hidden and powerful skill of pitch framing, a catcher’s ability to receive borderline pitches in a way that gets them called as strikes. Teams began to understand the vast difference in framing skill at the position and the number of runs that could be saved by good framers — and runs cost by poor receivers. They started to target players who possessed framing skills and even teach those who didn’t. The value in framing is thought to account for the majority of defensive value behind the plate.
Framing relies on the fallibility of the human eye, the home plate umpire’s perception of the strike zone. But MLB now has the technology to automate the strike zone. It has experimented with such a zone in the Arizona Fall League and had planned, before the pandemic struck, to bring it to some minor league parks in 2020. Adding an automated zone has also been discussed this year as a way to allow umpires to maintain appropriate distance from the catcher and batter if there is a season. But if MLB chose to automate the zone, catchers could lose much of their value.
What an interesting concept. And what a change to baseball this would be. Not just the automated umpires, but a total change in view to the value of a catcher.
So in the end, does robotic calls of balls & strikes help or hurt the game?
Grace & Peace & Love to you all -
Matt
