Patrick Bailey: Luddite (Complimentary)

You’ve all heard the terms “luddite” and “sabotage” before. They’re words with pejorative connotations: The former is someone who distrusts technological progress; the latter is the act of conspiring to destroy from within. Luddites and saboteurs are rubes and terrorists, respectively, in modern vernacular.

These are more recent linguistic developments than you might think. Both words come from organized labor movements in which workers saw machines lowering product quality and putting entire industries’ worth of skilled craftsmen out of business in a time of economic precarity. They reacted to this existential threat the way you’d expect: by destroying it. Throwing one’s body on the gears and the levers until the machine stops working would one day become a vivid political metaphor, but to the original Luddites and saboteurs, it was a literal thing.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the fate of the Luddites: death and prison, mostly. The efficiency benefits of mechanization were enjoyed by factory owners and rentiers, as those displaced by the machines were left to scrape for ever-smaller pieces of a vanishing pie. Money buys power, even power over language. Those who wanted nothing more than honest work had their memories defamed 200 years beyond the grave.

Why is this relevant? Perhaps I’ve been ruminating on this subject while praying that the generative AI bubble bursts before the drive to lower wages and discipline labor deals a fatal blow to art in our society. Perhaps the vivid precarity of our economy in this moment in American history has me looking back through time in search of an effective mode of resistance.

Actually, no, believe it or not. I’ve been thinking about the original Luddites because Patrick Bailey doesn’t like robot umps.

He told Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic as much at the start of training camp. MLB has been trialing a limited form of ABS in spring training games: Teams have two unsuccessful ball-strike challenges per game, which must be initiated by either the pitcher, catcher, or batter immediately after the pitch.

Baggarly characterized Bailey’s attitude toward ABS exactly the same way I characterized the Luddites’ attitude toward mechanical knitting frames: as an existential threat.

Said Bailey: “I think it’s going to change the game a lot more than people realize. It’s gonna take a lot of the value away from defensive catchers. I don’t think it’s going to be good for the game.”

Baggarly also talked to retired catcher Tyler Flowers, who was a great pitch framer in his own right. “Thank goodness I’m not playing anymore,” Flowers said. “I’d be out of a job.”

I understand, and empathize with, Bailey’s position. I don’t think it’s even a little hyperbolic to call him the best pitch-framing catcher who ever lived. His numbers would be bonkers in any era, and are exponentially more impressive now that framing is a core competency for catchers, as opposed to the early 2010s. Back then, as we were just starting to learn how to quantify framing, performance was much, much more variable.

To lose even a run or two in framing value could be significant for a player like Bailey. He was a 4.3-WAR player last year in just 121 games. For his career, he’s produced 7.0 WAR in 801 plate appearances, which is a ratio of one win every 114.4 plate appearances. This despite Bailey’s career slash line being .234/.292/.348. For context, Francisco Lindor, for his career, has produced one win every 112.8 plate appearances. He’s also an elite defender at a premium position, and his career batting line is .274/.342/.476.

Given how much Bailey has to lose, it makes sense that he’s taking a hard line against ABS of any kind. Though I do wonder how much of a dent, if any, the challenge system would make. The proposed system takes care of obvious missed calls, like if the umpire sneezes at a bad time and misses a fastball right down the middle. I don’t think anyone needs or even especially wants a millimeter-perfect imaginary box in the sky, and until and unless we get that, Bailey and his contemporaries will still have room to operate.

I guess there’s no limit to the number of successful challenges a team could make, but it’s unlikely that an opposing lineup would be able to identify every borderline call Bailey gets without being wrong more than once. If the other team does somehow manage to reel off 10 or 15 successful challenges, they’ll have earned whatever advantage they gain from nullifying Bailey.

I’d argue that the further the strike zone gets refined, the more Bailey’s framing would shine. I know catchers don’t like to think of framing as “stealing” strikes, but if you’ve seen a heist movie you know that anyone can pick up a bag of cash that’s been dropped on the sidewalk. It takes a real master to break into the vault of the Bellagio on a fight night. And Bailey is the Danny Ocean of framing.

Still, just for fun, let’s zero out everyone’s framing numbers. Over the past two seasons, FanGraphs’ WAR numbers have Bailey as the best defensive catcher in baseball, 62.6 runs above average (including positional adjustment) and about 20 runs better than second-place Cal Raleigh. The numbers on Statcast are similar; Bailey’s the best in the league by 16 runs.

If you take away framing, and the positional adjustment, Bailey is still a good defender but not a great one. For instance, he leads the league in Statcast’s throwing runs, which is surprising because when he was in college, Ben from Love Is Blind, who was not a very good baserunner, stole two bases off him. (All that knowledge is in my head forever, now, and I’m not going to suffer alone.)

I separated out the framing and positional adjustment of our defensive rating, and compared them to the non-framing Statcast numbers. If you take framing completely out of the picture, the best defensive catcher in baseball over the past two years, apparently, is Gabriel Moreno.

Now, if Rob Manfred actually did decree universal robot umps for all, tomorrow, I don’t think this is how everything would shake out. Every catcher, including Bailey, would adjust his receiving technique. If framing were no longer a consideration, they’d set up in a way that emphasized blocking and/or throwing instead.

What does that do to Bailey’s total value? Well, over the past two seasons, he’s fourth in WAR out of 63 catchers with at least 500 defensive innings at the position. If you calculated total runs above average (offense plus defense and positional adjustment plus baserunning), he’s third, trailing only William Contreras and Raleigh. He’s roughly 10 runs more valuable than fourth-place Adley Rutschman despite only having about 60% as many plate appearances as the Orioles backstop. Pretty impressive, in short.

Take framing out of the picture, and the top of the list gets surprisingly difficult to alphabetize by first name. Contreras remains on top, with his brother Willson second, and Dodgers catcher Will Smith (a great hitter but a poor framer) third. I guess that does underscore how much value is still out there in framing. In this no-framing world, the elder Contreras is the second-best catcher in the league. In real life, he was such a poor receiver that the Cardinals decided to move him off the position entirely. He’s set to be their starting first baseman this season.

Raleigh stays in the top four, on the strength of having consistent 30-homer power in addition to great receiving skills.

Bailey falls to 21st out of 63 catchers, 0.95 runs above average in total. It turns out that a wRC+ of 80 is not great out of context, but for a catcher it’s not that bad. Especially for a catcher who — it bears repeating — does a lot of things well defensively apart from stealing strikes. Among the catchers Bailey has covered even without considering framing: Travis d’Arnaud, Francisco Alvarez, Alejandro Kirk, and Jonah Heim. Non-framing Bailey is within half a run of Logan O’Hoppe, who’s pretty decent.

So should Bailey be throwing his spikes into the gears of the ABS machine? (I don’t think that’s how it works, but indulge me, I’m committed to the metaphor.) Maybe. With framing, he’s one of the best catchers in the league. Without it, he’s average.

But even full ABS, all the time, wouldn’t cost Bailey his spot in the majors. Again: Without framing, he’s average. Even though framing is a huge part of his game, he does plenty of other things well.