What do robo-umps, challenge s...

Scott Servais, now manager of the Seattle Mariners but a catcher during his playing career, remembers when a member of the front office explained to him just how valuable catchers can be in tipping a game in their team’s favor. “One of our analysts told me, ‘Scott, if we get two 3-2 pitches in the course of the game, that can mean up to half of a run,’” he said recently.

He was referring to the value of pitch framing — “stealing” a strike via the catcher’s expert sleight of glove. Half of a run for just a couple of extra strikes. “That’s huge,” Servais said. Even for someone who intuitively understood the defensive contributions of catchers, it was striking.

Servais played during the Mike Piazza era, when the Hall of Fame slugger ushered in an appreciation and expectation for catchers’ offensive production. Catching has always been a uniquely demanding position, but backstops at the time were seen primarily as another spot in the lineup from which to generate runs.

Then, around 2008, with the addition of PITCHf/x in major-league ballparks, teams started to quantify stolen strikes. Pitch framing became part of how catchers are trained and evaluated; coaches started to teach it, and players who couldn’t learn the skill were largely phased out.

The inevitability of ABS

In 2019, robo-umps debuted in the Atlantic League. The independent league partnered with MLB, allowing it to serve as a testing ground for more extreme or preliminary experimental rules. While the effect wasn’t much to look at — a human umpire still stood behind home plate and signaled the calls relayed to him by a computerized eye-in-the-sky — it represented a seismic shift on the distant horizon.

Since then, the automated ball-strike system (ABS) has made its way into and up through affiliated ball. Last season, a handful of the Triple-A stadiums featured ABS, exposing prospects on the cusp and rehabbing major-leaguers to the system.

What it means for catcher development

Tucker Frawley, the Minnesota Twins catching coordinator, spends some time in the offseason ensuring that the team’s training systems are “in line with how we see big leaguers actually earning those paychecks.”

His job is to give the organization’s minor-league catchers the best chance to succeed and contribute at the major-league level. Personally, he has a lot of appreciation for the mental side of catching — the ability to digest the huge amounts of information available and turn them into effective game-calling — but that can be tricky to measure. And so instead, “I've been locking in lately on the receiving side,” Frawley said. “Because it's the most easily quantifiable.”

What about challenges?

The challenge system is easier for catching gurus to embrace. “It's an upgrade over the full-blown version [of ABS],” Swanson said. (Managers faced with navigating the tricky clubhouse dynamics of players empowered to demand the use of limited replay only on their own behalf don’t necessarily agree.)

In fact, Frawley sees a future in which a challenge system could actually enhance the importance of framing. Only the catcher, pitcher and batter are supposed to be able to challenge pitch calls, but he says it’s tough to imagine how the rule could prevent other players and coaches from emphatically weighing in based on what they see.

Consider the larger ecosystem

Modern umpires are remarkably good. Under MLB’s evaluation system, which includes a buffer zone for “acceptable” calls, the league-wide average was 97.4% accuracy in 2021. Third-party and public grading accounts are a little tougher, but even by those metrics, big-league umpires call well over 90% of pitches correctly. Younger umpires are more accurate than the old guard, and a huge swath of old-school umpires with subjective strike zones are set to retire ahead of next season.

It doesn’t matter. The technology exists to turn a maddeningly imperfect system into something absolute and resolute. In an era of on-screen K-zones — which are an entertainment product, not an actual grading system — and missed calls gone viral, the ability to automate perfection makes implementation of ABS all but inevitable.