The Mets continued to maintain an open dialogue with their national catcher after witnessing a tragic scene on Tuesday when J.D. Martinez delivered a vicious hack directly into the forearm of Willson Contreras, leaving the Cardinals catcher with a broken bone that required surgery. Ta.
In an era when pitch framing is accepted and highly valued as a reality of the game, and the difference between calling a pitch a strike or a ball is huge, the Mets, like any other team, I believe it is necessary to: Reach forward and present the pitch as a strike as best you can.
To do that, catchers may need to position themselves even further forward than catchers have been in recent decades.
“It’s something we talk about every day,” Mets catcher and strategy coach Glenn Sherlock said Friday before the series opener against the Braves at Citi Field. “Catcher depth is becoming a big part of everyone’s catching program. That’s what we’re talking about.”
Martinez’s swing cost Contreras several months of the season and highlighted a difficult part of his game to decipher.
Advanced game-wide data shows how catchers can best view pitches as strikes.
For low pitches in the zone (or just below the zone), the catcher is better off catching the ball as quickly as possible. The longer the distance to the glove, the lower the pitch will appear when you catch it (i.e., the ball will appear lower).
“As far as frame counts, there’s a correlation between catchers closer to the plate and catchers farther from the plate,” Sherlock said.
Mets catchers entered with the 13th highest cumulative frame rate in MLB, according to Statcast, and while Francisco Alvarez and Tomas Nido stood out in the game, Omar Narváez had a worse rating.
He was also called for catcher interference three times as a result of the catcher reaching too far forward.
Narvaez was hit twice.
Alvarez crouched on the ground in pain after getting his gloved hand drilled during last month’s game against the Pirates, but although he survived the scare, he tore a ligament in his base-running thumb two days later.
The Mets aim to keep the catcher out of harm’s way while also putting him in a position to convert most pitches into strikes.
A relatively new development, Sherlock said, is advanced scouting reporting on opposing hitters’ swings.
In past years, he said, the Mets were wary of hitters who were simply involved in catcher interference calls.
Now, each batter’s swing is studied, even if that batter has never hit a glove.
“What we’re doing this year to help with that is we’re looking at a lot of video and trying to figure out who the catcher interference players are and the players that are making that type of swing, the deep players. “I mean, we’re trying to make sure the box, the guys with the big backswings,” Sherlock said. “Now we have more information that connects us to bat path information and tells us where the bats are going. That helps us when it comes to catcher depth.”
If a batter takes a long swing or a particularly exaggerated backswing, the Mets’ catcher is expected to backswing quickly.
However, whenever possible, catchers are expected to reach forward to steal strikes.
Last season, MLB batters had a 137 point better OPS (.983 compared to .846) when going 1-0 instead of 0-1.
The difference between whether a pitch is called a strike or a ball is significant, so teams continue to preach tactics that can put catchers in trouble.
“The last thing you want is to get in the way of a catcher,” Sherlock said. “The last thing you want is for a catcher to get hit or get hurt.”
Contreras’ horror has generated even more buzz, but the Mets (and probably other teams as well) still think there’s an advantage to grabbing pitches rather than waiting for them.
The Mets haven’t given up on this strategy.
“He was very close,” Sherlock said of Contreras. “That was painful to watch.”
