The Catcher Is Watching You
As Melvin Upton steps to the plate and readies for the pitch, Buster Posey appraises him. First, he looks at his feet as they dig in. Gradually, his eyes move up Upton’s body, brazenly staring as he takes in information. Down pops the sign as the catcher moves his attention to the pitcher.
It’s not just idle ogling. He’s looking for clues. Which ones?
Brandon Moss thought the most likely thing was that the catcher is looking for a change in approach, particularly due to count. “I’d never tell anyone my two-strike approach,” he told me when I asked him what he did to make more contact. “We all know when we have to make a small adjustment to get a pitcher off a spot. I think the catcher can see it. They watch the hitter get in the box with their feet. They’re seeing what you’re doing, they always watch.”
They’re mostly watching the feet. Chris Iannetta remembered figuring out what one veteran did with his feet: “Paul Konerko would open up his back foot towards right field when he was trying to go opposite field, and when he wanted to pull the ball, he’d close it.” If you want to try to simulate this at home, imagine you are a right-hander. Make your back foot perpendicular to the pitcher’s mound, and then open up your toe so that your foot is now parallel with the right-field wall. Your body is now lined up to power pitches to right field.
Knowing that sort of thing can be super helpful to calling the game, and there is other foot-based scouting the catcher can do. Are they inching up in the box after an offspeed pitch? Are they backing away from the plate after getting busted inside? What is their body language like after certain pitches?
But you can go too far. “Some guys move up on the plate if the pitcher has a good offspeed pitch, but they might be setting you up, too, to make you think that,” said Iannetta. Former teammate Hank Conger agreed. “They’ll inch way up, hoping I’ll think I can blow a heater by him because he’s sitting curveball,” he said. “But they’ll really be sitting fastball.” Moss detailed just this sort of thing, as well.
It can get confusing on both sides of the ball. Colby Rasmus has been experimenting with different stances at the plate, and apparently it has something to do with this in-game scouting from the catcher. “I wanted to try and hit some balls the other way because we have that short porch in Houston, with the boxes out there,” Rasmus said, “so, at the beginning of the year, I tried to work my swing to go the other way.”
He pulled two-thirds of the balls he saw in April. The plan didn’t work, maybe. Or maybe “pitchers are smart,” as he put it. “When you close off and try to go the other way, they can see that, so they started throwing some balls in.” He agreed it was the catcher that probably spotted it. “They have the privilege of waiting on you to do what you’re going to do. It’s tough.” He’s in the middle of alternating opened and closed stances, with some stances that close as the pitch comes in. “It’s kind of a chess match,” Rasmus says, although it’s a bewildering one in his case.
What do you do with the information you get if some of the information is not helpful? “I try to take everything with a grain of salt,” shrugged Conger. “You’re playing poker,” smiled Iannetta dryly, “a game within a game.”
Conger did think you might be able to spot smaller changes that might be authentic. “There are some guys where, like if we’ve been pounding them in with a two-seam, they’ll just slowly move their feet,” the Houston catcher said. “They’ll be an inch or two backed off. I always check the feet.”
In the end, just looking a the batter might be a worthy enterprise. You could make the batter nervous and make him think about something other than his normal approach at the plate. “Even if I don’t see anything there,” Conger smiled, “I’ll look anyway to make them think I’m noticing something in their feet.”
Poker, maybe, but on a field, and mostly involving intricate foot positions and possibly faked body language.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Goddamn, I love baseball.
It goes both ways too. I remember reading a thing about how Roberto Alomar could tell where a tennis player was going to serve the ball after watching him just a few times, this from all his practice at picking up subtle clues from pitchers’ body language. Catchers resent it when the batter peaks back at them, though.
All the micro-subtleties of the game in the battle between the pitcher and batter are really fascinating.
and I’m watching you, Eno Sarris!
Have fun with your broken knee.
Isn’t it considered bad form for batters to peek at where the catcher sets up? Catchers who do this certainly cannot complain about batters doing that.
Yup, one of those famed “unwritten” laws of baseball, the Hitter is not permitted to see where the catcher is setting up etc. Oops, now its a written law.. sorry guys
you guys are just figuring this out?
this looks real good eno. and so do you.
I love hearing about all the little things professionals do to stay so consistently good. I’ve never read an article about watching the hitters feet, so this was a pleasure to read.
This is nothing new to somebody that has actually played baseball. Catchers also look to see if the batter is peeking back to steal signs
I think you’d want to add a qualifier in there — “at a high level.” I played plenty of bad, low-level baseball, and those catchers were just trying not to drop the ball.
I’ve never seen a hitter look back, and I played a lot of baseball. If you want to know where a catcher is setting up, make an arrangement with the base coach. Until, that is, they start throwing at you.
Other than the feet, most catcher who read hitters successfully are using intuition when they look at hitters. Informed subconscious thought. At one time most catchers did not look over hitters the way we see them do today. With ubiquitous video players began seeing that some successful catchers were all over the hitters, so everybody had to do it. But not well. Pitch selection is less a science and more a talent. With notable exceptions, pitchers are amazingly bad at it.
I have seen once or twice where the broadcast for a game picks up a batter trying to peak out of the corner of his eye at the catcher. It does happen, albeit very very rarely.
I once took advantage of this. Pitchers really don’t like when you do that and will let you know by buzzing you up & in with a heater. It’s an easy free base to just lean into it, and if you pull the Biggio spin-turn it doesn’t even hurt too much.
It’s also not terribly difficult for a catcher to wait until a pitcher is in his motion to set up. And if the batter is looking at the catcher while the pitcher is in motion… well, that probably wouldn’t bother too many batteries.
Eno, you are the best man. There is not a better baseball writer/analyst out there right now.
Great Eno. You killing it recently.
What is Conger like? Is he completely and hilariously insane? Because he seems that way to me.
All this recent focus on catcher’s analytics these days made me think of something. Catchers were more or less the game’s first analysts, long before teams started employing entire analytics departments. They were reading the game from a better view than anyone else could have, what with no camera’s of high resolution or real biomechanical developments (until more recently). It makes sense that some of the best managers in this game’s history played catcher (Torre, Bochy, Scioscia), and why some of today’s highest regarded managers (Girardi, Gibbons, Matheny, Yost, Ausmus) were also catchers. Obviously it’s no news that many managers were once catchers, it’s just been kind of cool to get some insight on why.
I agree with these points, and I’ll add another trait of catchers that I think serves them well as managers. Catchers think about the game from the perspective of both hitters/position players and pitchers, because they work very closely with the pitching staff (and, of course, are themselves hitters/position players).
That’s helpful not only in making decisions, but also with the “softer” aspects of being able to instruct and relate to all players on the roster.
Bob Melvin belongs in that second list of managers, too.
http://s464.photobucket.com/user/austin10121994/media/BurgerKing-1.gif.html
AJ Ellis is considered one of the best game callers among catchers. I’d love to hear his perspective on this. I wonder if he is picking up subtle clues that inferior game callers don’t see.
Big deal.Pitchers, batters have been doing that since ever.
At first I thought I was reading some MLB erotica fanfic. That could be a nice niche market for you to work on Eno