Swihart v. Vazquez: The Value of Framing

PaulinMyrBch

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StatCorner is very good, by which I mean that his framing stats generally agree with mine.

That said, it's pointless to look at framing numbers at this point. Earlier this year I looked at sample size vs framing numbers. The smallest sample size I tried was about 7 games (500 chances) and the error bars on that were huge.

You can probably more or less distinguish the best framer in the league from the worst at that sample size, but that's about it. Wait for another 30 games or so.
I was digging up stats to see if anything independent agreed with the 15 v 16 stat. It sounded off for both catchers to me and you've confirmed my suspicions. I don't have faith in that twitter feed, and blocked them so I wouldn't even see a RT.
 

nvalvo

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I'm not singling you out so don't take this the wrong way.

Porcello and Price don't get any of the praise here??? It's all about Vazquez??? Believe me, I think Christian is a very good defensive catcher and deserving of the praise he gets. But both in the media and around here he is made out to be some sort of savior. A catcher can not make a pitcher have better command. Yes, it helps to steal some strikes but it's as much about the pitcher executing his plan as it is pitch framing and believing in the catcher he is throwing to. You can believe all you want in a catcher's ability to read hitters and love his feel for the game but he can't turn a crappy pitcher into a good one.
I suspect that our pitchers will look better going forward because a) some of the guys didn't look like they had good feel in Spring Training and time/reps might help, and b) they've had a fluky high HR/FB rate that's led to a sharply divergent staff FIP and ERA.

Vazquez may help too. But let's keep it in perspective.
 

geoduck no quahog

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Anyone else worried about umpires over-reacting to this stuff? They're only human (or at least partly human) after all.

Who wants to be known as a guy who doles out strikes because a catcher's so good at deceiving him? If it were me, I'd over-compensate so not to look more like a fool than I already am.
 

RetractableRoof

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Anyone else worried about umpires over-reacting to this stuff? They're only human (or at least partly human) after all.

Who wants to be known as a guy who doles out strikes because a catcher's so good at deceiving him? If it were me, I'd over-compensate so not to look more like a fool than I already am.
Yes, I do. But I've heard that good catchers talk with the umpires and know where the umpires like to stand, where they want to see the ball, etc. I think they talk to the umpires during batter changes, etc. I'm hoping he talks to the umps and says something along the lines of "this framing stuff is BS, I just try to squeeze the ball w/out moving or stabbing at it so you get your best look at it".

Personally I look at framing as not stealing strikes (though it does happen), but as not losing strikes your pitcher has thrown. The more the perception of framing is of 'stealing strikes' I agree the faster the umpires resent it.
 

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Anyone else worried about umpires over-reacting to this stuff? They're only human (or at least partly human) after all.

Who wants to be known as a guy who doles out strikes because a catcher's so good at deceiving him? If it were me, I'd over-compensate so not to look more like a fool than I already am.
It doesn't have to be a personal thing at all. An umpire can make two types of mistakes on a pitch--call a strike for a pitch outside the zone (Type I error), or call a ball on a pitch inside the zone (Type II error). If the league is giving the umps more grief for Type I errors than has been the case in the past, you're going to see more Type II errors (or, in fact, correct calls on balls that would have been called strikes in the past).
 

doctorogres

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Someone posted GIFs of all 9 of the Price strikeouts from Saturday, and three caught my eye as shining examples of Vazquez's skills:




He was calling a pretty big zone all day, but the glove work is just beautiful, especially on the cutter. The body is so still.
 

Lowrielicious

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Those gifs are gorgeous.

Check out not only the glove movement (or lack of it) but also the setup.
Look how low he gets his chest in that last one in particular so the glove is actually mid chest when he sticks it. Makes it look so much more like a strike than sitting upright and taking it at knee height.
 

iayork

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Porcello and Price don't get any of the praise here??? It's all about Vazquez??? Believe me, I think Christian is a very good defensive catcher and deserving of the praise he gets. But both in the media and around here he is made out to be some sort of savior. A catcher can not make a pitcher have better command. Yes, it helps to steal some strikes but it's as much about the pitcher executing his plan as it is pitch framing and believing in the catcher he is throwing to. You can believe all you want in a catcher's ability to read hitters and love his feel for the game but he can't turn a crappy pitcher into a good one.
This paper ("Who Is Responsible For A Called Strike?") suggests that the order of importance in extra strikes goes catchers, umpires, pitchers, batters, with catchers being about 4 times as important as pitchers. (I think that's an accurate summary but it's still simplified.) They bump down the number of framing strikes a catcher gets compared to most other methods, but agree that catcher framing is very important and valuable.
 

