A little earlier, I played around with some strike-zone data. There’s a theory out there that umpires are more willing to give veteran pitchers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to called strikes. I wanted to investigate that, and sure enough, I was able to turn up a modest effect related to age and experience. However, my suspicion is that this has less to do with doubt benefits, and more to do with pitcher command. It makes sense that more experienced pitchers would be better command pitchers, and it makes sense that better command pitchers would end up with a little called-strike benefit given what we understand about good and bad pitch-framing, and so on. It’s something that could be investigated further, and I’ll think of what I did as a simple starting point.

Now, if we’re going to look at pitchers, we should also look at hitters. Just as there’s a theory that veteran pitchers get the benefit of the doubt, there’s also a theory that veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt, in the opposite direction. In short, a lot of people believe that umpires are biased in favor of age and experience. I don’t know where this comes from, but enough people have repeated it that it’s worth a quick look with the numbers we have available. Once again, what follows isn’t exhaustive, but once again, it should get us started. If there’s any kind of major effect, this study should be able to find it.

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On some level, people have understood pitch-framing for a long time. Catchers have long been taught to try to reduce their movement with the pitch on the way, and there were good framers before there was good framing analysis. But before people started really talking about the various good and bad framers, there were some other popular theories regarding the variations in called strike zones. Among them was that home-plate umpires would be tough on rookie pitchers, while to veterans they’d extend the benefit of the doubt. For so long, this was just kind of accepted, even among players, and it’s not like there’s ever been an abundance of data to analyze. That is, until PITCHf/x, which continues to revolutionize things years and years after its launch. We’re all revolutionaries!

Because you can probably see where I’m going, I’ll spare you more needless introduction. In short, I wanted to go in search of the veteran benefit of the doubt, now that we have a full six years of pretty reliable PITCHf/x data. Really, I wanted to go in search of age bias, and I figure if such a bias exists, it shouldn’t be too hard to turn it up. All the information I needed, I got right here on our own leaderboards. And it turns out there’s definitely been something interesting going on. It’s been subtle, but overall it’s been present.

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As we’ve talked about a whole bunch of times, the pitching market is at a standstill right now, as teams await a Masahiro Tanaka resolution. Free agents are waiting to maximize the size of their markets, and teams are waiting because they’d prefer not to be reduced to chasing one of the free agents instead of Tanaka. Tanaka, baseball has decided, is much better. Additionally, the trade market is quiet, especially the one for David Price, because while teams do of course see Price as an ace, getting him would require giving up players, and teams are more comfortable just giving up money. So Tanaka is the primary focus.

It stands to reason there could be one more run at Price after Tanaka makes a decision. Every team but one will be left without a new Tanaka on it, and there just aren’t many starters like that available. But where once a Price trade seemed like a foregone conclusion, here’s Buster Olney on Tuesday:

Increasingly, rival executives are convinced that David Price will remain with the Rays for the 2014 season. “Ninety percent chance he stays,” said one rival official. “The [trade] market hasn’t materialized.”

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People don’t really argue about Tom Glavine anymore. It’s been some years since he pitched, and we have younger, Troutier, Cabreraier things to argue about. But when people did argue about Tom Glavine — and they used to do it a lot — his critics routinely pointed to the same thing. And when Glavine was voted into the Hall of Fame just the other day on the first ballot, the old familiar argument popped up again in certain places. Glavine, many people believe, was a product of a strike zone that extended several inches off the outside of the plate.

An alleged strike zone, it should be said, that Glavine kind of allegedly earned. The theory is that Glavine established that area and was given the benefit of the doubt by the umpires because he could so consistently put the ball there. So, with his command, Glavine was said to get strikes on balls. That would be a credit to his ability, but that also puts hitters at a disadvantage, and a lot of people want to know how Glavine would’ve held up under a more uniform zone. There’s a belief that, had Glavine been more squeezed, he would’ve been punished more often. The only problem is that Glavine doesn’t seem to have been a product of his strike zone at all.

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I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about athletes in other sports who might hypothetically be able to make a decent transition into baseball. It’s something I think everyone’s thought of at least a few times before, and the first thing that came to my mind was that hockey goalies could and would make for good backstops, since they’re highly skilled at keeping things moving quickly from getting right past them. I know, for example, Dan Wilson used to be a goalie, so it’s not a surprise he was also a good defensive catcher when it came to blocking low pitches. It requires pretty obviously the same kind of skill.

