Great! I've been wanting SB numbers for awhile now.

Wonderful! Thank you!

News from Chairman Sean:

I would've gone with Foreman Forman.

Great stuff, Sean.

Have fun mocking Dick Dietz‘s inability to block the plate

Or Cliff Johnson, allowing 1 SB every 9 innings:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/j/johnscl01.shtml

This is great---not just the SB and PB numbers but the WP are very interesting.... I quickly compared a few catchers over their careers:

Dick Dietz: 1 wp for every 23 innings behind the plate
Ivan Rodriguez: 1 wp for every 24
Russell Martin: 1 wp for every 28
Ted Simmons: 1 wp for every 30
Johnny Bench: 1 wp for every 32
Yadier Molina: 1 wp for every 37

I figured once St. Joe's got knocked out of the NCAAs Sean would get back to work.

Good stuff Sean.

Mike Piazza: 1 every 38

I did a SABR presentation two years back on pitch blocking and Piazza is probably one of the best there was at blocking pitches. I-Rod and Deitz were among the worst. Unfortunately for Mike, the difference in value is probably a third to a fifth that of the difference in throwing between I-Rod and Piazza.

Brings them closer, but I-Rod is still very valuable as a defensive catcher and Piazza is still poor.

These stats are also in the Baseball-Databank files I uploaded this morning.

Am I crazy or does "blocking the plate" generally involve a baserunner and a throw, rather than a pitch that does or does not get away?

I agree with you Deivi. I would say, "Blocking pitches"

In a word, fabulous.

Some comments: the Fielding Register lists might be better sorted by Innings than by Fielding Percentage. And now you really need to construct those leaderboards :)

Sean, any plans to add a metric like UZR? This is great, too- just curious.

Sean,

Have you ever given any thought to working with the guys like Eric C. and Chris Cobb and the other guys doing research on Latin American Leagues and the Negro Leagues to try to put something up for the Negro Leaguers? Maybe all known researched stats and then their MLE's or something like that? I would definitely sponsor player pages of a few Negro Leaguers if it would help! It's just endlessly frustrated trying to look up stats and research for Negro Leaguers as their isn't a central depot for them that I know of. Being able to go to BB Ref and find the MLE's or collected stats for Chet Brewer or Lenny Pearson or Dick Seay would be fantastically satisfying and fun. Anyway, I appreciate all the great stuff you do at BB Ref. I can't imagine life without it anymore.

Yes, I'm working with Sean Smith to get his pbp defensive metrics onto the site. They will go back to 1956 as well.

C and 1B are sorted by FP. The other positions by RF. I could go either way on that.

Have you ever given any thought to working with the guys like Eric C. and Chris Cobb and the other guys doing research on Latin American Leagues and the Negro Leagues to try to put something up for the Negro Leaguers?

There may be some movement on this front finally this summer. I've heard of a dataset wending its way down the pike that might be available. We'll see what we can do. I figure MLE's would fit our neutralize feature almost perfectly.

C and 1B are sorted by FP. The other positions by RF

Ah, cool. Makes sense. I did not scroll far enough down to note the change ...

May powerful entities from around the world bless you, Sean.

There may be some movement on this front finally this summer. I've heard of a dataset wending its way down the pike that might be available. We'll see what we can do. I figure MLE's would fit our neutralize feature almost perfectly.

Holy sh!t. That is awesome news.

Yes, I'm working with Sean Smith to get his pbp defensive metrics onto the site. They will go back to 1956 as well.

If I weren't at work, I'd be masturbating furiously right now.

I'm just kidding!

Kind of.

Dick Dietz: 1 wp for every 23 innings behind the plate
Ivan Rodriguez: 1 wp for every 24
Russell Martin: 1 wp for every 28
Ted Simmons: 1 wp for every 30
Johnny Bench: 1 wp for every 32
Yadier Molina: 1 wp for every 37

I think there are two things to consider: which pitchers they caught and the likelihood that some pitchers would be more confident throwing their breaking pitchers to better defensive catchers.

The second is hard to figure but the first is not. Just looking at Dietz, he caught Gaylord Perry (spitter), Hoyt Wilhelm and Phil Niekro (knucklers). This may have some effect on their wild pitch blocking opportunities (more/less chances based on the pitchers). I think a blocking % may be a better indicator than rate after adjusting for "opportunity".

which pitchers they caught

I think that's a major consideration, definitely, for a given year, or in looking at the career numbers of a catcher who's only been in the league a few years, but for an entire 10-15-year career I would imagine that a lot of that would even out, both by catchers having a broad range of pitcher types (including "change-of-speed/location" types who'd I imagine would be easier to catch) as well as the more "difficult" pitchers throwing to a number of different catchers over the years...