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The amazing thing to my eye in those three gifs is the way the top of his glove (i.e. What the umpire can see) appears to be completely still. It's only the the thumb portion of the glove that opens and sucks in the ball. It looks like a computer generated version of a catcher
 

O Captain! My Captain!

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Anyone else worried about umpires over-reacting to this stuff? They're only human (or at least partly human) after all.

Who wants to be known as a guy who doles out strikes because a catcher's so good at deceiving him? If it were me, I'd over-compensate so not to look more like a fool than I already am.
As has already been alluded to upthread, I think the best sort of framing makes the pitch look less ambiguous, not more. When Vazquez catches the ball in those GIFs, he's not really pulling the ball into the strikezone as much as he's catching the ball so that the umpire can see that it's a strike (whether or not it "is" a strike is somewhat immaterial). IMO, umps probably love working with good framers because they make their jobs easier. When you're working with a bad framer, there's a ton of movement in the glove and everything just becomes a mess for the ump.
 

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Those gifs are gorgeous.

Check out not only the glove movement (or lack of it) but also the setup.
Look how low he gets his chest in that last one in particular so the glove is actually mid chest when he sticks it. Makes it look so much more like a strike than sitting upright and taking it at knee height.
Supercrouch -- my knees ache just thinking about it.
 

Lowrielicious

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Did a little digging into numbers after some discussion around Christians defense in the gamethread tonight. Specifically around the running game.

Vazquez has also been exactly average at throwing out basestealers this year (31% v. league average 30%).
Interesting.
Is there a way to quantify if opponents are running on him/redsox less due to arm/reputation?
Pulled the catching stats for 2014 and 2016 to compare. Specifically innings caught, steals, caught stealing.

In 2014 Vazquez caught 458.1 innings giving up 14 stolen bases and 15 caught stealing.
This comes out at 0.28 Steals allowed per 9 innings and 0.29 caught stealing per inning.

For 2014 the only catcher with a better steals allowed (min 100 innings) was Yadier with 0.22
There were 12 catchers (min 100 innings) with a better CS per 9.

For 2016 Vazquez 319.2 innings, 11 steals, 5 caught stealing.
Thats 0.31 steals per 9 and 0.14 caught stealing per nine.

This year 5 catchers have a better steals per 9 and plenty have a better caught stealing per nine (Vaz definitely below average on that stat this year).

So Vazquez allowing a little more steals overall but his caught stealing is way down resulting in his CS% dropoff (31% this year, 52% in 2014).
 

HomeRunBaker

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Vazquez in June. 138/167/339 while looking helpless in more than a few PA's especially recently. With Young producing recently along with Holt (maybe) returning soon I'd have to imagine Swihart returns to full-time catching once he returns and in the mix to get starts in Boston.
 

mfried

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Vazquez in June. 138/167/339 while looking helpless in more than a few PA's especially recently. With Young producing recently along with Holt (maybe) returning soon I'd have to imagine Swihart returns to full-time catching once he returns and in the mix to get starts in Boston.
Vazquez has produced a major improvement in catching Wright's knuckles in comparison to Hanigan. With the rise of Wright as our stopper this skill has raised his value even in light of his awful hitting.
 

Koufax

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Vazquez in June. 138/167/339 while looking helpless in more than a few PA's especially recently. With Young producing recently along with Holt (maybe) returning soon I'd have to imagine Swihart returns to full-time catching once he returns and in the mix to get starts in Boston.
Isn't that return now looking like 2017?
 

