Opposing Base Runners Get Greedy, Caught in the Hedges

During the most recent baseball season, 389 players received at least 150 plate appearances. That’s a low and arbitrary threshold, but it will serve to make an important point: Austin Hedges was a terrible hitter. Among those 389 hitters, Hedges was dead last with a 26 wRC+. Taylor Featherston, Rene Rivera, David Ross, and Christian Bethancourt were the other members of the under-40 wRC+ club last year, if you’re looking for some indication as to its infamy.

To put it mildly, Hedges did not deliver at the plate. He slashed .168/.215/.248. By comparison, National League pitchers hit .132/.159/.169 (-16 wRC+). Hedges didn’t hit like an average pitcher, but he didn’t exactly hit like a position player either. Fortunately for the young catcher, baseball is a robust competition and there are other aspects to the game beyond hitting. While Hedges failed to provide value at the plate, he had occasion to provide value behind it, which he seemed to do. But when digging into some of the particulars on Hedges’ season, an odd fact surfaces: teams tried to steal many, many bases against the Friar backstop.

The book on Hedges before his MLB debut was pretty straightforward. Kiley McDaniel gave a good review in December 2014:

Scouts don’t think Hedges will hit much at all and point to his awkward and changing swing, with a leg kick and load that are sometimes slight and sometimes don’t exist. Hedges is one of the best defensive catchers to come through the minors in years, with easy plus defense and a plus plus arm, so scouts are pegging him as one of those +7.5 to +10 run defensive catchers and if he ends up being a framing dynamo as some expect, you will see him compared to Yadier Molina.

There was hope that he would learn to hit, but as Chris Mitchell noted in May, his plate discipline in the minors didn’t bode well. On the defensive side of things, he was arguably a generational talent, but at the plate he was hardly a consideration. No matter how you slice it, Hedges checked all of the boxes as an elite defensive catching prospect. The bat would determine if he was an impact player, but no one debated his ability to frame pitches and nab runners. From Mitchell’s piece:

Hedges’ defense grades out as excellent across the board. Kiley gave him future values of 60 and 70 for his fielding and throwing respectively, and called him “one of the best defensive catchers to come through the minors in years.”

The data agree with this assessment. Hedges threw out a respectable 38% of would-be base stealers in Double-A last year, but it was his pitch framing that really tipped the scales. According to Baseball Prospectus’ minor league framing model, Hedges earned his pitchers 37 more strikes than the average catcher last year. This was the best minor league framing season on record, and was far and away the highest mark among minor league receivers last year.

I review this to stress the point that Hedges’ defensive ability was well known prior to the start of the season. It’s not as if the Padres had a catcher-defense camp and turned an average defender into a great one in secret. It was common knowledge that he could make an impact behind the dish.

Flash forward to 2015 and an odd thing emerges: teams ran on Hedges quite often. There’s no perfect way to measure this concept, but let’s take a crack at it. Baseball-Reference records something called Stolen Base Opportunities (i.e. situations in which a player was on first or second with the next base open). One measure of how often a runner takes off on a catcher would be how often a stolen-base opportunity turns into a stolen-base attempt. In Hedges’ case, it was 9.84% of the time in 2015. That’s third among catchers who had at least 300 stolen-base opportunities (66 catchers in all) and league average is about 5.4%.

The details will become messier in a moment, but for reference, Molina’s SBA/SBO% was 3.47% in 2015 which was fifth lowest in the game. All else equal, a catcher’s reputation should drive how often a team tries to steal on him. Guys with terrific arms should deter stolen-base attempts, driving down their SBA/SBO%. That was not the case for Hedges in 2015.

Granted, I don’t mean to suggest that Hedges is the only outlier and that other good catchers didn’t have the same fate, just that his case is an interesting one. He had a reputation as a premier thrower, but teams didn’t seem to pay him any mind. There are two non-mutually exclusive explanations for why this could have happened.

The first explanation is that Hedges was over-hyped. Perhaps the scouting reports were glowing but he wasn’t really as good as everyone asserted. It’s a plausible and logically consistent hypothesis, but it is also a wrong one. To start, Hedges was quite successful at throwing out runners in 2015. He caught 33% of would-be base-stealers and Baseball Prospectus’ model says he saved 0.3 runs with his arm (a good mark for a guy who played as little as he did according to their methodology). Neither of those numbers reflect elite outcomes, but he was above average in both respects.

