Defensive metrics are far from perfect, but they’re certainly making strides in the last few years. Still, quantifying catcher’s defense is pretty hard. Matt Klaasen at Beyond the Box Score has done his best to put together an attempt to rate catcher’s defense. He doesn’t claim it’s perfect, but notes that some of the observations match up well with the Tom Tango’s Fan Scouting reports.
I’m mentioning this for two reasons. One is that Ryan Doumit scored as the worst defensive catcher in baseball and was more than a run worse than anyone else at throwing runners out on the basepaths (Hey! These ratings do match up with fan observations!). It’s not that Chris Snyder was much better (he scored 115th out of 120), just that Doumit was really awful. The second thing I want to point out is Yadier Molina’s score. He was five runs better than his nearest competitor (the difference between him and #2 Ivan Rodriguez is as big as the difference between Pudge and #12 Buster Posey) and almost 25 runs better than Doumit.
These rankings might not be perfect, but even if we use them to simply get a ballpark idea of how to grade catching defense it’s a good illustration of 1.) how much of a difference a good defensive catcher can make and 2.) why the Pirates valued Tony Sanchez so highly in the 2008 draft.
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