The catcher pickoff is one of my favorite plays in baseball. It’s impressive almost every single time. Not only do backpicks call for remarkable agility and arm strength on the catcher’s part, but they also require a Holmesian ability to read the diamond. Are any runners getting cocky? Is the defense ready for a pickoff throw? Can the team risk a throwing error? The catcher needs to make those decisions rapidly, all while still performing his regular duties behind the plate. It’s not easy.

To that point, I like catcher pickoffs so much because they’re a nice reminder of the level of talent on display in professional baseball. In all my years of childhood rec league play, I never saw a catcher pull off a backpick. I don’t think I ever saw anyone try. The chances of success were too low, and the risk of a catastrophic error was too high. Catcher pickoffs are better left to the professionals. Yet this year, even the professionals are leaving them to someone else.

Here is a supercut of every catcher pickoff so far in the 2024 season. You might notice there aren’t many:

According to the records at Baseball Reference, there have been a total of seven catcher pickoffs this year. Just past the quarter mark of the season, that puts the league on pace for 26 backpicks in 2024. Last year, there were 49. In each of the previous two seasons, we saw 51. Over the last two decades, there has never been a full season with fewer than 41 catcher pickoffs. The numbers are, perhaps, even more dramatic if you remove cross-listed pickoff/caught stealing plays. There have only been five pure catcher pickoffs this year, putting the league on pace for just 19 by season’s end:

In 2023, the league leaders in catcher pickoffs were Keibert Ruiz (6), Patrick Bailey (4), and Francisco Alvarez (4). In 2022 and ’23 combined, the leaders were Ruiz (10), Jose Trevino (7), and Elias Díaz (6). While three of those five catchers have spent time on the IL this season, that group has still combined to catch 933.1 innings over 115 games. That’s nearly equivalent to a full season of work behind the dish. They have yet to pick off a single runner.

Here’s another fun way to think about how few catcher pickoffs we’ve seen in 2024. So far this year, there have been more successful steals of home plate (9) than successful catcher pickoffs (7). That’s partly because steals at home are up, but still, this simply doesn’t happen. Like, ever:

Entering the 2023 season, I thought we might see an uptick in backpicks. I was hardly alone. Willson Contreras, one of the greatest backpick artists of his generation, took note of the fact that the new disengagement rules did not limit catcher pickoff attempts. He said the Cardinals would have to be “smart” regarding “when our catchers backpick runners.” Manager Oliver Marmol sang a similar tune, praising his new catcher’s pickoff abilities. He said Contreras would “play a big part” in preventing runners from “stretching out” their primary and secondary leads. More catchers, such as Sean Murphy (“Yeah, that means we’ll throw more”), and managers, including Gabe Kapler (“We’re emphasizing backpicks”), made similar remarks.

A few months into the 2023 season, Kiri Oler looked at the data and concluded that “the numbers suggest catchers could be throwing behind runners significantly more in the name of keeping runners on edge.” She found that backpicks were a much more effective tool for discouraging stolen bases than traditional pitcher pickoff throws. Yet, if catchers were throwing behind runners any more often, they weren’t earning any more pickoffs. League-wide catcher pickoff totals were remarkably consistent from 2021 to ’23. Now, in the second season under the new disengagement rules, catcher pickoffs are disappearing.

This disappearing act is especially noteworthy considering average catcher pop times have gotten quicker in recent years (at least as of Ben Clemens’s piece on the stolen base rate from last month). What’s more, it’s not as if runners have been extra cautious on the bases this season; if anything, it’s the opposite. The stolen base attempt rate is slightly up, while the stolen base success rate is slightly down. Similarly, runners are making outs on base (OOB) and taking extra bases (XBT%) at similar rates to last season, according to Baseball Reference.

Most interestingly, the decline in catcher pickoffs has not resulted in fewer pickoffs overall. Ninety-nine runners have been picked off this season, putting the league on pace for 368 pickoffs by the time the calendar flips to October. That would be the highest total in a single season since 2012. Needless to say, this means pitcher pickoffs are on the rise. If current trends hold, pitchers alone will finish the season with more pickoffs (342) than pitchers and catchers combined in 2023 (341). Pitchers have not surpassed the 300-pickoff mark since 2012; they’re on pace to smash past that threshold in 2024.

On the one hand, it makes sense that pitchers would improve their pickoff throws with a full season of new disengagement rule experience under their belts. That said, it stands to reason that runners, too, would get better at making the most of the new rules. A recent article from The Athletic noted that “stolen-base percentages actually went down with each pickoff attempt last season, perhaps because baserunners were not yet attuned to exploiting the new rules. This season, runners are taking fuller advantage. According to STATS Perform, the stolen-base percentage after zero pickoff [attempts] is .77 percent. After one, it’s .81. After two, .87.”