Perhaps more convincingly, Hedges is an objectively good thrower. You can trust the caught stealing rate or the more advanced BP model, but there’s nothing like reviewing some good old fashioned pop times. As you may have learned by reading the present author in this year’s Hardball Times Annual, Hedges had the fourth-lowest average pop time among catchers who had at least 10 throws recorded by Statcast in 2015.

His average time was 1.896 seconds, roughly 0.08 seconds better than league average. If you haven’t read the Annual piece about pop time, I’ll point out that Hedges grades out exceptionally well and it’s a statistic that seems to become reliable quickly. Digging even deeper, Hedges had three of the 25 best individual pop times and eight of the best 90 out of the 1,784 that were recorded by Statcast last season. He’s no J.T. Realmuto, but he’s quite good.

Pop time is a measurement of how much time passes between the ball hitting the catcher’s glove and it arriving at second base, so it’s an independent measure of catcher performance that has almost nothing to do with the pitcher. As a result, we can say that Hedges was not only a good thrower by reputation, but he demonstrated that ability in the majors with regularity.

After watching and re-watching many of his throws, it’s clear that he’s skilled from start to finish. He gets himself into a good receiving position, executes a quick transfer and release, and has the ball traveling on a line to his target with great velocity. Even the bad throws were halfway decent. It’s easy to see why the scouts drooled over his arm.

There is no reason to think MLB teams were without access to any of this information. Hedges was thought to be good and showed himself to be.

So the other explanation for teams’ desire to run on Hedges stems from the context in which he found himself. If you recall the work of Max Weinstein (here, here, here, here, here, and here), you know that pitchers play a major role in stolen-base prevention. The BP stats team has backed up that belief (with slightly different ratios), so it isn’t that surprising that a good catcher having a good season could still be faced with lots of base running bandits. Let’s explore.

By my count, Hedges caught 22 different pitchers last season over 1,458 PA. My intention was to create an average of BP’s Takeoff Rate (TRAA) for the pitchers Hedges caught, weighted by how many plate appearances he had with each. It’s a stat that measures the rate at which that pitcher allows attempted steals relative to average, controlling for other factors like catcher, umpire, etc. I did the calculation, and it’s about +6%, which is very high, but it’s driven largely by one key actor: Tyson Ross. He’s responsible for basically 5% of that 6%.

Translation? People run on Tyson Ross, and Hedges happened to catch him more than any other pitcher (433 PA). It’s actually not that simple. Ross was on the mound for about 35% of the stolen-base attempts against Hedges and roughly 29% of his total plate appearances (PA and SBO correlate very strongly). It’s a decent difference, but it’s not unreasonable. The fun part is that Hedges caught 7 of 17 with Ross on the mound (41%) while other catchers caught 6 of 33 (18%). In other words, everyone runs on Tyson Ross, but Austin Hedges doesn’t take it sitting down.

Much of this is observational and the findings are not terribly surprising. Hedges is a talented defender, and he ought to be, given his poor performance at the plate. Teams ran on Hedges quite often in 2015 despite that talent, due in part to his role as Tyson Ross’ personal-ish catcher. That worked for the Padres, though, as Hedges helped nab more of those runners than the other Padres catchers could.

Hedges is a top-notch thrower and seems to be a great framer. We saw both in action in 2015, but Hedges’ experience also reminded us that the catcher can’t do as much as we think when it comes to limiting stolen-bases attempts. A great arm isn’t that much of a deterrent when most bases are stolen off the pitcher. It will be interesting to see how Hedges’ future unfolds. It’s easy to imagine him as a +15 or +20 defender (framing included) over 450 plate appearances or so. If he turned into an average major league hitter, that’s a three- to four-win player.

But average feels a long way off. After all, he had a 26 wRC+ in 2015. It was a small sample and he is a young player who was getting settled at a tough defensive position. There will always be room on a major league roster for a defensive specialist at catcher, but he’ll need to get into the 70-80 wRC+ range if he wants to be a starter. Yadier Molina was an unimpressive hitter for the first three or four years of his career, and while Hedges is starting from a lower nadir, there are many people who think the defense is legitimately comparable. After observing Hedges in 2015, I’m not sure they’re really all that crazy to think that side of his game is in the same area code.