Yet, while it’s clearly important for a catcher in the majors to be able to block challenging pitches, it’s also true that, in the majors, there isn’t a lot of spread in skill. Which means there isn’t a lot to be gained by being particularly excellent at preventing pitches from flying by. Last year, by our measures, the A’s were baseball’s worst pitch-blocking team, and it cost them 5.5 runs. The Cardinals were baseball’s best pitch-blocking team, and it gained them 6.4 runs. From worst to best, it’s a spread of about a win, which makes it maybe an unjustifiable thing to be concerned about one way or another.

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In a sense, the pitching market is still at a standstill. Masahiro Tanaka has little reason to sign before his deadline, and other pitchers have little reason to sign before Tanaka does, so for about another week and a half, we could be dealing with a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not just free-agent pitchers. There could be renewed runs at David Price and Jeff Samardzija, but only after Tanaka goes. And free-agent position players might wait for financial clarity as well. The short-term result of all this is that we’re not seeing changes in the 2014 projected standings, because teams aren’t making moves. But something did happen to shake things up right before the weekend.

That something is that Derek Holland hurt himself on his own staircase. It sounds too absurd to take real seriously, but the fact of the matter is that Holland needed knee surgery and he’s projected to be out until midseason. To hear Holland talk, he’s determined to beat those projections back to the field, but medical timetables aren’t made up out of thin air. Holland is going to be out for a significant amount of time. Holland is good, and his replacement will be worse. The Rangers are in a fragile position, and this is a bigger deal than it might seem like.

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Thursday afternoon, I took a quick glance at 2014 team-by-team pitch-framing projections. This afternoon, I’m taking a quick glance at something else within the pitch-framing field. Longer glances are, of course, superior to quicker glances, but I take quick glances for three primary reasons. One, I don’t have the time, really, to dedicate to longer, research-paper-level glances. Two, I don’t have the mathematical chops to really get into stuff in depth. And three, quick glances make for good starting points, and they usually end up being fairly accurate. If you can get to X in an hour, and if you can only get to 1.1X in ten hours, how valuable are the extra nine hours? Extremely valuable, in science. Less valuable, in casual baseball analysis.

For some years, we’ve had pitch-framing information, for catchers. We’ve been able to tell how many strikes they gain or cost, and we’ve been able to assign run values. A major complication, however, lies in trying to separate catchers from pitchers. It’s the pitchers, after all, who’re throwing the pitches getting caught, and it stands to reason different pitchers might be differently challenging to receive. This is far from a new idea, but it’s an idea worthy of further exploration.

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You. You, specifically. The person reading FanGraphs right now on your machine. Haven’t you ever thought about yourself as a player? You shouldn’t, you’d be terrible. You definitely wouldn’t want to even try to swing the bat. But, what if you were a batter, yet you never swung the bat? What might your numbers eventually look like against big-league competition?

It’s fun to think about the worst player possible, who would show up as essentially having the WAR of the complete absence of a player. The WAR of a vacuum, as it were, provided it weren’t such a strong vacuum that it attracted all batted balls in the field. A related thought project is putting yourself in the major leagues, and often, when people do this, they just comfortably assume a .000 wOBA. I mean, you’d never get on against a qualified big-league pitcher, right? That’s very kind of you to assume, but it’s also untrue. You could get on base sometimes. You’d just have to not swing the bat. How often could you reach if you followed that simple, single instruction?

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Just because there aren’t any pitches being framed these days doesn’t mean we can’t still talk about pitch-framing. When the Yankees picked up Brian McCann, it got me thinking about how well they’re going to frame as a team. When the Pirates picked up Chris Stewart, I tweeted out they might be the best framing team in baseball. It was a statement off the top of my head, and there are in truth a handful of contenders, but I decided, why wait? Why not try to figure this out now?

Somewhere over the past couple months, we all stopped looking at 2013 statistics and started thinking about 2014 statistics. We don’t have any 2014 statistics, but we do have projected 2014 statistics, so that’s how we’re informing a lot of our thoughts. Right here at FanGraphs, we provide projected batting data, projected pitching data, and projected fielding data. Something I haven’t seen, though, is projected pitch-framing data. So this is a first pass, which I assure you is both quick and lazy. But a start nevertheless.

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