I looked at all of these issues and estimated pitcher wildness based on

1) if they threw the knuckleball
2) their HBP, SO and BB rates to get an estimate of WP and PB rates.
3) then compared it to the actual for the catchers

Here are the results.
Full talk: http://www.baseball-reference.com/sabr2006/
Worst: http://www.baseball-reference.com/sabr2006/slide24.htm
Best: http://www.baseball-reference.com/sabr2006/slide26.html
By rate: http://www.baseball-reference.com/sabr2006/slide25.html


We have pitcher splits by catcher.
Dietz caught Perry more than anyone else: http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/psplit.cgi?n1=perryga01
but he only caught Wilhelm for one batter and never caught Niekro.

He was bad, bad, bad.

Gotta love all these stats. Especially the Piazza blocking vs I-Rod. Anything that shifts the defensive viewpoints on those two makes me happy :)

It would be useful to know how many knuckballers each catcher had to deal with though as a guy who is, say, Tim Wakefields personal catcher is bound to have more PB & WP than anyone else in the majors today. Same with a catcher with Atlanta in the 70's vs a catcher with, say, Baltimore. Has anything been shown to have as large an effect as knuckleballers on WP/BP's?

I would've gone with Foreman Forman.

I still think Cool Papa Forman is the way to go.

Has anything been shown to have as large an effect as knuckleballers on WP/BP's

Nolan Ryan

I still think Cool Papa Forman is the way to go.

I hear he can flip the lightswitch and have new features added to BB-ref before the lights go out.

And how is it possible that we've had a Dick Dietz-related thread and no Steve Treder sightings?

Good news and bad news for Ted Simmons, when in some far future time his name comes up for evaluation in the Veteran's committee:

His SB/CS totals aren't all that bad: yeah compared to his contemporary rival Bench he is inferior (66% for Simmons, 57% Bench), but he basically kept the opponents' running games from being a positive sum game. In the run happy 70's that wasn't a bad thing at all. [I can only imagine that many of the attempts vs. Bench were failed hit-and-runs, because nobody in their right mind would do a straight steal-or would they? Baserunners weren't as valued back then as they are now.]

But his PB data-eicchsh: 182, almost twice as much as Bench. Odd thing: a sudden dropoff from 1975-76. Checking the Cardinal's staff in those years, Ron Reed and Bob Gibson both left after the 1975 season; Gibby's WP totals were never excessive. Maybe Simmons did some offseason work on his footwork or something.

Mike Piazza: 1 every 38

Victor Martinez is 1 WP per 38 innings too. If he really has improved his arm to where it's league-average, Victor might actually be...dare I say...a good defensive catcher.

some interesting numbers:

Jorge Posada, lauded by Michael Kay and other Yankee supporters as having a great ability to block the ball: 1 wp for every 27

Jason Varitek: 1 wp for every 42

And for some context: Doug Mirabelli who has caught Knuckleballer Tim Wakefiled for effectively half his career: 1 wp for every 27.

other "defensive" catchers:
Brad Out-smus: 1 wp for every 33
Mike Matheny: 1 wp for every 33

and for kicks: carlton fisk: 1 wp for every 43. and think, that's a ton of innings...

Jorge Posada, lauded by Michael Kay and other Yankee supporters as having a great ability to block the ball: 1 wp for every 27

I can't recall anyone every lauding Posada's ability to block pitches. He's awful at it. He's had WPs on strikes.

Shouldn't you guys be including PB in the catchers' numbers (or are you)? I think that's how Forman did it.

It would be useful to know how many knuckballers each catcher had to deal with though as a guy who is, say, Tim Wakefields personal catcher is bound to have more PB & WP than anyone else in the majors today. Same with a catcher with Atlanta in the 70's vs a catcher with, say, Baltimore. Has anything been shown to have as large an effect as knuckleballers on WP/BP's?

This article which looked at 1972-1992, was expanded to look at ALL the Retrosheet years (1957-2006, excluding 1999) in The 2008 Hardball Times Annual.

I-Rod was 29th worst in WP+PB out of 170 catchers. Piazza was 53rd worst. Dick Dietz was worst.

Tango,

Your work doesn't take into account pitcher difficulty, right? Piazza had Candiotti to catch some of those years and some other tough ones.

I think it does, Tango compares how Piazza does with Candiotti to how every other catcher does with Candiotti, and repeat the process for every pitcher/catcher combo.

AROM is right. It's all detailed in the article. Let me know if something is not clear.

My ratings don't control for the pitcher difficulty, other than pitcher handedness.

Dietz may have been the worst, depending on what inning cutoff you use. Dale Murphy is at the very bottom of my list, though he did have to catch Niekro so it's not quite fair.

Pudge is +9 runs per year and Piazza is -5.

Right, I used about 3600 innings or so as the cutoff (15,000 PA actually). So, your bottom catcher (Dietz) matches mine. I had IRod at +10 and Piazza at -10.

Our differences are best exemplified with Charlie Hough's catcher, Geno Petralli, who I have as +3 and AROM has as -7.