MLB Catchers Getting Younger, Better

×

Expand

Photo: Victor Caratini - Instagram

Victor Caratini

Victor Caratini

Brewers fans were, justifiably, so excited about one thing they didn’t see for most of Sunday’s game that they might not have noticed another.

Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams and Abner Uribe combined to author ten no-hit innings in the series finale at Yankee Stadium but were denied the third no-hitter in franchise history when possible AL Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole and the Yankees bullpen also worked ten scoreless innings, extending the game to the eleventh.

While Burnes et al eventually lost their bid for history, however, another Brewer had a much quieter perfect game. Brewers pitchers threw 180 offerings on Sunday and Victor Caratini received 115 of them, catching all but the balls that were fouled off or put into play. There were no wild pitches charged to any Brewer pitcher and no passed balls assessed to Brewer catchers on Sunday, and there weren’t in either the Friday or Saturday game in the series, either.

Through 142 games this season Brewers catchers have allowed just 47 wild pitches and been charged with two passed balls. That means they’ve allowed runners to advance on an errant pitch about once every 422 pitches they’ve received this season. That’s slightly better than 2022, when they did it once every 413 pitches, but much better than 2021, when they did it once every 342 pitches.

Better Defensively

The fact that they block pitches well is part of the reason that both Brewers catchers, Caratini and William Contreras, have seen improvement in their defensive metrics in recent years. Baseball Savant estimates Caratini has been about five or six runs better defensively in each of the last two seasons compared to his performance in 2021 and shows even more striking improvement for Contreras, who went from -7 runs defensively with the Braves in 2022 to +7 with the Brewers this season. Contreras has specifically improved his blocking, with Baseball Savant estimating he’s blocked about six more pitches than the average catcher this year. That’s up from three below average last season.

The Brewers’ improvement in this category matches a pronounced trend across the game. As shown in the chart below, passed balls and wild pitches were flat at a rate of about .3% of all pitches for most of the last decade before falling by about one sixth over the last two years:

×

Expand

Passed Balls - Wild Pitches chart

Catcher defense has proven to be one of the hardest things for analysts to quantify during baseball’s statistical revolution, as the role of a catcher includes an array of simultaneous responsibilities: Catchers are responsible for suggesting pitches for their pitchers, receiving those pitches in a way that maximizes their chance of being called a strike by the umpire, blocking errant pitches to prevent baserunners from advancing and being prepared for and capable of rapid throws to bases in an attempt to prevent or discourage opposing base stealers. Many of those skills are hard to evaluate, and isolating one from the others might be an even greater challenge.

With that said, the challenge of certainty around catcher defense hasn’t prevented people around the game from advancing theories on this specific trend:

• Improvements in catcher defense roughly correlate with the accepted use of the PitchCom device and using it in place of traditional signs may have led to fewer “cross ups,” or instances where a pitcher throws something different from what the catcher expected.
• This trend also roughly correlates with MLB’s crackdown on pitchers using foreign substances on the mound, which could have eliminated some difficult-to-receive pitches where foreign substance use caused a pitcher to either get exceptional movement on a pitch or have a difficult time releasing the ball.
• It’s harder than ever to hit at the major league level, and fewer baserunners means fewer opportunities for runners to advance on errant pitches.
• Finally, despite the protests of many traditional thinkers around the sport, the shift away from the traditional catcher crouch to more frequently using a “one knee down” posture appears to be improving catcher defense instead of limiting catcher mobility. J.J. Cooper of Baseball America has done multiple studies on this in recent years. 

It’s also worth noting, however, that this improvement in one specific aspect of catcher defense also happened alongside a youth movement at the position. The 2023 season in particular has seen many teams turn to a younger option behind the plate: Of the game’s 15 most frequently used catchers, 11 are 28 years old or younger and only one is older than 32. William Contreras is on that list, and he’s one of five primary catchers that are 25 years old or younger. In 2022 the median catcher age to get 90 games behind the plate was 29 years old. In 2021 the median catcher age was 30. This year more than two thirds of the regular catchers are younger than that.

The way teams develop young catchers has changed significantly in recent years and it stands to reason that younger catchers, who were "born into" this model, would outperform catchers who had to adapt to it mid-career or refused to adapt to it at all. This would normally lead to a slow improvement over time, but with catching getting significantly younger this season it makes sense that progress might jump ahead a bit. Even if they aren’t actually getting a benefit from changes in style, though, they’re still likely to be more mobile than their older counterparts.

Improvements in athleticism across generations are one of the biggest differences in baseball across the decades. Fans watching the game now are seeing the biggest, strongest, hardest throwing players in baseball history. There’s also reason to believe the best defensive catchers in baseball history are on one knee behind home plate right now, and they’re getting better yet as younger players join the ranks.