Can any posters that umpire discuss pitch framing?

[jerichoholicninja]

I understand how the whole idea of pitch framing being a real thing has been "proven". It make sense that if some catchers are getting more strike calls than other, maybe those catchers are doing something to effect those calls. However, I've never actually heard an umpire talk about it. No MLB ump is going to admit that catchers are fooling them into calling strikes though, so I'm not surprised.

 

Now I am not a trained umpire nor have I ever umped a game but I've been behind the plate for scrimmages of the high school team I coach and I really don't understand how the placement of the catcher's mitt can influence a call as I'm focusing on the area that is front of the plate and know the call before the ball is even caught. The only way framing making a difference makes sense to me is at the top of the zone where the glove could potentially get in your line of sight of the ball crossing the plate and the only thing you really have to go off of is where the ball is caught.

 

There has to be some umpires here that have an opinion on framing and how it does or doesn't effect their calls. I'd love to hear it.

[Baldkin]

There was a great article on Grantland awhile ago about this:

 

http://grantland.com/features/studying-art-pitch-framing-catchers-such-francisco-cervelli-chris-stewart-jose-molina-others/

[jerichoholicninja]

Read that article now and remembered I read it when it was first published too. Still doesn't address the issue from an umpire's perspective. What a catcher does with his glove should be totally irrelevant as the umpire shouldn't be looking anywhere close to the glove because the strike zone is a good 2 or 3 feet in front of where the ball is caught.

[homer]

I agree. I was yelled at in high school for moving my catcher's mitt. I asked the ump "Isn't it where it crosses the plate? Not where it hits my glove?" and he told me to stop mouthing off or he'd toss me.

[OnTheBlack]

I understand how the whole idea of pitch framing being a real thing has been "proven". It make sense that if some catchers are getting more strike calls than other, maybe those catchers are doing something to effect those calls. However, I've never actually heard an umpire talk about it. No MLB ump is going to admit that catchers are fooling them into calling strikes though, so I'm not surprised.

 

Now I am not a trained umpire nor have I ever umped a game but I've been behind the plate for scrimmages of the high school team I coach and I really don't understand how the placement of the catcher's mitt can influence a call as I'm focusing on the area that is front of the plate and know the call before the ball is even caught. The only way framing making a difference makes sense to me is at the top of the zone where the glove could potentially get in your line of sight of the ball crossing the plate and the only thing you really have to go off of is where the ball is caught.

 

There has to be some umpires here that have an opinion on framing and how it does or doesn't effect their calls. I'd love to hear it.

 

 

Well...to hear it from an Ump, you'd have to hear an Ump admit that he's wrong several times a game and he was tricked by how the ball was caught. So I don't think you'll hear it from an Ump. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. Coached, I did little league when I was a kid, but no real ump experience.

 

So I think you're gonna be disappointed in your goal to find a real qualified high level ump to talk about it.

 

Incidentally, I saw the rankings about a month ago of the catchers who got the most balls called strikes this year. Out of all qualified catchers and there were 93 of them at the time, #93....Jonathan Lucroy. I wonder if that has to do with him getting so much talk about what a great pitch framer he is(I did go back to look at the previous 5-6 years and he was inside the top 6-10 the last few years, had a multi year run at #1 and this matched his reputation) that it started to work against him. Or if like everything else, his game had just fallen off in that area too(this was before or right around his trade to the Rockies.

[igor67]

Ueck used to talk about framing quite often, I'm rarely in radio range anymore but it was kind of funny when the numbers guys got all excited that they had found this huge effect.

[jerichoholicninja]

I understand how the whole idea of pitch framing being a real thing has been "proven". It make sense that if some catchers are getting more strike calls than other, maybe those catchers are doing something to effect those calls. However, I've never actually heard an umpire talk about it. No MLB ump is going to admit that catchers are fooling them into calling strikes though, so I'm not surprised.

 

Now I am not a trained umpire nor have I ever umped a game but I've been behind the plate for scrimmages of the high school team I coach and I really don't understand how the placement of the catcher's mitt can influence a call as I'm focusing on the area that is front of the plate and know the call before the ball is even caught. The only way framing making a difference makes sense to me is at the top of the zone where the glove could potentially get in your line of sight of the ball crossing the plate and the only thing you really have to go off of is where the ball is caught.

 

There has to be some umpires here that have an opinion on framing and how it does or doesn't effect their calls. I'd love to hear it.