Thus, while pitchers are getting better at picking off runners, the penalty of a failed pitcher pickoff attempt has increased. That being so, you might think catcher pickoffs would rise as a result. Runners’ taking more aggressive leads provides the opportunity, while the disengagement limit for pitchers provides the motive. The case is solid. Nevertheless, things certainly haven’t played out that way. What’s up with that?

Perhaps it isn’t really about the pickoffs, at least not directly. Instead, catchers might simply be placing greater emphasis on a different aspect of their game: framing. Teams knew pitch framing was important long before they had any metrics to quantify it. Now that we have the numbers, framing is more in vogue than ever. As a result, it’s likely teams are prioritizing framing over other strategies (i.e. pickoffs) in spring training, game plans, and the moment. I’ve already described how difficult a backpick can be. Now imagine trying to pull one off while simultaneously attempting to steal a strike. It’s all but impossible. If anything, I’d think backpicks have the opposite effect; pitches in the strike zone are probably more likely to be called balls on catcher pickoff attempts. Indeed, Noah Woodward found just that in a piece for his Substack, The Advance Scout. Woodward also suggests that the one-knee-down catching stance, known to help with pitch framing, makes it harder for catchers to pull off backpicks. As this catching setup rises in popularity, it makes sense that we would see fewer catcher pickoffs.

Good pitch framing isn’t nearly as exciting as a successful backpick, nor is an extra called strike nearly as beneficial as a pickoff. Ultimately, however, there’s more value to be gained from framing than backpicks over the course of the season. If a catcher can only do one or the other, it’s not hard to see why framing wins out. Even Willson Contreras seems to agree. Contreras recorded 28 pickoffs from 2016-22 with the Cubs. Throwing behind runners was his signature skill. Yet, ever since he signed with the Cardinals – who encouraged him to work on his framing and switch to a one-knee-down position – he has not picked off a single runner. The evidence may be circumstantial, but it’s still compelling.

If catchers are really letting pickoffs fall by the wayside in an effort to steal more strikes, it’s worth remembering that pitchers are picking up the slack. In other words, it might be a win-win. Since the disengagement limits were introduced, pitchers have been picking runners off with greater efficiency than before. That means pitcher pickoff attempts are less detrimental than we might have thought. Meanwhile, catcher pickoff throws still come with significant risk attached; as Kiri explained in her piece last year, the probability of an error is significantly higher on a catcher pickoff throw than a pitcher pickoff throw. Furthermore, while each pitcher disengagement marginally increases the chances of a successful steal, a throwing error all but guarantees the runner an extra base. Therefore, if pitchers can successfully pick runners off at a high enough rate, pitcher pickoff throws might be a safer option for the defense than backpick attempts. Hence the win on both fronts; catchers can be more efficient when they focus on framing over pickoffs, and pickoffs might still be more efficient coming from pitchers rather than catchers.

It will take a lot more data before we can say with any certainty that catchers are truly moving away from backpicks. After all, we’re only seven weeks into the season. Moreover, catcher pickoffs are always so low in number that the league-wide backpick pace could skyrocket quickly. But hey, if we always waited to write about trends until they were undeniable, we wouldn’t be doing a very good job telling the story of the season as it plays out. Pickoffs, both the catcher and pitcher variety, are something to keep a close eye on for the rest of the year. That shouldn’t be hard to do — pickoffs are pretty fun to watch.

All stats and rankings through May 16.

Like everyone else in and around baseball, I’ve been following the conversations about the persistent prevalence of pitcher injuries, specifically the straining and tearing of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) that leads to Tommy John surgery. Eury Pérez, Shane Bieber, Spencer Strider, Nick Pivetta, Jonathan Loáisiga, Trevor Gott, and Josiah Gray all landed on the IL within the first couple of weeks of the 2024 season with some manner of elbow injury, renewing concerns for pitchers’ health that have become an annual April tradition over the last decade or so.

There’s no consensus as to the cause of all these elbow injuries, and there’s even less agreement on how to prevent them, but most agree a solution is needed. As I listened to prominent figures in baseball weigh in on the issue, an idea for a new rule began to formulate in my mind, something akin to a high velocity usage tax. I threw some publicly available injury and usage data at it, and it held up well enough for me to feel comfortable unleashing it from the confines of my skull to run free in the world. Essentially, my proposal would cap the number of innings that harder-throwing hurlers can pitch in a season, while also limiting the pitchers on a roster and curbing roster management protocols to avoid churning through max-velo pitchers as they reach the innings threshold. I’ll go into greater detail of my proposal a little later, but first, let’s run through some of the possible causes of the elbow-injury problem, as well as some of the suggested solutions to it. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday at Citi Field, Max Fried was unhittable. For seven innings, the 30-year-old lefty baffled the Mets, surviving a handful of hard-hit balls, including two that would have been home runs in several other ballparks. But because he walked three batters, went to a three-ball count against five others, and needed 24 pitches to complete the seventh while running his count to a season-high 109, Fried got the hook from manager Brian Snitker. He could only watch as J.D. Martinez — who had already hit two scorchers of at least 105 mph off Fried — clubbed a solo homer off closer Raisel Iglesias with two outs in the ninth. The Mets’ rally would ultimately fall short, but the run left the Braves still searching for their first no-hitter since Kent Mercker’s gem on April 8, 1994.

