What does the challenge system, robo-umps, and catchers mean? Some coaches are worried
Scott Servais, 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. A couple of extra strikes can make half the run.
“That’s huge,” Servais said. It was amazing, even though I intuitively understood the defensive roles of catchers.
Servais played during the Mike Piazza Era, when the Hall of Fame slugger ushered in an appreciation and expectation for catchers’ offensive production. Backstops, while a unique position in catchers’ history, were primarily used to generate runs.
In 2008, it was replaced by 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.
Over the last decade, defensive demands have increased on catchers. Pitchers throw more than ever, teams are able to cycle through more pitchers per match, and scouting reports have become more thorough. The running game has slowed — though if all goes according to MLB’s plan, that tide could turn starting next season — but on the whole, “the job of the catcher has never been more difficult,” said Tanner Swanson, the New York Yankees The catching coordinator.
“And yet catchers are performing at a really, really high level,” he said.
“It’s not so much on the legs anymore,” Phillies manager and former catcher Rob Thomson said. “But mentally, it’ll wear on you.”
It boils down to MLB teams prioritizing strong defence from their catchers. 2022 Houston Astros won 106 games and the WOderld Series with Martín Maldonado — OPS+ of 69 — catching 113 in the regular season and all but two in the postseason and generally being considered a cornerstone of the club. Jose Trevino, baseball’s best pitch framer last year, was a 3.1 fWAR player — more than Luis Arráez, Matt Olson or Kyle Schwarber — despite below-average offense.
Preventing runs is as important as creating them. Take for instance that the league’s OPS was.908 on a count of 2-1, and.414 on a count of 1-2. Even with the pitcher doing most of the work, every single pitch of a game presents an opportunity for the catcher’s defense to tilt the scale one way or the other.
However, this could change soon. So-called robo-umps loom, and as they creep closer to the big leagues, it’s becoming impossible to ignore that baseball is at an inflection point for catchers. The automated ball-strike system will soon be in use, and catchers will need to adapt.
“It’s gonna change the game more than anything else in our lifetime,” Servais said.
ABS is inevitable
2019 robo-umps debuted in the Atlantic League. The independent league joined forces with MLB to allow it to be a test ground for more extreme and 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.
The automated ball-strike machine (ABS), which was developed in the 1980’s, has continued to evolve. into and up through affiliated ball. A few Triple-A stadiums included ABS last season. This allowed prospects to be exposed and rehabbing major-leaguers to access the system.
A Low-A league, and the Arizona Fall League, introduced a riff to robo-umps. a ball-strike challenge system. The game was called by humans, but only hitters and catchers could challenge the calls. They were then deferred for the computer. Each team began the game with three challenges. The successful challenges were retained.
The sense supported by commissioner Rob Manfred’s public commentsABS at the major league level is inevitable. However, to make a change in something so fundamental and ubiquitous in the game it must be fail-proofed and the consequences carefully accounted.
Manfred also sounded a bit unsure about the timeline during the December winter meetings. “The one thing I will say from a developmental perspective: We learned a lot about ABS in 2022, suggesting to me that we are probably not done learning about ABS,” he said.
In 2023, the experiment will grow significantly. All 30 Triple-A stadiums next season will have ABS. Each stadium will alternate between full ABS or the challenge system.
The league sees two benefits to the challenge system. The league sees a few advantages to the challenge system. It is easier to scale up from there into full ABS than it would be to reverse total implementation. It is a bonus that the rule change’s primary purpose is to increase entertainment value.
Either way, the role of receiving in a catcher’s job description is poised to change drastically in the next couple of years. It is difficult for catching coordinators and catchers to anticipate when and how they will shift.
What they do know, however, is that they’re not happy about what they fear is the future of catching.
It is important to understand what it means for catcher design
Tucker Frawley, 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.”
Swanson agreed: “I think teams have gotten smarter and better at figuring out how to optimize that skill and not just try to acquire it.”
Swanson, in fact, was at the forefront of the “knee-down” setup that swept baseball in recent seasons, as teams realized the stance put catchers in better position to steal strikes. There was once a stigma attached the unathletic approach. But it wasn’t. Mitch Garver went from one of baseball’s worst pitch framers to among the best in a single offseason of working with Swanson, the rest of the sport soon got on board.
“Ultimately, catchers have just gotten too good at deceiving umpires, and the next step is potentially adjusting the rules to try to balance things out,” Swanson said. “That’s how I see it.”
For catchers in the minors now, it’s difficult not to wonder what those adjustments will mean for how organizations evaluate — and compensate — them.
“That absolutely gets brought up,” Frawley said of a future in which pitch framing is replaced by robo-umps, “and we’ve quickly just told them, we will adjust to that if and when.”
For guys who are already trying ABS, this possibility can be quite immediate. At least, the Twins insist that they train for human umpires. This means that coaches at these levels must remind catchers regularly Not to change how they receive pitches but to continue to present them as strikes — even where it no longer matters.