 

 

Well...to hear it from an Ump, you'd have to hear an Ump admit that he's wrong several times a game and he was tricked by how the ball was caught. So I don't think you'll hear it from an Ump. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. Coached, I did little league when I was a kid, but no real ump experience.

 

So I think you're gonna be disappointed in your goal to find a real qualified high level ump to talk about it.

 

Incidentally, I saw the rankings about a month ago of the catchers who got the most balls called strikes this year. Out of all qualified catchers and there were 93 of them at the time, #93....Jonathan Lucroy. I wonder if that has to do with him getting so much talk about what a great pitch framer he is(I did go back to look at the previous 5-6 years and he was inside the top 6-10 the last few years, had a multi year run at #1 and this matched his reputation) that it started to work against him. Or if like everything else, his game had just fallen off in that area too(this was before or right around his trade to the Rockies.

 

Ya, I really doubt any ump is going to admit they get fooled by catchers trying to frame but I have heard them talk about catchers who try to frame but they don't give the call so some are at least aware that they can be influenced by it.

 

Lucroy is an interesting case as he was the poster boy for framing when it first became a "thing" but now he's one of the worst in baseball. Meaning framing is just noise and is not a skill or like you said, umps have caught on and are changing how they call when he catches.

[djoctagone]

Can any posters that umpire discuss pitch framing?

if one reads "umpire" as a noun, this thread title beats "radio announcers what you want" hands down.

[MrTPlush]

It probably come down to how long it takes to process a close call after it crosses home plate. You are barely into that mental process when the catcher frames it. Think about...the amount of time between crossing homeplate and the catcher catching the ball is ridiculously close to zero. So while processing a decision the catcher has made it look beautiful and impossible for your brain to ignore that.

 

I also think people don't understand how close most pitches that are framed are. A pitch just outside on FoxTrax is easy to see...but in game in person good luck.

[Point Beer Is Best]

I think if there is any perceived skill that a player could diminish in, "pitch framing" would have to be the least likely. You don't just wake up one day and forget how to do that. For Lucroy to have fallen off that badly makes it seem like once that stat was known (essentially, how many times had he made the umpires look foolish), perhaps the umpires became keenly aware of this (and Lucroy specifically), and it has worked against him ever since. Just a theory as it pertains to Lucroy & pitch framing.

[Raw Biz]

Can any posters that umpire discuss pitch framing?

if one reads "umpire" as a noun, this thread title beats "radio announcers what you want" hands down.

 

It never crossed my mind to use "umpire" as a verb. I was reading this for five minutes trying to figure out what it meant. I thought it must have been done on purpose to mock that title.

[MadScientist]

Not an ump, but some of it has got to do with biophysics. As good as our eyes are, they are not even remotely cameras. Our eyes and mind do all sorts of processing tricks to make up for the difference be what we actually register and what we need to see and when we need to see it. It takes on the order of .04 second between when the light hits your eye and when you see it. With a 90 mph pitch, when it hits the catchers glove, the umpire is actually seeing it about 5 feet from his glove. Our brains do some pre-processing to guess where the ball actually is. When it hits the glove, we know for sure where it really is.

 

Also given this and the limits in precision of depth vision there is likely some mental triangulation going on, i.e. if the ball looks to be in the strike zone and the catcher catches it just outside the zone, it likely passed through the zone. It's in this grey area that framing can make a difference.

[Lathund]

I think if there is any perceived skill that a player could diminish in, "pitch framing" would have to be the least likely. You don't just wake up one day and forget how to do that. For Lucroy to have fallen off that badly makes it seem like once that stat was known (essentially, how many times had he made the umpires look foolish), perhaps the umpires became keenly aware of this (and Lucroy specifically), and it has worked against him ever since. Just a theory as it pertains to Lucroy & pitch framing.

 

I think that having a reputation as a pitch framer could indeed hurt him.

 

But on the framing skill diminishing: There was an analysis somewhere of his pitch framing, and basically he used to set up lower. As he gradually set up higher and higher, the rate at which he was getting low strike calls got lower. So as one ages, and wear and tear takes it's toll on the knees and other parts, perhaps that physical decline does affect framing too.

 

While I don't know the exact workings of the framing metrics, I do believe they in some way are scaled to the average. i.e if the other catchers improve in framing and Lucroy remains the same, his framing numbers would go down. His fall is too great for that to be the whole factor, but it could very well play in.

 

Probably a little bit of A, a little bit of B and a little bit of C.