Tigers Discuss Pitch Framing, Considering How To Use Data On It
By Ashley Dunkak
@AshleyDunkak
LAKELAND, FLA. - When Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus played in the major leagues, catchers generally did not get specific instruction on framing pitches. Some catchers do not need such instruction; they just do it naturally. That was Ausmus.
"When I played, my approach was, I want to make every pitch look as good as it can possibly look," Ausmus said. "I guess I worked on receiving, but everything I did as a catcher, that's the way I caught. You knew you were supposed to have soft hands, you wanted to make the pitch look good.
"In terms of the mechanics of framing to get a strike," Ausmus added, "I think that's probably in its infancy right now."
While the concept of pitch framing is nothing new, what is more recent is the quantification of how effectively a catcher frames pitches, and Ausmus said the Tigers have taken notice.
"It's a very en vogue stat right now," the manager said. "We pay some attention to it just because if you think of the effect - one call in a game, changing one ball to a strike or one strike to a ball, and now say it's 10 calls in a game or five calls in a game. The impact that can have over the course of a season is enormous."
As a special assistant with the San Diego Padres, Ausmus studied hours of video on catchers, looking for characteristics of the ones who seemed to get more calls than others.
"We came up with a relatively short list of things we thought were commonalities among these catchers who got strikes called for their pitchers, so I'm very familiar with this whole concept, this new stat, the whole idea of the effect it has, and I don't think it's overly technical," Ausmus said. "The reason we were doing [the video study] is we were trying to take any information we can and either apply it to development or apply it to scouting so scouts could look for these traits when they're looking at a high school catcher."
Ausmus said he has talked with Detroit's catching coordinator and minor league farm director about information on pitch framing and how to use it.
"I think we'd be burying our heads in the sand if we didn't at least acknowledge it," Ausmus said.
Ausmus has also talked about pitch framing with Tigers catcher Bryan Holaday, who served as the backup to Alex Avila last season.
"I haven't gotten too in-depth about it, but really, when you're talking to players, you just put it in baseball terms that they're used to talking about it," Ausmus said. "There's no geometry involved. It's just talking to them about how we think receiving the ball is conducive to getting strikes called. Some of them do it already; some of them, you don't need to talk to them. I don't think Jonathan Lucroy or Russell Martin probably needs to work on that."
