"When thinking back on mistakes he’s made, Neyer recalls a long-ago postseason game in which “Tim McCarver was raving about pitch framing and how important it is.” McCarver, who caught in the major leagues for 21 seasons before becoming an announcer, talked at great length about how a catcher could receive the ball in such a way—catching the ball in front of his body, making sure not to jerk his glove—as to influence an umpire’s ball and strike calls. Neyer says he “wrote a typically arrogant column mocking the notion that major-league umpires could be fooled by a catcher,” citing his own experience as an unfoolable Little League ump. (This column, it seems, got lost in some long-ago ESPN.com redesign.) Neyer wasn’t alone in pooh-poohing McCarver’s hobbyhorse. In 1999, Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner did a convincing-seeming study showing that catchers had no influence whatsoever on a pitcher’s performance."


http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/th ... ution.html

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/artic ... icleid=432

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I have a hard time believing it. The ump is trained to look at where the ball crosses the plate. I don't think catchers can pull some David Blaine shit to make them look at their glove instead.

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I'll be umpiring for our little leagues Major Girls division Tuesday and will report back if they fool the shit out of me.

The Japanese have mastered the art of pitch framing.

I've always thought this was bullshit. Like was said, the ump makes up his mind before it hits the glove. There is no doubt about that in my mind. Framing doesn't matter.

I will respectfully disagree. Plus, Bucknor & Joe West are current proof that training for many, blew.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

The lede here is that a guy like Rob Neyer could think he actually knew more about catching than a guy who played 21 big league seasons and caught Carlton and Gibson.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

They miss calls. Yes. But it's not because of framing. They miss them just cuz they miss them.

JORR, remember the long ago days when guys like Musburger locally or Jim McKay and Curt Gowdy (nationally) just broadcast games and reports without trying to prove that not only were they smarter and funnier than you and the guys that you know, actually played any games?

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Yeah, and you know, it's not that players can't or don't say dumb shit. Many of them say dumb shit all the time. But to simply dismiss everything a guy like Joe Morgan says as if his experience as possibly the best second baseman ever is meaningless strikes me as the height of arrogance.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Fuck Tony Kubek.

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You think everything is arrogance. It's probably your fantasized blue collar upbringing.

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All that means is that Neyer would be a great fit for this board. If a MLB pitcher came in here and told you W/L was meaningless, you wouldn't suddenly change your mind. Same here if some well respected NBA lifer came in and told us Hoiberg was actually a good coach. I'd laugh at him and call him an idiot. IMU thinks he can run a MLB team, and I'm not sure he's wrong after seeing Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn still employed. Etc, etc, etc.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Only because I don't think one would unless he was a guy with a losing record.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Wow, FF just made an excellent point.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Of course framing is important...as is trying not to look fooled. It's common to see a catcher set up outside and have to lunge back inside for a pitch...although it's clearly over the plate, it gets called inside.

I actually never heard the ridiculous argument that framing has no affect.

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That is the entire sports world. I still remember Bernstein trying to lead Sale down the path to saying he believed W/L was irrelevant in an interview. Sale immediately dismissed the notion.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Sale dismissing the notion is meaningless, though. He may not really believe it, or he might, but either way, he has to say that W/L is important for PR reasons. If he didn't, he'd be construed as self-centered and only caring about his own stats.

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Not for nothing, but '99-'00 was around the beginning of statheads trying to be more than rotisserie jockeys, and meeting lots of resistance and ridicule from guys like McCarver, so there was, at times, a biasing of statistical analysis towards proving whatever these guys said as wrong.

Ultimately, it lead to (and still does) erroneous assumptions being made, lack of complete data being glossed over, and generally poor, though voluminous, analysis.

The problem is they thought they did "prove" that McCarver was wrong. Now the conventional wisdom seems to be that not only was McCarver right, he was right to such a degree that pitch framing is regarded as perhaps the most important aspect of catching. Maybe that's wrong too.

Maybe the fetishization of the walk is wrong also. But by all means, keep arrogantly sneering at anyone who doesn't want to retroactively put Ferris Fain in the Hall of Fame.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I have fought against the saying, "a walk's as good as a hit". I have never seen a walk drive a player home from 2nd base.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

His own stats haven't been in dispute pretty much from the moment he entered the league and I believe Arrietta told him that as well.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

The problem was two-fold: the assumption that any "value" must manifest in a significant difference in a few key peripheral stats between the control and experimental groups, as well as a lack of direct observational data of individual pitches.

What was being done in the study you linked is not all that dissimilar from astronomers inferring the existence of a celestial object from how observable objects behave, and in this case they were wrong, in part because of a lack of observational data as well as a touch of bias towards confirming the null hypothesis. I find it rather hard to fault them for not having data that wasn't available to anyone at the time.

Who has said a walk is as good as a hit with men on base, though?

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Well it is assigned the same value as a single in most baseball metrics. But that saying is spoken constantly at ball games all over this great land.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Well, they're wrong: even with the bases empty, a base hit allows for the possibility of further advancing on an error.

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Indeed, and that was my point. I argued that point here extensively. The only thing I was willing to concede is that a walk does have the value of using more pitches.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I don't fault them for not having data. I fault them for their sneering fake superiority and arrogant belief that there is nothing they could possibly learn from listening to a guy who caught 21 big league seasons.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

That may not really be a "value" though. This is really the heart of the conversation on walks, the idea that taking pitches is unquestionably positive. The fact that strikeouts are up dramatically and walks are up only marginally if at all suggests that the obsession with seeing pitches is resulting in hitters getting into bad counts and eventually striking out, albeit after going deeper into the count. The best pitch to hit is usually the first pitch. When the batter goes to the plate looking to take the first pitch he is killing what is often his best opportunity.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don