Recently, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a catcher’s ability to frame or receive the pitch in order to get more strike calls. However, that isn’t the only job of a backstop — blocking pitches in the dirt is a far more visible skill to most. Does being good at one affect your ability to be good at the other?

Listen to the skills that different catchers have listed as important to framing a pitch so that the umpire might best call it a strike:

“The less movement you have, the more likely he’s going to call it a strike.” — Jonathan Lucroy.
“Get good at sticking it.” — Jonathan Lucroy
“The emphasis is shifting to being as quiet as you can about receiving the ball and giving the umpire the best view of the pitch that you can.” — Jason Castro
“That’s part of what I’ve integrated into my catching this year is thinking about the angles in which I set up.” — Jason Castro
“Give the lowest target possible.” — Hank Conger
“My stance is narrower.” — Hank Conger
“I usually ask the umpire if I should get lower.” — Travis d’Arnaud

Now listen to the skills involved in blocking a pitch:

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During his minor league career, Jacob deGrom had a 3.62 ERA and struck out batters at about a league-average rate. Those are OK numbers, but without the context of his actual stuff, it’s not surprising he’d never been featured on Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list — or that he’d rated no higher on the New York Mets’ prospect list than Marc Hulet’s No. 7 ranking coming into this season.

Now that the pitcher with the hair and the command and the fastball and the changeup is dominating the major leagues, it’s fair to ask: How did we miss this?

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Now that he’s nearing 35, Adam Dunn may not be the same fearsome offensive force he was earlier in his career. So he’s experimented with a few tweaks to his game over the last couple of years. Mostly, they didn’t work. But he did retain a few aspects of those experiments that benefit the veteran to this day.

The first idea might have been the worst idea. In Spring Training last year, Adam Dunn decided to be more aggressive on the first pitch. The result was disastrous, as he got 50% worse at getting into counts that were in his favor.

“That didn’t work for me,” the slugger admitted before a game with the Giants in August. “I get myself into a lot of bad counts anyway, that was not good for me.” 2013 was the second-worst year of his career by most offensive stats.

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Maybe you find Tim Lincecum frustrating. He’s still throwing no-hitters, still in the top 25 for swinging strikes, still has an above-average strikeout rate, and still has a an above-average ground-ball rate. His walk rate has improved the last couple of years! Those home runs are coming at a rate that you’d figure would regress to the league average at some point. But they aren’t, and so you have his last few years.

Well, you are not alone with your emotions. Tim Lincecum is also frustrated. “The last few years have kind of eluded me in a sense, so I’m always trying to figure something out,” the pitcher admitted before a game with the White Sox.

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Last year was a tough one for Phil Hughes. Worse than that. “Last year was a disaster for me,” Hughes admitted to me before a August game with the A’s in Oakland.

But this year has been much better. He’s top fifteen in strikeouts minus walks, a pretty solid (if simple) way to measure starting pitcher quality. A big part of the change has been mindset, according to the pitcher, but that mindset has benefitted from a few key changes.

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Sam Fuld is not your typical outfielder, maybe. There’s an active brain at work out there. Often it wonders what the numbers say about this beautiful game.

Fuld’s history sounds like the backstory for a baseball analyst. He carried around a book of baseball stats when he was five. He went to Phillips Exeter, one of the best prep schools in the country. He has a degree in economics from Stanford. He read Moneyball and was inspired to complete an internship at STATS Inc.

Sam Fuld once said “The beauty of numbers is that our minds don’t necessarily capture the whole picture accurately. Our emotions remember certain things for whatever reason, and there are certain things you don’t remember…. that’s the beauty of numbers. It’s fact. There’s no way around it.”

So, before a game against his old team — the also openly nerdy Tampa Bay Rays — I thought I’d ask him what he was thinking about out there when the games got long.

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Chris Capuano and Shane Greene have not given up an earned run in the last two Yankee games, and it’s just like Brian Cashman must have drawn it up. A veteran lefty who hadn’t started all year and a sinker-slider righty that put up an ERA in the high fours in Triple-A this year — of course it’s working out.

Capuano has a track record that suggests he’s not too far from his true talent level, but Greene’s rest-of-season ERA projections (by ZiPs at least) are two runs higher than what he’s showing right now. Given his minor league numbers, we know why that is. But given what he’s doing now, is there a chance he might beat those projections?

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Jake Odorizzi arrived in the Tampa Bay organization with a slew of breaking balls, a decent fastball, and questions about his changeup. After more struggle with the change, he reached out to teammate Alex Cobb, who had once had a similar issue. Cobb taught him the grip for his splitter, and Odorizzi’s game took off.

The interesting thing, though, is that Odorizzi’s pitch is different — despite having the same grip. For two pitches that they’ve nicknamed Thing 1 and Thing 2, these aren’t the indistinguishable twins from The Cat in the Hat.

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