Rockies catchers at the forefront of the modern pitch-framing movement

DENVER – The concept of pitching framing is nothing new. It goes back over a hundred years to the game’s beginnings. As long as human perception remains imperfect, and balls and strikes remain called by humans, the game-within-a-game that the catcher plays with the umpire will remain.

But the game has changed.

Where almost a decade ago, many if not most statisticians scoffed at the idea of catcher pitch framing as a valuable skill, today stats measuring exactly that are the new hot thing.

“That’s become very trendy the last number of years with all the data that’s been accumulated,” said Bud Black before Tuesday night’s game between the Colorado Rockies and Washington Nationals. “I know that Mike Redmond and our coaches in spring training on the catching side worked hard with our catchers in a lot of areas: blocking, receiving, throwing, and pitch framing and receiving the ball.”

The statistics Black is alluding to take a long time to balance out but a season ago Tony Wolters rated quite well … Dustin Garneau did not.

Last season, Wolters described his process to us: “I always try to beat the ball to its spot,” he said. “I feel I have to get my body lower in order to give a nice, visible target for the home plate umpire to see. But my goal is to always beat the ball because if I’m late, I’m not going to get the call.”

But Garneau is very aware of that and has taken it upon himself to gather up the information about what he wasn’t doing well and address it.

“I’ve changed,” he told BSN Denver in an exclusive interview. “I’ve had to reinvent my receiving to get my metrics up. Last year I was down in like the 70s,” he said. “I’ve had to readjust and that’s the way catching is going right now. It’s adapt or die.”

And Garneau wastes no second thoughts on whether or not there is some nefarious element of this type of gaming the system. “You’re just trying to manipulate the ball to be in the strike zone. It’s all just apart of the game that we have to deal with.”

It would be silly not to make these kinds of adjustments based on available data, even if the data still has a long way to go before it is anywhere near 100 percent accurate.

To our eye test, Garneau has been much better this season in the framing department and it will be interesting to see where he stands once he accumulates enough innings in 2017 for the data to mean anything. One way to see the positive effects that he has had on the pitching staff is to look at the ERA for those pitchers while he is behind the dish. Garneau currently ranks first among players with at least 10 games caught in “catcher ERA.”

Garneau is also tied for second among MLB catchers in DWAR.

“I think [catcher ERA] is a good measurement for catchers,” he told us. “But it’s all due to my pitching staff, man. Our pitching staff is on point right now. It makes games a lot easier to call when your pitching staff can pitch a little bit. But to me, it’s still the most important part of catching.”

We also talked a bit about the next frontier of catcher analysis; game calling. We’ll have that for you soon.

But as far as framing goes, Black was driving the point home that as a former pitcher he appreciates the time and effort put in by these catchers to get the most out of every pitch.

“These guys have worked on it,” he said. “And I know that when you work on something and you work on it diligently and you work on it every day and you repeat quality work and good habits, it will show up in the game. And I think that’s what’s happened.”

As we recently highlighted, the Rockies aren’t winning games with their typically blusterous bats, rather they are winning with a combination of fantastic pitching — especially the bullpen — timely hitting, and lockdown defense. And all of those things have been anchored by the catching tandem of Garneau and Wolters.