RedOctober3829

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Vazquez in June. 138/167/339 while looking helpless in more than a few PA's especially recently. With Young producing recently along with Holt (maybe) returning soon I'd have to imagine Swihart returns to full-time catching once he returns and in the mix to get starts in Boston.
This was predictable from Day 1 for me. Vazquez is no more than a quality backup catcher because of his poor offensive skills.
 

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To my untrained eye - it seems like Vazquez is noticeably yanking more pitches back toward the zone - so I'm not surprised to read that he hasn't been as effective a framer as he was in 2014. The art of framing is in the subtle glove turns and nearly inperceptable movements near the edges - as obvious as he's been about some of the pitches he's pulling back, I'd not be surprised if he's turning umpires off a bit.
 

joe dokes

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To my untrained eye - it seems like Vazquez is noticeably yanking more pitches back toward the zone - so I'm not surprised to read that he hasn't been as effective a framer as he was in 2014. The art of framing is in the subtle glove turns and nearly inperceptable movements near the edges - as obvious as he's been about some of the pitches he's pulling back, I'd not be surprised if he's turning umpires off a bit.
Interesting point. Does a catcher lose some of his framing advantage if he's trying to steal pitches that are relatively way out of the zone, as opposed to only those that are just barely so.
 

geoduck no quahog

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I no longer want to see Swihart trade speculation. A catcher with his upside is a huge bonus and I'm irrationally down on Vazquez these days. Of course it depends on what he brings back in trade, but the team has only one touted prospect (Austin Rei: 22 years old in A ball) so the judgment call is having Vazquez as the catcher of the future in the hopes that he and the player traded for Swihart have more impact than Swihart alone. It's impossible to make that judgement in a vacuum, but looking at current statistics (based on a minimum of 60 ab's so that Swihart's included) we find:

Swihart is 18 out of 51 in OPS
Vazquez is 43 out of 51

Without cooking the stats, it's clear to the eye that Swihart is a hitter with upside.

Now, there are a lot of "name" catchers that are hitting poorly: Gomes, Navarro, Martin, Montero and even Molina, to name a few. In fact, if you look at all regularly playing catchers this season, 4 are hitting > .300 and there's a 30-point drop from them to Posey at .274. It's not hard to argue that a good-hitting (defensible enough) catcher is gold, particularly a young one.

If Swihart were still in the farm-system rankings, where do you think he'd fall among the current crop of Red Sox prospects?
 

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I would guess 4 or 5, possibly nudging Espinoza out of the big 4, mostly because how far away Espinoza is. Most of the prospect guys I've read were impressed by his development last year when pressed to action and not many got down on him a whole lot the start of this season before his demotion.
 

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I would guess 4 or 5, possibly nudging Espinoza out of the big 4, mostly because how far away Espinoza is. Most of the prospect guys I've read were impressed by his development last year when pressed to action and not many got down on him a whole lot the start of this season before his demotion.
I can agree with that. We'd have Moncada, Benintendi, Devers, Swihart and Espinoza leading the prospect list. That needs to be kept in perspective when tossing Swihart's name around in trade speculation. That's a lot of faith to put in Vazquez.
 

Papelbon's Poutine

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I can agree with that. We'd have Moncada, Benintendi, Devers, Swihart and Espinoza leading the prospect list. That needs to be kept in perspective when tossing Swihart's name around in trade speculation. That's a lot of faith to put in Vazquez.
Sure, it just depends on who the acquisition is. Many teams have won titles with drek for a bat at a position or two. Right now the sox are below average at, what, LF? Looking at BRef for war I'm not seeing another guy negative. So if Swihart is the main cost for enough pitching to get the team to the World Series, I'm ok with that. (Personally I'm ok with anyone other than Moncada and Benentendi, but that's probably a personal preference, at least in part based in tinstaapp). I'm just not sure he is right now, especially being injured.

We need pitching. It's not free. If we can get someone good enough to make the difference by spending Swihart, I'm ok with that. He's never going to be an elite guy, but the others have that shot.
 

smastroyin

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I think your post needs to be framed by the opinion that Vaz is the presumptive catcher from now until the foreseeable future, with Swihart at best getting 33% or so of the catching load. Because IMO Swihart still has a chance to be an elite player as a full-time catcher.