“We do constantly need to remind them to not fall into any traps relative to those systems,” Frawley said. “Because right now, if they end up in the big leagues, it’s going to be your traditional umpiring crew. So that’s our tact right now. I’m not sure if it is. [other] orgs are sticking to that same messaging.”
“We’ve kind of started to shift away from not putting so much importance on it,” Veronica Alvarez said about pitch framing. She works in player development in Latin America for the Oakland A’s and spent the past few years as an independent contractor coaching catching at their affiliate levels, at spring training and in instructional leagues.
“So setting ourselves up for success as far as remaining adjustable to pitches and things like that, as far as when we receive the ball. But the framing part, there’s a little less focus on it. We still do it, just less than before.”
“We’ve talked about this a lot,” Swanson said. “I’m not certain that we would do anything different from a tactical standpoint.”
What he means is that the knee-down setup he evangelizes for its framing benefits is also effective for the blocking and throwing parts of catching that won’t be as impacted by ABS. However, it is likely that the position and the skill teams will change dramatically in the coming seasons.
The embrace of a totally rigid strike zone and the loss of framing as an art form — or a valuable, teachable skill that catchers practice and take pride in — is enough for coaches and coordinators to lament the advent of ABS. ABS may initially increase the value of other skills in catching, particularly those related to controlling the running. Frawley hopes it will highlight guys who excel at game-calling and what he termed “targeting” — setting up in a way that helps a pitcher hit his spot.
But beyond that, there’s concern about the broader consequences of deemphasizing defense.
“Eventually, I think it’ll go to the point where it’s like, all right, just give me a body that can catch the ball but hits,” Alvarez said.
It could be the beginning of a whole new era in men behind the plate.
“The defensive-centric catchers take a lot of pride in that part of their game, and they spend a lot of time and energy dissecting opposing lineups and game-planning and working with pitchers,” Swanson said. “I guess one of the potential fears is that you insert a player into that position that doesn’t have a lot of vested interest in maximizing the performance of the pitcher or limiting base runner advancement or gaining strikes or preventing runs. They are there to drive in runs.
“And so, I’d be curious to know, what does the preparation look like? How does that change? Is it a shift in the mindset of the player to one that is defensive-oriented and cares deeply for getting hitters out, versus someone who is literally getting paid. The league and front office are sending the message that you’re being put back there to be an offensive weapon that helps us score runs. How does that affect the game-calling and pitchers? How does that impact pitchers and the game-calling and so forth?”
All that, plus the loss of the dynamic tension between hitters, pitchers and umpires — and the fans who heckle them — leaves Swanson apprehensive about ABS.
“I’m not sure it would lead to a better brand of baseball,” he said.
How about the challenges?
It is much easier to catch gurus by using the challenge system.
“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.)
Frawley believes that a future where a challenge system could increase the importance of framing is possible. 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.
“The catcher is now tasked with not only tricking the umpire but also the hitter in the box and, honestly, the dugout as a whole because while you can’t challenge, sometimes there’s going to be some guys in the dugout that give you the heads-up that it’s clearly down or clearly up,” Frawley said. “You’re not just tricking the guy behind you but also the guy in front of you and the players to your right or left.”
And while some players certainly have better eyes than others, as evidenced by their ability to take close pitches for balls, the early results of the challenge system indicate that pro baseball players don’t know the rulebook strike zone as well as they might think. The Arizona Fall League was last year. only a third of challenges were successful. That’s a drop-off from what it was in the minor-league season, but even in the Single-A and Triple-A leagues that experimented, fewer than half of challenges were successful.
The numbers would improve if players adapted to a less-by-the-book approach and took a more focused approach to challenges. However, catching coordinators still believe that ABS is a better way to go. They want to convert borderline pitches into strikes, which are more likely to be challenged.
Take into account the wider ecosystem
Modern umpires can be incredibly good. Under MLB’s evaluation system, which includes a buffer zone for “acceptable” calls, the league-wide average was 97.4% accuracy in 2021. Although third-party and public grading accounts can be a bit more difficult, big-league umpires still correctly call over 90% of pitches. Younger umpires are much more accurate than the older guard. swath of old-school umpires with subjective strike zones are set to retire ahead of next season.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Technology exists to transform a frustratingly inept system into something solid and reliable. 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.
A game called by a robot-ump is not just one that is officiated by an individual with 100% accuracy on the particular day. The intention is to change the rules of catching. Swanson wondered if there would be enough motivation to catch the ball.
“Which I think is problematic,” he said.
ABS isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Baseball evolves. The current game is due for radical change. Given current concerns, it could be possible to trade defensive complexity for more offense. The catch is that experts should not assume the strike zone is a closed system. This means that umpires might not be the only ones involved in its creation.
“They’re definitely not catchers,” Alvarez said of those pushing for ABS. “I can’t imagine that a catcher said, ‘Let’s do an automated strike zone.’”