On Tuesday night, Milwaukee Brewers slugger Rhys Hoskins smashed his eighth home run of the season. That’s the main reason the organization wanted the former Phillies first baseman, but he also values his plate discipline in unexpected ways.
This statement will appear absurd at first. But hear me out: Rhys Hoskins is one of the top pitch framers among major league hitters.
For many fans, the very presence of pitch framing is anathema. The ability of some catchers to frame pitches and earn their batterymate more called strikes than others has been a topic of discussion for 50 years, with the first attempts to loosely quantify it dating back 35 or 40 years, but framing has become contentious since it was first comprehensively quantified using PITCHf/x data nearly 15 years ago.
First, many fans were dubious that the skill existed. Some persist in that disbelief, even though the reality of the effects involved has now been exhaustively demonstrated. More common now, though, is the lament that framing is nothing more than evidence of the brokenness of the game–that deceiving umpires shouldn’t be a valuable skill, and that we need to hurry up and automate the strike zone.
I deeply and fundamentally disagree with those assertions. Principally, I would note that every other sport has situations in which the players involved are trying to make a play, and in which the judgment of the official is required to determine whether they were in bounds (physically or legislatively) or not. Catcher framing only comes into play when a hitter decides not to swing. Once that happens, it’s not clear to me what’s wrong with catchers doing their best to earn a called strike and take advantage of their opponent’s passivity.
However, that is not the focus of this paper. It’s about the other interactions that shape the strike zone on a plate. About a decade ago, Baseball Prospectus (which published some of the first and best catcher framing statistics) published studies suggesting that pitchers, in addition to catchers, have a role in getting additional strikes on the edges when a batter does not swing. That isn’t shocking, but it was fascinating. Pitchers often aim for the zone’s edges, but those who can hit their spots more accurately (or whose delivery or pitch movement is particularly funky or deceptive) can persuade an umpire to expand those margins a little more. Unskilled hurlers, like untrained catchers, might lose
