Yasmani Grandal Is Doing It Again
Yasmani Grandal and I will be forever connected.
Despite his paltry traditional offensive numbers a year ago — including a .229 batting average, 49 runs scored, and 72 runs batted in — I placed Grandal seventh on my NL MVP ballot. I was the only writer to cast a vote for Grandal. I wrote about why I did this back in January when I was still new on the job here at FanGraphs. In summary, I gave a lot of value to Grandal’s framing, batting eye, and power from each side of the plate.
I will probably not be voting for the NL MVP again this season. (I don’t think it will be because of the outlier vote!) Votes often rotate around local BBWAA chapters. So someone else will have to carry the flag, if interested and if Grandal is worthy. And perhaps someone should carry the flag, because Grandal is doing it again. He’s doing it in a slightly different way, but after Buster Posey, he again appears to be the second-best catcher in game — and, by some measures, the best catcher in the game to date this year. A quarter of the way through the season, Grandal once again deserves down-ballot MVP consideration.
Grandal has been a darling of BWARP (Baseball Prospectus’s version of WAR), in large part due to his framing. He’s a darling of that metric once again this year, currently ranking 19th (at 1.88 wins) among all major leaguers.
While the gap between the framing Haves and Have Notes has shrunk, as Jeff Sullivan wrote last year, Grandal has been the best framer in the game, worth 8.7 runs saved above average according to StatCorner and 7.7 runs according to Baseball Prospectus. He’s on pace for his second-best framing season, per BP’s fielding metric, and could perhaps make a run at challenging his career-best mark of 31.2 set last season. According to StatCorner, his glove was worth 24 framing runs above average last year, a career best, and Grandal is on pace to beat that mark this season.
According to Statcast data, Grandal has received 181 pitches out of the zone called as strikes, while 106 pitches in the zone he has received have been called as balls. That’s a +75 differential.
Here is a chart of the furthest out-of-zone pitches Grandal has received as called strikes this season:
The furthest out-of-zone pitch Grandal has caught for a strike this year was via Sergio Romo:
The low pitch is the easiest to frame, so Grandal has a bit of an advantage here. Plus, you could argue that the call was just bad. Whatever your feelings about the above pitch, however, it’s hard not to regard this reception of a Rich Hill curveball as pure artistry:
Notice how Grandal’s glove moves with the direction of the pitch, back across the plate, to give the appearance of a strike. Notice the subtle but influential movement.
It wasn’t a strike, of course — as you can see below — and remarkably, Grandal was not distracted by Hill’s delivery:
While BWARP has always loved Grandal, we love him more at FanGraphs this year, too.
According to FanGraphs’ WAR formula, the Dodgers catcher is tied with Mookie Betts and Buster Posey for 12th in position-player WAR (1.9), with Joey Votto, Kris Bryant, Charlie Blackmon and Francisco Lindor trailing him.
FanGraphs’ WAR doesn’t include framing. Grandal does well by that measure, however, because of his improved hitting (career-best 129 wRC+) and baserunning numbers.
If he keeps up his present .292/.359/.496 slash line, he might even warrant some consideration from the traditional-minded MVP voters who make up most of the electorate. While that electorate will be changing over the coming years, it of course still makes decisions largely upon traditional stats.
While his slash line is inflated by a .351 BABIP unlikely to be sustained by a slow-footed catcher, even a poor runner like Grandal can sustain higher BABIPs thanks to above-average exit velocity. His batted-ball profile is slightly different this year, giving him a better chance to post a respectable slash line — and perhaps earn an MVP vote from someone other than myself.
Grandal has become slightly less selective, lowering his walk rate to 9.7%. He’s also become slightly more aggressive, swinging at 45.0% of pitches — up from 39.2% a year ago and his career average of 40.0%. While swinging more freely doesn’t always indicate a positive trend and while he’s more often expanded his zone, Grandal has increased his out-of-zone contact from 53.4% to 63.7%, a career best. His zone contact has improved to a career-best 90.1%.
Grandal is making better contact and is still enjoying an isolated-slugging mark better than .200 (.204). So he hasn’t traded much power for improved contact. He has the unusual combination of swinging at more pitches overall and out of the zone while also making contact with more pitches. Grandal has become less of a three-true-outcomes performer. Perhaps he will convince more of his excellence if he truly is transforming himself into more of a contact hitter. Perhaps there will be another MVP vote in his future. Grandal is still great, he’s just a doing it a little differently in 2017.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
While you make a case for Grandal based upon the available stats, he is a poor defensive catcher. Any ball in the dirt is an adventure, far too often bouncing off his chest or skittering thru his legs. And since any ball that hits the dirt and gets by the catcher is automatically ruled a wild pitch, he gets no blame. I think in this day and age, with replays a part of the game, that relying on old school scoring – i.e. only eyeballs from the press box – is doing a disservice to Moneyball.
Fortunately, we have data for passed balls and wild pitches!
Grandal, career, 129 WP and 43 passed balls in 3500 innings, .05 combined per inning. His PB / (PB + WP) ratio is 0.25.
For comparison, one of the best defensive catchers of all time Yadi Molina has 388 WP and 74 PB in 13600 innings. .034 combined per inning. His PB / (PB + WP) ratio is .16.
While PB/WP grate on a fan, I don’t think those rates are likely very significant compared to the score of other things he does well. I bet the overall impact is Lester’s control over the running game — it hurts him, but it’s written about more because it’s so visible, not because it significantly impacts winning.
(As an aside, Moneyball is not really about statistics changing the game, it’s about economic inefficiencies — what Michael Lewis generally writes about. Can we please let the Moneyball=statheads trope die?)
Thank you Travis L.
At fangraphs, we don’t get away with saying things like “is an adventure”, or “far too often”.
