Pitcher framing, so hot right now. If you don’t have a catcher that can frame, then you ain’t cool, homey. In that case, consider the Angels squares because they had a terrific framing catcher in Hank Conger and just up and gave him away. What were they thinking? How can a team survive without a framer? Won’t somebody please think of the Angels pitch framing?
But seriously, the Angels are now voluntarily without the services of Hank Conger, who has rated as one of the best framing catchers in baseball the last two years. Now they are left with Chris Iannetta, who has rated as one of the worst framing catchers in baseball since people started paying attention to pitch framing. Does that mean Angels pitchers are now royally screwed?
To the data-mobile!
[table id=83 /]Yes, that’s right, folks. I dusted off Catcher’s ERA for this! Lyle Spencer would be so proud (and, spoiler alert, just wait until the twist ending of this post where I suggest trading for Jeff Mathis). I know these aren’t the perfect metrics for assessing how a catcher impacts a pitcher and that there are other factors in play, but it is what is available, so just go with me here and take these numbers with a grain of salt.
Even armed with that salt and some healthy skepticism, those numbers don’t look so great. There’s certainly some kind of pattern in the ERA numbers and evidence that there is an impact on OPS. To me, that speaks more to issues with game-calling than framing, but it might also just be a fluke.
What’s harder to write off though is those strikeout and walk rates. Across the board, every starter walks fewer batters with Conger behind the plate. Every starter also strikes out more batters with Conger behind the plate. OK, everyone but Wilson, but there is a lot of noise in his 2014 numbers seeing how he forgot how to pitch back in June. Even treating Wilson as an outlier, it seems pretty clear that Conger was stealing a whole lot of extra strikes and Iannetta was failing to steal those same strikes and/or turning other strikes into balls.
That seems like a pretty big problem for the Angels in 2015, but it might not actually be. It isn’t as if Iannetta is suddenly going to be catch 50 more games this year. He started 92 games behind the dish last year and the Angels pitching staff did just fine, thank you. At most, he is going to take on an additional 20 starts, if Mike Scioscia is to be believed. The rest of the starts will be granted to Drew Butera who should be just fi-
What? Oh, he sucks at framing as well? Hmm, OK that could be a problem. Oh, wait, never mind. He might actually be good. This is confusing.
Well, no pressure, Drew Butera, but the fate of the Angels pitch framing relies almost entirely on whether or not the good or bad Butera shows up. If he’s good like he was last season, the Halos might nary miss a beat. If he sucks like he did a few years ago, the Halos are going to give away several runs, potentially even a few wins. Wins that might be incredibly crucial in the competitive AL West.
Awesome, Drew Butera holds the Angels season in his hands, err, catcher’s mitt. What could possibly go wrong?
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