When did you stop posting as just, “Jeff?” Not that it matters or is any of my business.

but if ML scouts look at it then I just assume it has SOME effect. I doubt ML teams would still look at those things if they had zero effect.

Over at Prospect Insider, JAC wrote a scouting report on Rob Johnson and gave a quick thought on this subject (Comment #10), saying :

Blocking and throwing are about 20% of the catcher’s duties. Receiving is big. Setup, game calling, framing, blocking the plate, pitcher whispering…

Johnson has the advantage in all of those areas.

Thanks, Paul, ASU.

wouldn’t it make more sense to use CFIP or CtRA rather than CERA? After all, we know that ERA isn’t the best statistic.

Great job.

It’s just not easily quantifiable. I tend to think of it more as knowledge than a skill. Knowing your pitcher and his stuff. Knowing what’s working for him that particular day. Knowing the pitches that he has confidence in. Knowing how he likes to work.

Also, knowing each batter, where the holes in their swing are. What pitches they like to hit. What they will chase out of the zone. What they will have trouble recognizing.

I have a feeling that a pitcher begins to trust a catcher because he calls what they want to throw. After they reach a meeting-of-minds, then a trusting relationship is formed. At that point, the pitcher is comfortable, the catcher is in control and they can start worrying about the hitter instead of arguing about each pitch.

It’s clear to me that Rob Johnson at least knows his pitchers and what they like to throw in any given situation. Whether he is willing to change things based on individual hitters or not, I don’t know. Is he actually calling a better game or are the pitchers just more comfortable and confident is his abilities? It’s impossible to tell.

If it is a skill though, it’s an imminently learnable skill. It just takes a bit of work and knowledge. Maybe some catchers don’t put in the work. Maybe they only think about what pitch they want to call and not about the pitcher. Who knows.

Regardless, it’s clear that Wak believes in Johnson’s abilities so I’m willing to give him a “little bit” of a rope in this regard. I just would rather they use Rob as a teacher for Adam Moore and hopefully we can have the hitter AND the game caller.

So, if the best catcher at calling a game is worth two wins than the worst catcher at calling a game, they where is Johnson? Is he the best? Is he better than average? Average? Etc.

Where was Johjima? Better than average? Average? Worse than average? The worse?

This is a subjective subject, so there is no wrong answer.

simply from anecdotal evidence, we can infer that Ivan Rodriguez doesn’t call a great game because he likes to call lots of fastballs with runners on so he can try and pick them off. Who knows about the other catchers, though?

Like you’ve pointed out a hundred times around here, the biggest problem with game-calling is how to measure it – it seems nearly impossible to isolate it by pitcher and batter, unless you did something like finding pitcher-batter combos with different catchers. Even then, the noise would be incredible because the sample size was so small. Perhaps the best way would be to find those pairs and simply look at what pitches the pitcher threw and use weighted pitch values. Of course, then you’re ignoring things like the count, which is probably the biggest determinant in what a pitcher will throw, regardless of catcher.

It’s sort of like chemistry – it probably has an effect, and it might be bigger than we’re letting on, but until there’s a way to properly isolate and measure it, it’s hard to chalk it up to anything beyond white noise.

It seems to me that the ideal would be to randomly select pitch types (weighted for the pitcher’s ability in those pitches as well as the handedness of the batter) and a random location (selecting from a zone based on the count, i.e. covering more of the strike zone on a hitter’s count and less on a pitcher’s count, especially 2-strike counts). I mean, isn’t the whole point of game-calling to be unpredictable? And what’s more unpredictable than random?

I think there are some parallels between baseball game-calling and football offensive playcalling. There’s some evidence that football coaches are bad at randomizing. If catchers are different in game-calling skill, it seems to me that it’s likely the better ones simply call less predictable mixes of pitches… but I think a computer would do the best job at that.

And we DO know that physically catching a baseball is a skill. And Rob sucks at that.

How much is there to stuff like this?