Pitching Framing Runs

[ukyah]

6 hours ago, Stradling said:

Well I am sure since an ump sees every pitch of each pitcher in the game he is behind the plate there's enough data to account for umpires strike zone.  

strad, do you know how i can look up WAR in my own post history? so that i can find where i've talked about it before.

i can't seem to figure that out on this site.

[Stradling]

1 hour ago, ukyah said:

strad, do you know how i can look up WAR in my own post history? so that i can find where i've talked about it before.

i can't seem to figure that out on this site.

I dont but I would assume @Lou would know how to.  

[The Ghost of Bob Starr]

Can someone breakdown the optimal framing catcher with the most precise umpiring crew so that I have the best chances of making the one game I attend next season a win?

[ettin]

2 hours ago, Rosewood said:

Can someone breakdown the optimal framing catcher with the most precise umpiring crew so that I have the best chances of making the one game I attend next season a win?

I suggest Hundley with Eddings behind the plate, enjoy your win.

[Blarg]

Ouch!

[Erstad Grit]

On Saturday, December 17, 2016 at 10:17 PM, Oz27 said:

It says he's terrible.

I recall last season when mariners signed him many here were using this stat  saying CI was an elite framer.  My eyes told me he was one of the worst.  

[Oz27]

13 minutes ago, Erstad Grit said:

I recall last season when mariners signed him many here were using this stat  saying CI was an elite framer.  My eyes told me he was one of the worst.  

He had one season where he was elite, sandwiched around a career of being terrible. That is extremely rare but you do see it from time to time, in the same way shitty hitters occasionally have one-off excellent seasons.

[Erstad Grit]

2 hours ago, Oz27 said:

He had one season where he was elite, sandwiched around a career of being terrible. That is extremely rare but you do see it from time to time, in the same way shitty hitters occasionally have one-off excellent seasons.

 Problem for me is that one "elite" season he looked like the same crappy catcher.

[Angel Oracle]

Montero brings some offense with the pitch framing.

His big issue is how his arm has declined.   After having 40% and 42% CS rates in 2011 and 2012, they've declined -- 32% to 29% to 20%, and to 11% in 2016.

[eaterfan]

1 hour ago, Erstad Grit said:

 Problem for me is that one "elite" season he looked like the same crappy catcher.

Well you were wrong and that's why they measure these things instead of just guessing.

[Erstad Grit]

2 hours ago, eaterfan said:

Well you were wrong and that's why they measure these things instead of just guessing.

In a discussing about the validity and accuracy of this stat measuring formula your statement sounds like something a 10 year old would say. 

CI may be the worst MLB  pitch framer that I've ever seen and I question a stat that ranked him so high.  

 

[eaterfan]

29 minutes ago, Erstad Grit said:

In a discussing about the validity and accuracy of this stat measuring formula your statement sounds like something a 10 year old would say. 

CI may be the worst MLB  pitch framer that I've ever seen and I question a stat that ranked him so high.  

 

You didn't question it. Beyond that you don't believe it. Which is something a 10 year old would say. What component of the stat do you find inaccurate? Is it the value of getting strikes called that are normally called balls? Is it the accuracy of the pitch fx? Is it whether or not it is a skill and not just noise? You raised no questions. You just said you don't buy it.

You want a response that is above that of a 10 year old then raise a better argument than I disagree with what the stat said so therefore it's wrong because the only response to that is "no you're wrong". If you'd like to see the math about why you're wrong then read any number of the links in this very thread that show the value of changing balls to strikes. If you'd like to see how that relates to Ianetta specifically then you can probably find his 2014 numbers online. I'm also sure you can read about how pitch fx works many places online.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-two-things-chris-iannetta-represents/

Here's just one article about it.

[Erstad Grit]

As an umpire I believe very much in the skill set.  Some catchers have bad habits which makes strikes look like balls.  Others excel at "sticking" pitches to make them look like strikes.  I don't question the skill but the difficulty in grading it. 

I offered up CI as a case study.  He is horrible yet the stat rated him high.  

[Docwaukee]

things I see affecting whether a strike gets called appropriately vs. whether a ball gets called appropriately:

where the catcher initially sets up and places the glove

how much he moves his glove up, down or side to side relative to where the pitch is thrown vs. the strike zone

the catcher's position and how it allows for the umpire to visualize the pitch.  

the pitcher's ability to generally be around the zone vs. being wild and missing by a lot when they miss.  

the umpire's general level of consistency.  

how well does the catcher know the pitcher.

probably a few other things as well. 

 

Because the umps rotate and are likely consistent to a reasonable level, it makes sense that their effect cancels each other out.  

So it mostly boils down to the pitchers ability to be around the zone and the catchers skill.   

They are giving Posey credit for a +200 calls over the course of the season.  Which means he turned 200 more balls into strikes than he did strikes into balls.  That's 50 base runners.  vs. Sal Perez (gold glove winner) having -146 or 37 base runners.  League wide, there is about a run score for every 3 base runners so I guess it makes sense that the best teams as getting calls would be at about +2 wins and the worst would be -2 wins.  

But the question is how much of that is on the pitching staff and how much is on the catcher.  

An interesting exercise - to isolate the pitching staff out of the equation, would it make sense to look at how the various catchers did on a single team?  For example, in about 6000 chances, tyler flowers had a +1.3 calls per game while his brave team mate AJ pierzynski had a -0.85 in 4700 chances and Anthony Recker had a -1.81 in 2000 chances.  There is still noise in that comp though.  

