Hank Conger’s Jon Lester Season Behind the Plate

Jon Lester became a talking point during last year’s postseason for all the wrong reasons. For all the good things Lester can do on a pitcher’s mound, he has this one glaring weakness, and last October, that glaring weakness was exposed on a national stage. In the American League Wild Card game, the Royals ran all over Lester, taking full advantage of his inability to make pickoff throws to first base. The Royals stole five bases on Lester and a record seven in the game, and the stolen bases, of course, played a huge role in the team’s comeback victory

Plenty of time was spent in the offseason discussing Lester’s weakness and whether it would be exploited in the upcoming season. Curiously, runners hadn’t taken advantage of Lester before the Royals game the way one might expect, but with the weakness exposed on such a large scale, it seemed inevitable that things would change in the future. And they did. This year, in Chicago, Lester allowed a league-high 44 steals. He had the second-highest rate of steals attempted. He allowed the fifth-highest pitcher-isolated success rate. This season, Lester was exploited in the way we’d all imagined.

Though it didn’t receive anywhere near the same level of attention, the same thing happened to Hank Conger.

A brief aside: I just want to admit that it feels kind of dirty to keep bringing up Lester’s problem with the run game, because despite that very real shortcoming, Lester still does plenty of things well and his weakness doesn’t prevent him from being a valuable player. Before we dive into Conger’s weakness, it’s worth pointing out that he does plenty of things well, too. It’s also worth pointing out why we’re talking about Conger in the first place. If you missed it, Conger was a non-tender candidate in Houston, and late Wednesday night, he was traded to the Tampa Bay Rays for cold hard cash.

Now, for what Tampa Bay’s new catcher does well. Firstly: the robot. He does that very well. Also: pitch framing. Conger’s been one of the game’s best pitch framers, and that’s probably the most important skill for a catcher to have! He wasn’t quite elite last year, with BaseballProspectus’ framing metric grading him at roughly +4 runs, but the year before that he led all catchers with +25 framing runs. Lastly: Conger can hit a little. He’s a switch-hitter, which is a rare luxury in a catcher, and over the last three years he’s been about a league-average hitter, running a 96 wRC+. That’s not great, but for a catcher, it’s just fine. That’s the same as Salvador Perez, Matt Wieters and Jason Castro.

Considering the robot, the framing, and the bat, you could do a lot worse in a backup catcher. But there’s this part of Conger’s game where you can’t do a lot worse. You can’t do any worse, in fact, because in this one area of catching — a pretty major area — Hank Conger just had the worst season in recorded history.

In 2015, baserunners attempted 43 steals with Hank Conger behind the plate. Of those 43 attempted steals, 42 were successful. Put another way, for effect: Hank Conger only threw out one baserunner in 43 tries. One more time: base stealers had a 98% success rate against Hank Conger last year.

The table you now want to see:

We go back to 1956, because that’s as long as we have caught stealing data here on the site. Over the last 60 years, looking at caught stealing rate by a catcher, it’s Conger in last place and it isn’t even close. You could make the case that Bard and Barajas’ seasons were worse, as they allowed two-to-three times as many steals as Conger, but that all hinges on playing time. Who knows what would have happened if Conger were given another 60 attempts? Maybe he’d go 1-for-100.

The only runner Conger threw out all year was J.B. Shuck, back on May 29:

At that point, Conger was 1-for-6 in throwing out would-be base stealers. That’s 16%. Before the 2015 season, he was at 22%. He’d never had a great caught stealing rate — league average hovers around 33% — but when Conger threw out Shuck, nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. The next 37 attempted steals against Conger were successful.

Looking at the list of names in the table, one finds plenty of speedy base stealers, as one might expect when looking at a list of people who stole a base. One also finds names like Jose Bautista, Avisail Garcia, Logan Morrison (twice), Evan Longoria, Hanley Ramirez, Shin-Coo Choo and Joey Gallo. These names are not the names one expects to see.

One thing we’ve learned over the years is that, throughout history, catchers have received far too much credit for whether a base stealer is safe or out. The success of a would-be base stealer is actually far more dependent on the pitcher than the catcher. So when you watch video of guys like Hanley Ramirez stealing a base…

…it should come as no surprise that both parties are at fault. Most teams want their pitchers getting the ball to home in around 1.3 seconds. Here, I’ve got Will Harris clocked around 1.7.

When Joey Gallo stole a base, I clocked Collin McHugh at about 1.5:

On this Avisail Garcia steal, it took Chad Qualls nearly 1.8 seconds to get the ball home:

In the most extreme examples, there’s quite a bit of blame to be placed on the pitchers, as well. But this can’t all be pitchers. You don’t get 1-for-43 because of the pitchers.

In that last clip, Qualls is slow, but you can see, clear as day, one of Conger’s big problems. He’s just dreadfully slow getting the ball out of his hand. Among catchers with at least 10 throws to second base recorded by Statcast, Conger had baseball’s very worst pop time, with an average of 2.13 seconds. In each of the three clips above, I had Conger clocked between 2.0 and 2.1. He also just has a weak arm, and that obviously plays a huge part in a catcher’s pop time. Of that same group of catchers, Conger had baseball’s third-worst velocity on throws to second base, averaging just 75.6 miles per hour.

Mike Scioscia on Conger’s arm, from spring of 2013:

“This spring, it hasn’t manifested itself on the field the way we’d like. Just yesterday, his exchange was long, his arm stroke was long, and he really wasn’t doing the things that he has improved on, so he was a little erratic throwing the ball yesterday.”

It’s long been a problem. This year, the problem was exacerbated, and exploited.

Sure, maybe Conger’s pitchers didn’t do him many favors, but the real issue is that Conger is so slow, his pitcher needs to get the ball home in 1.3 seconds or better for the battery to even stand a chance at throwing out a runner. If the pitcher delivers anything slower than 1.3 home then anyone can run on them, and that’s how you wind up with steals from Avisail Garcia, Hanley Ramirez and Joey Gallo with the worst recorded caught stealing rate by a catcher on record.

It’s worth pointing out that, in Tampa Bay, Chris Archer does an excellent job controlling the run game. Erasmo Ramirez seems to do well. Jake Odorizzi, Matt Moore and Jake McGee are all fine. Drew Smyly appears to be below average, and guys run all over Brad Boxberger. Maybe things will be a little better with Tampa Bay’s rotation. Maybe the Rays aren’t super worried about it, given the other things that Conger does well. Every player has their warts, after all. But Conger’s wart last year became a historic wart, and with Lester, we started to wonder how high something like this could go? How bad could it get? It got pretty bad for Lester. It got pretty bad for Conger. Yet, even then, teams attempted steals with Conger behind the plate at exactly league-average rates. What happens when teams decide to really start taking advantage?