Back in October, Bojan Koprivica wrote an excellent research piece on determining the difficulty of blocking every major league pitch.
Our WAR implementation now includes Bojan’s pitch-blocking algorithm dating back to the 2008 season. This impacts catchers only, with a maximum range of +/- 7 runs per season. The vast majority of catchers will see a change of +/- 2 runs or less per season.
We’ve also included two new stats in our fielding section: CPP and RPP.
CPP – The expected number of passed pitches.
RPP – The number of runs above / below average a pitcher is at blocking pitches.
You can check out these leaderboards to see which catchers have benefited the most since 2008 and here are the RPP leaderboards for individual seasons since 2008.
Much thanks goes out to Bojan for helping us get his metric up on the site! We will be updating CPP rand RPP weekly (possibly daily) throughout the 2012 season.