You may be right in terms of the Red Sox plans, but I'm not sure it's the best plan. For one, Vaz's bat is a pretty large negative. Yes, on b-ref, where they bake positional adjustment into both oWAR and dWAR his offense doesn't look *that* bad. But, among catchers with regular playing time, he has the worst OPS, worst wOBA, and second worst FG oWAR (Yan Gomes has similar rate but in more PA).

Now, he shouldn't be as bad as he has been. But I'm also worried that his defense has been overrated, largely because I don't see much of a case for anyone that has pitched as a Red Sox with him catching being improved compared to throwing to other catchers on the Red Sox, or other teams. Of course these effects are hard to see because the individual samples are small. But, the Red Sox have not been a good pitching team with Christian Vazquez catching. While it's not his *fault* per se, and you can still make the argument that they would be worse without him, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that his outrageous defensive projections have any merit.

All of that said, if the Sox consider Vazquez to be Yadier Molina and consider Swihart to be more Jim Leyritz than Jason Varitek then yes, Swihart should be on the trade block - as soon as he's healthy, which may not be soon enough to help the 2016 Red Sox.
 

alwyn96

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Like Koufax said, my tea-leaf reading of what's coming out of the front office about Swihart is that there's still a very good chance he's done for the year. If he can make it back I would guess he might be able to return to LF more quickly than catching since catching might put more strain on the ankle, but I could be wrong about that. Hopefully he's a good healer.
 

iayork

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swihart is the superior athlete with a huge upside at Catcher it's a travesty not having him behind the plate .
If you don't capitalize "Swihart", and you don't capitalize the first word in a sentence, why do you capitalize "Catcher"? I'm genuinely curious.
 

simplicio

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If you don't capitalize "Swihart", and you don't capitalize the first word in a sentence, why do you capitalize "Catcher"? I'm genuinely curious.
The SwiftKey keyboard on my phone will autocomplete with caps based on prior usage sometimes. Dunno if that's their deal of course.
 

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Like Koufax said, my tea-leaf reading of what's coming out of the front office about Swihart is that there's still a very good chance he's done for the year. If he can make it back I would guess he might be able to return to LF more quickly than catching since catching might put more strain on the ankle, but I could be wrong about that. Hopefully he's a good healer.
I agree. I think Swihart's injury means, perhaps ironically, that he now has more value to the Red Sox as a long-term reclamation project than he does as a trade chip.
 

soxhop411

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I wonder if The sox might send Vazquez to AAA


Scott Lauber
ESPN Staff Writer


John Farrell alluded Friday to Red Sox facing a decision once Ryan Hanigan returns from DL. While they typically view catcher as a "two-man position," Farrell said, red-hot Sandy Leon is out of options and might not clear waivers. Christian Vazquez is in lineup tonight to catch knuckleballer Steven Wright, but if he doesn't hit more, he might lose playing time -- or even his roster spot, unless the Sox carry three catchers.
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Buzzkill Pauley

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Wow, if the Sox are seriously going to roll with Ryan Hanigan and Sandy Leon, they better damn well not be planning to trade any real prospects for pitching.

Because unless they're also planning to trade for Lucroy, that's not a recipe for a championship.
 

JimBoSox9

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Wow, if the Sox are seriously going to roll with Ryan Hanigan and Sandy Leon, they better damn well not be planning to trade any real prospects for pitching.

Because unless they're also planning to trade for Lucroy, that's not a recipe for a championship.
It's likely that they would only run with Leon for a month or so until his regression hits, then swap him and CV when Leon has less chance of being claimed, which has the added bonus of letting Vazquez sort himself out with some Pawtucket PAs.
 

Buzzkill Pauley

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It's likely that they would only run with Leon for a month or so until his regression hits, then swap him and CV when Leon has less chance of being claimed, which has the added bonus of letting Vazquez sort himself out with some Pawtucket PAs.
Yeah, that's plausible, too. I guess.

But Vaz is "hitting" himself into JBJ '14 territory. I have a hard time believing he'd be an easy call up near to the deadline.