I think it's very hard to tell statistically how much of this is attributable to the catcher from the data we have.  

what I do know is that Martin Maldonado did the following from 2012 to 2016

2012 - 5086 chances with +78 calls or 1.2 per game

2013 - 3202 chances with +75 calls or 1.8 per game

2014 - 2391 chances with +50 calls or 1.6 per game

2015 - 5100 chances with +48 calls or 0.7 per game 

2016 - 4950 chances with +53 calls or 0.8 per game

So he's been fairly consistent around 1.0 calls per game.  Or good for about a win over the course of a season where he plays 120 games.  

[Docwaukee]

51 minutes ago, Erstad Grit said:

As an umpire I believe very much in the skill set.  Some catchers have bad habits which makes strikes look like balls.  Others excel at "sticking" pitches to make them look like strikes.  I don't question the skill but the difficulty in grading it. 

I offered up CI as a case study.  He is horrible yet the stat rated him high.  

Agree.  watching CI frame is like watching my 5 year old try to eat pasta.  There's stabbing, awkward twirling and sometimes the other hand creeps in there.  In the end, all you have left is a tremendous mess.  

 

[Oz27]

3 hours ago, Erstad Grit said:

As an umpire I believe very much in the skill set.  Some catchers have bad habits which makes strikes look like balls.  Others excel at "sticking" pitches to make them look like strikes.  I don't question the skill but the difficulty in grading it. 

I offered up CI as a case study.  He is horrible yet the stat rated him high.  

Do we say that a hitter is terrible even though he has a high OPS+ or wRC+? No, of course not. That would be a sure-fire way to earn a one-way ticket to the lunatic asylum. So I don't understand why anyone, if they had bothered to go to any effort to understand them, would do that with pitch framing metrics. I consider it one of the most reliable statistics in baseball for two key reasons.

Firstly, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, there has been a history of an extremely high correlation in year-to-year framing results. The year-to-year correlation coefficient for individual framing metrics has been as high as 0.82. Admittedly, that has declined a lot in recent years but I put that down much more to framing being a teachable skill than any problem with the statistic. Anyway, the 'average' year-to-year correlation coefficient for pitch framing stats from 2008 to 2015 was 0.65. By comparison, for wRC+ it was .512. For OBP it was .546. For OPS it was .549. Put a simpler way, pitch framing metrics have been a better predictor of future pitch framing success than the most widely used offensive statistics have been of future hitting success. I refuse to believe that could be true unless pitch framing numbers were accurately reflecting a true, meaningful skill.

Secondly, pitch framing numbers are produced by thousands of events. We use 500 plate appearances - or events - to judge someone's hitting ability. But for everyday catchers we are using up to 7500 events to make a judgement. So the statistic is being produced with a sample size as much as 15 times larger what we're using to judge hitters. In offensive stats you occasionally get statistical outliers (after all the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter roughly works out to one hit per week over a full season) but when the sample size is so much bigger, outliers aren't really going to exist.

Pitch framing stats have been criticized in some circles and people like to criticize their findings, based on nothing more than their own limited subjective assessments. It's all well and good to say "he is horrible yet the stat rated him high" because the numbers don't say what you want them to, but if you wouldn't do that for offensive metrics then I'd suggest it's awfully silly to do it for pitch framing data.

[Jig Stew]

I swear if Fletcher ever decided to run for president I'd vote for him

[Stradling]

Yea, I read that tweet.  He and Victor were tweeting back and forth about it.  I have no idea if it is statistically accurate, I'm sure @Oz27 would know, but it certainly seems like the pitcher that is constantly around the plate gets more calls that the dude that is wild.  

[Troll Daddy]

Give me a catcher who knows how to call a game, who can control the running game, and can hit the frickin ball ... then, I don't give a crap if he can frame a pitch. 

Btw more power to him if he can.  

 

 

[eaterfan]

28 minutes ago, Troll Daddy said:

Give me a catcher who knows how to call a game, who can control the running game, and can hit the frickin ball ... then, I don't give a crap if he can frame a pitch. 

Btw more power to him if he can.  

 

 

Why?

[Oz27]

3 hours ago, eaterfan said:

Why?

Because saying unintelligent, provocative things is fun for some people?

[tdawg87]

4 hours ago, Troll Daddy said:

Give me a catcher who knows how to call a game, who can control the running game, and can hit the frickin ball ... then, I don't give a crap if he can frame a pitch. 

Btw more power to him if he can.  

 

 

What

[Oz27]

4 hours ago, Stradling said:

Yea, I read that tweet.  He and Victor were tweeting back and forth about it.  I have no idea if it is statistically accurate, I'm sure @Oz27 would know, but it certainly seems like the pitcher that is constantly around the plate gets more calls that the dude that is wild.  

I had a different response written here before but really I should have just said that the Baseball Prospectus metric already controls for any impact the pitcher has. It also does the same for the hitter and umpire. You can read more on that here - http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=25514

Anyway, people seem pretty keen to play down the importance of framing because it still challenges long-held beliefs but the evidence that this is a skill worth a lot is very strong.

[AngelsLakersFan]

There is also a distinct possibility that there are park effects that effect pitch framing as well.

The key issue is also the limited number of pitchers a catcher pairs with in a year, at least with a statistically significant number of pitches. If you try to do pitcher/catcher comparison across a staff then you are running into the effects of different umpires. The more you divide things up the more you run into sample size issues and introduce noise to the data.

As much as I buy into framing as a skill, I think we are still trying to figure out how to allocate credit.

 

[Stradling]

34 minutes ago, Oz27 said:

I had a different response written here before but really I should have just said that the Baseball Prospectus metric already controls for any impact the pitcher has. It also does the same for the hitter and umpire. You can read more on that here - http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=25514

Anyway, people seem pretty keen to play down the importance of framing because it still challenges long-held beliefs but the evidence that this is a skill worth a lot is very strong.

Or that it looks like it counts for only a handful of runs a season.