William Contreras and the Risks of Pitch Framing

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Photo Via William Contreras - Instagram

William Contreras

It was a weekend where the Brewers experienced some of 2025’s greatest moments, but only time will tell if it was also one where they suffered one of their most significant losses. 

The Brewers and Cardinals were tied at 2 in the bottom of the seventh inning on Saturday when St. Louis designated hitter Ivan Herrera started a swing late at Aaron Ashby’s 0-1 pitch and hit William Contreras’ glove with his bat, reaching base on catcher’s interference. Ashby retired the next batter and got out of the inning, but bigger damage had been done: Contreras left the game the following inning and didn’t play on Sunday. Contreras reportedly avoided serious damage on the play and is considered day-to-day at this point but was given a rare day off on Sunday. 

The Brewers clinched the NL Central when the Cubs lost on Sunday and will enter play Monday three games ahead of the Phillies in the race for the National League’s best record and seven games up on the Dodgers in the race for a first-round postseason bye. They would likely be fine if Contreras doesn’t play at all in the season’s final week and may not need him again until Game 1 of the NLDS in two weeks. If this injury turns out to be more serious than originally suspected, however, then having Contreras unavailable or less than full strength in October could be disastrous for their championship hopes.  

Even after missing Sunday’s game Contreras has appeared in 147 of their 156 contests this season and he’s been hot recently, batting .310 with a .396 on-base and .540 slugging in his last 48 games. The Brewers are 92-55 when he’s in the lineup this season and 3-6 when he’s not. 

Beaten and Bruised? 

If nothing else, this moment was an illustration of the risk inherent in keeping a strong hitting catcher behind the plate. In addition to the toll the position takes on a player’s knees, catchers are also subject to all kinds of collisions, foul balls, errant pitches and wild backswings that leave them beaten and bruised throughout a season. Increasingly, however, they’re also getting their hands hit by swings. Saturday’s play was the 87th time catcher’s interference had been called in a game this season, continuing a trend in recent years:

Over the last three seasons (and with a week left to play in 2025) there have been an average of over 94 catcher interference calls per season. That’s more than twice as many as there were from 2016-18. That’s not a lot on a per-game basis, but across a season that’s about 50 additional instances where a catcher has their glove hand or arm impacted by a bat.  

The worst of the 100 such instances last season will be very familiar to Cardinals fans: William Contreras’ brother Willson suffered a fractured arm last May when then-Mets DH J.D. Martinez hit him with a swing. The elder Contreras missed 40 games while recovering and the .792 OPS he posted in 53 games after returning to the lineup was over 150 points lower than the .950 mark he had in 36 games at the time of the incident. 

Certainly catchers will make mistakes from time to time, but they definitely seem to happen against some batters more than others. Of the 640 times catcher interference has been called in the last decade a total of 13 batters account for 31% of them (Former Brewer Jesús Aguilar is one of them. During his MLB career he was 15 times more likely to reach on catcher interference than the average batter). Batters who stand at the very back of the batter’s box, have longer swings or who swing late in an attempt to foul off pitches are more likely to make contact with the catcher. 

Catch a Pitch 

Another reason for the increased frequency, however, is a reaction to the increased knowledge of catcher “framing,” or the practice of catching a pitch in a way that increases its likelihood of being called a strike. One point of emphasis for many teams in this effort has been moving the catcher closer to the plate to receive pitches as close to the back of the strike zone as possible. This has been a part of the formula that has allowed the Brewers to get positive defensive contributions out of several catchers who came to Milwaukee with poorer defensive reputations, including Contreras. He talked to Adam McCalvy about it not long after his brother’s injury last spring. 

In the years to come this may all become a moot point. Major League Baseball has taken steps in recent seasons to test the automated ball-strike system (ABS), which uses high speed cameras to determine if a pitched ball passed through the strike zone. A challenge system where either the batter or defense can ask for a review of a pitch has been in use in some minor league levels for years and was tested during MLB spring training games and the All Star Game in 2025. It’s possible it will be implemented at the MLB level as soon as next season and while it won’t be in use on every pitch, it will presumably be at least one step toward reducing emphasis on pitch framing. 

Until or unless MLB turns to robot umpires to call every pitch, however, catchers are likely to be asked to continue to creep a little closer and take a little bigger risk in an effort to help their pitchers out. The Contreras brothers know all too well the chance they’re taking by doing so.