If Fried’s hitless outing evoked a sense of déjà vu, that’s because he did a very similar thing just 12 days earlier. On April 29 in Seattle, he and the Mariners’ Bryce Miller each held the opposing lineup hitless through six innings, the first time two pitchers did that in the same game in just over three full years. Miller faltered first, giving up an infield single to Ronald Acuña Jr., who came around to score; meanwhile, Fried departed after 100 pitches, and while Pierce Johnson pitched a hitless seventh inning, Joe Jiménez surrendered a single in the eighth. Unlike on Saturday, the Braves lost that one on a walk-off homer. Read the rest of this entry »

The phrase outer space has been around since 1842, but I’ve always thought that it’s a strange one. Space is the catchall word we use for any empty area. It’s a little bit silly that someone looked up at the unknowable vastness of the universe and decided to refer to it in the same way you’d describe a spare bedroom to a friend who needs a place to crash. Either way, there’s plenty of space out there. There’s space between planets and space between galaxies. Cosmic voids, the vast empty spaces between gravitationally linked galaxies, make up more than 80% of the universe.

Saturday was Space Night at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Florida. While Paul Skenes was dazzling a packed house in Pittsburgh, the Bradenton Marauders, the Pirates’ Low-A affiliate, held a stargazing session after the game and played “Space Oddity,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Mr. Spaceman” over the PA between innings. Staff members wore NASA flight suits. On the field, the Marauders overcame a two-run deficit to beat the Port St. Lucie Mets, 4-3, extending their winning streak to nine games. Also on the field: a turtle.

In the top of the second inning, with a 1-2 count on leadoff batter Yohairo Cuevas, the home plate umpire called time out and turned his head toward left field. It took a while for the rest of the heads in the park to follow, but when they did, they were rewarded with a show. A turtle roughly the size of home plate walked into left field as a defensive replacement. The human outfielders wanted no part it. Center fielder Sergio Campana gently pushed his teammates toward the turtle, and as they cautiously approached it, the turtle started hauling shell toward center field. Left fielder Esmerlyn Valdez waved to the bullpen for help. Eventually, reliever Magdiel Cotto jogged out, hoisted the creature from behind, and hauled it back to the bullpen. The whole saga lasted just over a minute, or as Reptiles Magazine put it, “Turtle’s Minor League Debut Short-Lived.” Read the rest of this entry »

I like to amuse myself by imagining a scenario in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane has to replace a departing Juan Soto. Now, if Moneyball came out in the 2020s, Soto would’ve been traded years ago and Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand would be heroically figuring out how to procure a block of taxpayer-funded stadium-adjacent condos for Steve, the cheapskate owner. But it’s my imagination, so it doesn’t have to be that bleak.

This is a kind of reverse-Six Million Dollar Man scenario: “We have to rebuild him; we don’t have the money.” Soto doesn’t provide any special value in the field or on the bases; even the cheapest team in the league can find an unremarkable defensive corner outfielder who steals 10 bases a year. The tricky thing about finding a poor man’s Soto is replacing his ability to get on base.

Guys who run a .400 OBP, or a walk rate in the high teens, are rare but not unique. Especially if you exclude those high-OBP guys who also bat near .300 and have 30-plus home run power, the tools that price the imaginary A’s out of Soto’s market. (Or Bryce Harper’s or Aaron Judge’s or Kyle Tucker’s.) Read the rest of this entry »

Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not quite right to say that Fernando Cruz was a late-blooming prospect. That would imply that he was a prospect, and he wasn’t, at least not really. He was picked in the sixth round of the 2007 draft as a hitter, but never made it out of A-ball in four years. He tried pitching after that, and it worked, but not enough for the Royals to keep him. He kicked around the minors, indy ball, and the winter league circuit for more than a decade. He played in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. He was living a full baseball life, and almost exclusively outside of affiliated ball. Over the 2021-2022 winter, though, Cruz put on a show, racking up a 2.03 ERA with 81 strikeouts in 61 innings of work across three leagues and the Caribbean Series.