I think a trade for Lucroy is definitely possible if Farrell's down on CV, perhaps even at the detriment of the pitching help the Sox really need. He's signed for 1.5 more years with the option triggered, which is a good development window for Swihart.
 

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Yeah, that's plausible, too. I guess.

But Vaz is "hitting" himself into JBJ '14 territory. I have a hard time believing he'd be an easy call up near to the deadline.

I think a trade for Lucroy is definitely possible if Farrell's down on CV, perhaps even at the detriment of the pitching help the Sox really need. He's signed for 1.5 more years with the option triggered, which is a good development window for Swihart.
If Vazquez is sent down when Hanigan returns, it definitely is because they want to ride the hot hand with Leon rather than that they are down on Vazquez. While Vazquez has been anemic at the plate, that's what they had to expect out of him when they called him up in April to replace Swihart.
 

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If Vazquez is sent down when Hanigan returns, it definitely is because they want to ride the hot hand with Leon rather than that they are down on Vazquez. While Vazquez has been anemic at the plate, that's what they had to expect out of him when they called him up in April to replace Swihart.
You think they expected him to be near 60% worse than league average? Come on. No one's defense is good enough to justify a bat that bad in a starting role.
 

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You think they expected him to be near 60% worse than league average? Come on. No one's defense is good enough to justify a bat that bad in a starting role.
Okay maybe they didn't expect him to be quite this bad, but if Hanigan never goes down and Leon never gets called up (and never hits like he has thus far), are the Red Sox remotely considering sending Vazquez down at all right now?
 

Snodgrass'Muff

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Okay maybe they didn't expect him to be quite this bad, but if Hanigan never goes down and Leon never gets called up (and never hits like he has thus far), are the Red Sox remotely considering sending Vazquez down at all right now?
Probably not but that has a lot to do with Swihart being unavailable. When Sandy Leon (hot or not) and Ryan Hanigan are worth being demoted for, though, you've lost your grip on the starting role.
 

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Probably not but that has a lot to do with Swihart being unavailable. When Sandy Leon (hot or not) and Ryan Hanigan are worth being demoted for, though, you've lost your grip on the starting role.
Hanigan can recuperate slowly and at leisure, like concussion victims Holt and Ross. At the very least he showed symptoms of shell shock and whiplash while trying to catch Wright's knuckleball.
 

Buzzkill Pauley

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You think they expected him to be near 60% worse than league average? Come on. No one's defense is good enough to justify a bat that bad in a starting role.
Right.

JBJ was so good in CF he was a Gold Glove finalist even with that execrable batting line, which gave him a positive WAR overall, and even then he was only worth keeping around because the team was in last place and going nowhere. Vazquez may be the best defensive catcher the Sox have, but he hasn't been nearly that good defensively.

Farrell could have expected CV to hit about what he had in 2014 (70 wRC+) and banked on getting a defensive boost over Swihart. But at 41 wRC+ it's a lot harder to justify.
 

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Leon is probably/maybe claimed if he's sent down. Hanigan can't be sent down. Swihart's DL long time. That leaves the Red Sox with Vazquez and Hanigan and no depth in the system (Dan Butler? Ali Solis?). Vazquez can sit in Pawtucket and be recalled at any time. Isn't this the rationale being written about?
 

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Demoting Swihart for Vazquez in the first place was a highly questionable roster decision. It is the type of decision professional talent evaluators are paid to get right. Whoever made the final call on that decision failed this team miserably. Would that be the manager's call? the GM's call? Allen Baird's serial incompetence again?
 

Buzzkill Pauley

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Demoting Swihart for Vazquez in the first place was a highly questionable roster decision. It is the type of decision professional talent evaluators are paid to get right. Whoever made the final call on that decision failed this team miserably. Would that be the manager's call? the GM's call? Allen Baird's serial incompetence again?
It definitely wasn't the GM's call.
 

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Why do you say that? Why don't you think it was DD's call? Most GM's are consulted when deciding whether to promote/demote a prospect. It is in the defintion of the job. Especially an assertive GM like DD who has his hands on everything. If you are being sarcastic, my sarcastic meter is broken.