Vazquez Pitch Framing Log

I've got an fWAR ranking for catchers that includes BP pitch-framing WAR, which I'll post when I return from tonight's movie.

Trailer:

Vazquez, 8th, 4.8 WAR / 120 games. (5.2 defense, -0.4 offense)
Saltalamacchia, 41st, -0.3
Pierzynski, 42nd, -1.1

I'll bet on over 1.5 in the AL East alone.

Well, noone told me about this 150 PA cutoff, I thought Cervelli might have a shot (along with Hanigan).

I'll have 2 or 3 more games to add later today, but the better news is that Vazquez's big night at the plate boosted his non-framing bWAR up to 2.5 per 120 games. That's a better than average catcher, without framing, despite a 74 OPS+. That's what you get when you annihilate the running game.

And when you include his 3.8 WAR/120 for framing, he's at 6.3.

Of course, Mookie is now up to 6.7 per 150.

I'm not sure about the basis for this tweet but it's there.


Mark Simon ?@msimonespn 14m
Best getting called strikes on pitches outside strike zone (2014)
Conger
Ross
J Molina
*Caleb Joseph*
Vazquez
Rivera
McCann
Castro
Grandal

I just took the Steamer WAR projections for 2015 catching, per 450 PA, and added to it career pitch framing, by count, per 1080 innings.

Jonathan Lucroy edged Buster Posey for first (6.9 to 6.7). Then there's a gap.

Christian Vazquez edged Russell Martin for 3rd (5.8 to 5.7). And the Steamer defensive projections (per 450 PA) for Vazquez are very conservative (12.7 runs compared to Yadier's best of 18.5) -- they have him ranked 9th, which is obviously based on big regression to the mean based on SSS. But we know that what he did last year was no fluke, and that he's a minimum 3.5 to 4.0 runs better than his projection, or about 0.4 WAR.

Even if you ignore that and even if you regress pitch framing to the mean, I'm pretty sure that Vazquez drops no lower than 4th, ahead of Zunino and McCann at 5.1.

On what planet can we get a great offer for that? What would a guy who projects to be about 5.5 to 6.0 WAR in his second season, and is expected to get better, perhaps quite a bit better, fetch, were all of that value visible to all other teams?

(The answer, BTW, would be that he'd be the second most valuable trade chip in MLB, after Trout. He's nearly as valuable as McCutchen, but controlled for 1 more year at dirt-cheap prices versus $51M.)

There's basically no way to get fair value for an elite pitch-framer until all or nearly all teams are factoring it in. And we're not there yet.

Furthermore, for such a deal to make sense, you have to factor in the projected one-year 3.6 WAR downgrade from Vazquez to Soto. (If you're trying t win a pennant, there's probably no rationale for such a move, period.) Not to mention the possibility that Swihart is not as good as Vazquez.

Well, we have two separate analyses, BP / Dan Brooks and StatCorner, that correlate (for 2014) at about r = .93, and they both have the same order of magnitude.

That most GMs are not rationally factoring in what the metrics say about pitch framing neither indicates that the metrics aren't correct, nor that most GMs have metrics that show the size is smaller, or whatever.

Teams giving up players with great pitch-framing skill can be assumed to be behind the curve. How many clubs were actively looking for a catcher this winter? How many of those are fully on board with pitch-framing metrics? How many of those clubs are rationally considering the possibility that the metrics are overstating the effect?

The key fact about Jose Molina is not that the Blue Jay's DFA'd him, but that the Rays signed him and gave him 834 PA over three seasons while putting up -0.3 conventional WAR. BP has him at about 8.0 framing WAR. (And Conger was traded for an MLB ready backup catcher and a pitching prospect.)

All Martin's contract tells us is that there weren't two clubs totally on board with pitch framing that were after him.

Maybe it's my perspective as someone who's worked a lot as an umpire, combined with that perspective being at a level well below pro ball and thus perhaps not really in tune with what's going on there, but to me, even just thinking critically about the subject shows how laughable the idea of pitch framing being worth multiple wins is. How many pitches per game can a catcher really "steal"? The pitch needs to be borderline enough to go either way. And then, how many of those stolen pitches really wind up contributing to the result of an at-bat? This is hard to quantify, but stealing the first pitch, which is then followed by a home run on the second pitch, does nothing.

There's just no way, in my mind, that pitch framing can be as valuable a skill as the ability to contribute in the batter's box, to execute pitches, or to turn batted balls into outs. Perhaps the difference between elite receivers and abysmal receivers is enough to be significant, but I find it hard to believe that the state of average receiving in the majors is so bad that even an elite receiver can be worth multiple wins for that skill alone, versus the combined skills of receiving, game-calling, controlling the running game, and so forth.

To me that's like saying a hitter's ability to lay off of pitches outside the zone is worth multiple wins, or a pitcher's ability to throw first pitch strikes is worth multiple wins. Important part of the picture? Yup. A skill important enough to significantly modify your valuation of the player on its own? Meh.

The issue with splitting up the '3rd pitch strikes' from the others is that you will be left with a smaller sample size that will be less predictive of future success. (I'm assuming that a catcher is just as good at stealing a borderline pitch in any count and that the borderline pitch would be called the same way by the umpire in any count - I would hope each of these things are true)

I think the best way to look at it would be:
1. Given player's:(strikes stolen - balls given)/(pitches - pitches on which contact was made - pitchouts - intentional balls)
2. Multiply the above by: 2 strike count pitches taken/total pitches
3. Multiply this number by the number of average pitches over any given period [presumably season; which would be an average of pitches thrown per game in MLB (divided by 2) multiplied by the number of games the catcher is expected to catch; assuming we are talking about full games to make things easier]
4. Now take the number of 'outs stolen' which we got above and multiply it whatever the valuation is of an out on a 'per WAR' (or whatever tool you like to use) basis.

The above does not accurately account for the full value of pitch framing but it establishes a floor for predicting the future value of a player based solely on pitch framing.

(There is clearly value in stealing a 1st or 2nd strike but determining this seems quite a bit more difficult as we can't know if the events that follow, however a similar method of averaging possible outcomes can be used to do this)

I'm not well versed in the determination of value taken from pitch framing, so it may be the above is already what is being done; in which case feel free to disregard.

First, I'm definitely with jmei on the overall point ... it strains credulity past the breaking point to think that pitch framing is as valuable as these public numbers suggest when you look at the behavior of some of the smarter teams. But, there's a fairly robust set of data on the difference in expected outcomes between 2-1 and 1-2. So if the catcher is the reason for the difference, it's a pretty linear move to assigning that difference to the catcher.

So, where does that logic fail? I'm persuaded that the Rays and Red Sox are going to be smarter about this than I am. So where's the difference?

My first instinct is to go to something I know ... I've done a lot of work with online politics and advocacy, and there's a LOT of easily-gleaned data that people focus on (email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates on action pages, etc). But, the very fact that it's easily gleaned sometimes gives it an outsized importance, causing people to discount or ignore other, less obvious metrics. I wonder if, in this case, the data is so easy to look at that amateur folks like us can give it outsized importance and don't put it in a broader context.