You can have big league potential without pitching in affiliated ball, and the Reds saw it. They signed Cruz to a minor league deal before the 2022 season and sent him straight to Triple-A, where he was one of the best relievers in the minors right away. He earned a promotion to the big leagues that September, and he hasn’t looked back since. Now, at 34, he’s off to one of the best starts of any reliever in baseball when it comes to missing bats. It’s a remarkable story, and he’s a player worth celebrating. How in the world did he sneak past everyone for so long, and how is he thriving now? I hope I’ll be able to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Finnegan might be the most underrated closer in baseball. Flying below all but D.C. radar, the 32-year-old right-hander logged 28 saves for the Washington Nationals a year ago, and this season he has 13 saves — no one in the majors has more — to go with a 1.56 ERA. Relying primarily on a 97.3-mph fastball and an 89.8-mph splitter, he’s holding opposing hitters to a .138 average and a .259 slugging percentage in the current campaign. Finnegan’s peripherals (4.41 xERA, 4.06 FIP, 3.45 xFIP, .154 BABIP) suggest that he likely won’t remain this dominant all season, but so far, he has been on of the league’s top relievers.

His ascent to the big leagues took time. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft by the Oakland Athletics out of Texas State University, Finnegan was just shy of his 29th birthday when he debuted in July 2020, seven months after he’d signed with the Nationals as a minor league free agent.

How did he go from a low-profile prospect to a high-level MLB closer?

“It’s kind of been like a slow burn for me, picking up different things and building off past experiences,” Finnegan told me prior to a recent game. “I’ve always had potential. I’ve thrown hard since I was a sophomore in college — I could run it up to 97-98 [mph] — so I really just needed the offspeed to come along. I’ve also been fortunate to be healthy throughout my career. Outside of that, I wish I could give you a rhyme or reason. I think I’ve just gotten a little better every year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt has a thing for spin. This season, there are only 14 breaking pitches in the entire league that average 3,000 rpm or more; Schmidt throws two of them. To find another South Carolina alum with such mastery of spin, you’d have to go all the way back to Andrew Card, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Schmidt’s breaking balls would fit perfectly in a turn-of-the-century alt-rock milieu, alongside the Spin Doctors, or Lifehouse’s “Spin,” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl.

Baseball Savant recently started publishing bat tracking data, and the public sabermetric community is currently working out what this new avalanche of data actually means. So it was in the early days of spin rate: How much is too much, and how little is not enough, and how does it vary pitch by pitch? It took a minute to actually sort this stuff out, and as ever, the characteristics of a pitch don’t matter very much if it’s poorly located.

For example: Last year, Schmidt spent his first full season in the Yankees’ big league rotation. And he was fine. His ERA was 4.64, his FIP 4.42. Even though he achieved that vanishingly difficult feat of starting 32 games and throwing 159 innings, he was only a 1.8 WAR pitcher on the season. Opponents hit .265 against him, and his two outrageous breaking pitches landed him smack dab in the 50th percentile for breaking ball run value. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite a strong late-winter effort to beef up their roster by adding big-name free agents Jorge Soler, Matt Chapman, and Blake Snell in February and March, the Giants have stumbled out of the gate. They haven’t even been at .500 since March 31, when they were 2-2, and now they’re 19-24 and in the midst of an unrelenting wave of injuries that has thinned their roster. The most serious is that of Jung Hoo Lee, who dislocated his left shoulder trying to make a run-saving catch in Sunday’s win over the Reds and could be out for several weeks, or even months.

The play occurred in the top of the first inning at Oracle Park, after the Reds loaded the bases against starter Kyle Harrison on a hit-by-pitch, two steals, a throwing error, and a walk. With two outs, Jeimer Candelario hit a high 104-mph drive to deep center field. At the warning track, Lee leaped for the ball, but it bounced off the padding on top of the wall instead of hitting his glove. On his way down, he smacked his left forearm into the padding; his elbow and then his back both hit the chain link fence (!) below the padding, jamming his left shoulder. He went down hard as all three runners scored, and after several minutes on the ground, left the game accompanied by head athletic trainer Dave Groeschner, who held Lee’s arm in place.

Though manager Bob Melvin initially indicated that the 25-year-old center fielder had separated his shoulder, the Giants later clarified that he had dislocated it, indicating a more serious injury. Lee underwent an MRI on Monday, but a more detailed prognosis won’t be known until at least Tuesday after he and the Giants consult with Dr. Ken Akizuki, the team’s orthopedic surgeon. The Giants are hopeful that Lee won’t need surgery, unlike Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story, who on April 5 dislocated his left shoulder while diving for a ball and additionally suffered a fracture of the glenoid rim, an injury that required season-ending surgery. There’s been no report of a fracture yet for Lee, but soft-tissue damage could be another matter.

[Update: Indeed, on Tuesday evening, the Giants confirmed that Lee has suffered structural damage in his shoulder. He will get a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache in Los Angeles on Thursday, indicating that surgery is a possibility.] Read the rest of this entry »