The Official 2012 MLB Thread

[paulhead]

Spring has sprung. Expanded playoffs are likely a go. What say you on that?

Very happy the heart and soul of the St. Louis Cardinals of the past few years is on the verge of re-singing.

[Verbow]

Yadi is going to be one of the beneficiaries of the "we let Pujols walk so we need to spend this dough to show we're serious" line of thinking in the Cardinals front office. Also helps that he's the best catcher in the majors and handles the pitching staff like an old pro.

Hopefully this will quiet all the loony Cards fans who worry too much about what these guys do in the offseason. "OMG Molina won't go to the Winter Warmup - the nerve of that guy"

[KnobTwister]

Hope springs eternal.

[mookie]

Catcher is the most underated position in baseball. Great backstops = great pitching. Glad to see Yadi will be around for a while cuz then we might have to put our new manager in there.....who is the 2nd best STL catcher of my lifetime. Didn't see McCarver play.

Speaking of catchers.....keep your eye on KC's young stud. Already hearing opinions from baseball minds i respect that say he's going to be an all-star for years to come. Many are saying he is already the best they've ever seen. He looked great last year and Royals pitching improved immensely when he came up. Homeboy can hit too.

Looking forward to seeing the Royales w/cheese take a big step forward this year. I think this just might be the year they finally make a run. Would love to see another I-70 Series.......with a different outcome. Hope Denkinger doesn't have a son.

[RavingLunatic]

Catcher is the most underated position in baseball. Great backstops = great pitching.

This is a common belief and seems plausible, but when stat nerds have tried to find evidence of catchers influencing pitching (apart from things like passed balls and cutting down the running game), they've come up empty. I've got a book Baseball Prospectus put out a few years backed called Baseball Between the Numbers, and one of the chapters is on the question of whether catchers influence pitchers' performance. They looked in great detail at pretty much every important pitching metric, and they couldn't find any consistent influence that catchers have on pitching performance. The variations from year to year in the performance of pitchers with different catchers was random. I don't think the studies completely disprove the possibility of any effect of catchers on pitchers' performance, but I think it does prevent very strong evidence that if catchers really are better at handling pitchers than others, the difference is much smaller than is commonly supposed.

[TravelbySea]

I hate CERA...Scioscia lives by it it seems. Thankfully we finally got rid of Mathis.

[RavingLunatic]

Haha, the title of the article in that book is "Is Mike Matheny a Catching Genius?" I love Scioscia, but he had a strange and destructive love of Mike Matheny, who had to have been the worst hitter in MLB over the last five years (with as many at-bats as he had). I had always assumed that Matheny was the league-leader in catching base-stealers until I actually looked at the numbers last year and found that he was mediocre at throwing out runners.

[mookie]

So RL, you're saying that Yadi's influence on the Cards great pitching is minimal? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Without Yadi behind the plate......no ring.

[RavingLunatic]

He's a beast defensively regardless of whether he improves pitchers' performance. I'm pretty sure no one's better than him at controlling the running game, and he doesn't allow passed balls. It's really at the point where you have to wonder why anyone ever tries to steal against him. I can't remember the exact success rate you have to have on average in order for stolen bases to be worth anything, but it's over 70 percent I'm pretty sure. Probably only the best base-stealers are running on Yadi right now, and they can barely manage 50%. It's time to give up trying.

[mookie]

Passed balls and throwing out runners is just part of a catcher's tools. You have to strongly consider pitch calling, location of said pitches, knowing the batter's tendencies, knowing the batter's strengths and weaknesses, knowing where to have the infielders and outfielders line up according to the location of the pitch. I'm sure there's more, but that's what I can come up with off the top of my head. Also, just the overall confidence a pitcher can feel by knowing he can throw a sinker in the dirt and not have to worry about his catcher failing to knock it down in front of him. All of this adds up to a major advantage over a mediocre or less than average catcher. Thus resulting in better pitching.

And throwing out base stealers isn't really something I consider that strongly. Most bases are stolen off the pitcher anyway. Unless you're Yadi and can gun a man down who's only a few feet from the bag.

[paulhead]

1B pickoffs are big IMO. I think it would be hard pressed to find anyone better than Yadi, maybe ever. I don't recall the pick-off at 1st being that common but Yadi seems to have one ever 2 or 3 regular season series'. Pretty significant in terms of run prevention when you consider a guy getting to 2b makes the team 33% more likely to produce a a run, or whatever the percentage is. I don't think there is a stat to show how effective a catcher is with recognizing body language and stress on a pitcher and how the catcher has a calming effect with trips to the mound etc. Yadi is very good at that.

[bltkmt]

He's a pretty damn good clutch hitter too.

[mookie]

I don't think there is a stat to show how effective a catcher is with recognizing body language and stress on a pitcher and how the catcher has a calming effect with trips to the mound etc. Yadi is very good at that.

Good points, Pauly. And yes, nobody picks runners off of 1st like Yadi. Atleast not in my lifetime. As blt mentioned too, he is one hell of a clutch hitter.

[RavingLunatic]

They actually list about 10 or 12 different ways that a catcher could plausibly improve a pitcher's performance in that Baseball Prospectus piece. Without knowing anything else, I would look at that list and feel pretty strongly that catchers must have a fairly significant effect on a team's pitchers. It's not an easy stat to measure, but there have been a pretty large number of situations over the years where controlled comparisons between two different catchers catching the same pitchers have been possible. When you look at the numbers, the variation in pitchers' stats from year to year when throwing to the different catchers appears to be completely random. That is, the fact that a pitcher threw better when being caught by catcher #1 than by catcher #2 in one year has no predictive power whatsoever in telling which catcher he will have better stats throwing to in following years. Yadi catches so many games that I doubt if there's enough data to assess his influence on Card pitchers with any certainty, but the fact that it's proven impossible to find any evidence of that sort of influence among any other catchers makes me skeptical of all such claims.

This is not one of those situations where an airtight case can be made one way or the other. The theoretical case for catcher influence seems strong enough that the pretty strong empirical evidence against such influence doesn't entirely disprove its existence. But our intuitions are not always very good guides to the way things really are. I think just about everyone would suppose that strikeouts, for example, are on average worse than other kinds of outs. Turns out that intuition is wrong. The productive outs made when putting the ball in play are balanced out by the doubly unproductive GIDPs. So I'm inclined to follow the stats on this one.

Still, there's no question that Yadi is an invaluable player for the Cards, for the way he shuts down the running game, the guys he throws out and picks off, his well above-average base-running speed for a catcher, and his impressive offensive stats for his position.

[paulhead]

Or you could've just said it's not an easy statistic to measure because it's not a statistic.