January 27, 2016

The Beginning of the End for Pitch-Framing?: (via this post at Balloon Juice)

posted by NoMich to baseball at 11:26 AM - 2 comments

The possibility that umpires will start to develop bias against certain catchers who are known (and statistically proven) to be good framers lends more weight to the argument that baseball should consider using technology to call balls & strikes

posted by geneparmesan at 02:39 PM on January 27, 2016

Maybe I am wrong to have done this, but on a close pitch any time I saw a catcher move his glove toward the strike zone after he had caught the pitch, the call was an automatic ball. There are a few catchers in MLB that are able to move the glove toward the zone before the ball arrives, and that will make the pitch look better than it really was. The point is that the umpire is supposed to judge the pitch as it crosses the plate, not where it is caught, and this is how I have tried to call pitches. If umpires begin to shade their judgement against "ball framers" it is an admission that they have not been calling balls and strikes properly all these years.

posted by Howard_T at 04:07 PM on January 27, 2016

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