Thank you for quantifying and analyzing the situation, to come to a reliable conclusion.
In other words, thanks for replacing gut feeling and misled observations with data.
Grandal is pretty great. It’s unfortunate that this year’s wild pitches have been high profile situations, but hes tremendous and its a notable dropoff to barnes.
I do think some of these aren’t the best examples, as Romos pitch I’d a 3-0 strike after he just got shelled : it was a mercy call thar many get in that situation. That was 6 runs into a 9 run meltdown.
Beowulf is gonna be so pissed.
Has there been any work to see who the most easily fooled umps are?
A couple of these pitches are just terrible calls…why does Grandal get all the credit over umps just being bad? Lots of catchers can catch a curve like that where it curves around the plate. You’re really over-valueing this talent. It’s a nice talent, it’s not worth what you think it is.
A couple of these strikeouts are just terrible swings…why does Kershaw get all the credit over hitters just being bad? Lots of pitchers can throw a curve like that where it curves around the bat. You’re really over-valueing this talent. It’s a nice talent, it’s not worth what you think it is
That makes literally no sense and has zero to do with my point, but nice effort. But, you actually make a good point in your mistake…Kershaw getting certain calls on the edges because he’s Kershaw no doubt goes towards helping Grandal’s framing numbers, which further calls into question the numbers. Treating framing numbers as gospel when there is still lots more to learn about all the factors that go into it is just foolish and you’ve helped prove that point. Nice job!
The fact that you can’t see his comparison kind of tells me you meant to click on bleacher report not fangraphs.
AJ Ellis was catching the same pitchers Grandal was. In fact, Ellis was catching Kershaw for a much higher portion of his starts when he was with the team. Ellis’s framing numbers were considerably worse than Grandal’s.
He literally does not mean and has nothing to do with my opinion, but it’s good. However, you have a very nice sense of their errors. His name is particularly on edge, because it’s definitely a help group Grandal frame framing figures as Gospel on more to find out all the factors that go into it is stupid and help you to prove. Very good!
Do you understand probability? Yes, umpires make bad call sometimes. What Grandal does is, for instance, take a pitch that is incorrectly called a strike about 10% of the time and make it called a strike about 20% of the time. Is it still a bad call? Sure. But Grandal still had something to do with it.
They MUST make a Rich Hill bobblehead in precisely that pose.
Do any of these catching framing numbers factor in leverage? Factoring it in with PB/WPs could get you some sort of “un clutch” stat for catchers. Similar thought for borderline calls; swiping a strike with 3 on and a 3 and 2 count might be more important for affecting game outcomes (or a proxy for umpire situational bias). There is ERA/FIP/xFIP/babip/xbabip to help our understanding of pitching, maybe something similar for framing would make sense.
The framing numbers are currently count-aware but otherwise context-neutral run values, correct? So yeah, it would be interesting to see them computed as RE24 base/out-aware values, or even convert to WPA.
Man, I’ve always been confused why some people don’t like Grandal. I bet these guys are Dodger fans. It really bugs me how underappreciated he is among Dodger fans. Usually your players are underappreciated by other team’s fans. I wonder how much of it has to do with not being Buster Posey, or not being AJ Ellis.
He did have a PED suspension.
Yeah I always forget how much that matters to some people. It doesn’t matter to me, so I always forget about it.
Because any stat for any player is a combination of “luck” and the skills of other players and the context of other things, we regress toward some “average” in order to estimate the talent of the player wrt to that stat.
The smaller the sample, the more big deviations from that “average” or mean is likely due to “luck” and other things (players, park, umpires
…etc.), and the larger the sample, the more luck and “other things” tend to “even out.”
That’s why we regress smaller samples MORE toward some mean (usually league average for that stat).
How much to regress, regardless of the sample size (although small samples always requires more regressing), depends on how much “luck” and “other things” there is in the stat AND how much talent spread there is wrt that stat. That is determined through statistical analysis and is not usually obvious although it could be intuitive (e.g., running speed and pitch velocity are mostly talent).
For example, Grandal has very good framing numbers so far this year. Some of that is his framing talent and some of it is the pitcher, bad calls by the umps, where the called pitches happen to be, etc. So we regress that number pretty heavily.
But, if we look at his last few years where we have a much larger sample, all those “other” things tend to “even out” so if he has great framing numbers, we assume that much of it is HIS framing talent. We don’t know that for a fact, but we must assume that. ALL estimates of true talent are statistical assumptions. They are BEST estimates, assuming the model that comes up with them is good.
We can also look at Grandal’s 2017 numbers and rather than assume that most of his good framing #’s are luck as we might ordinarily do with such a small sample, because his career is one of great framing numbers, we would regress THIS YEAR’S numbers to that of an estimate
of his talent, based on his career, in order to estimate how much of his 2017 framing was indeed his talent, rather than regressing 2017 numbers toward league average (say, 0).
So, while a random catcher with 8 framing runs in 40 games might be estimated to have framed, say, 4 runs due to his talent (the rest is luck, etc.), because we estimate that Grandal has great framing talent GOING INTO and including this year, based on career numbers, we might estimate that of his 8 framing runs 6 runs is talent and 2 runs is “luck” and “other factors.” Just a little primer on regression, estimating talent, etc. (Those numbers are for illustrative purposed only.)
Hypothetical ethics question: If an umpire reads up on framing stats and knows Grandal’s been hoodwinking him, would he be wrong to balance the scales by calling a big zone when Grandal is batting?
I know I’d be fine with it.
I guess the question is who Grandal is affecting. Is the umpire worried Grandal is threatening his job by fooling him and making him look bad? Then maybe he would take it out on Grandal only. Is he worried that he is unbalancing the game by giving one team a better zone? Well, if he was capable of calling a slightly bigger zone on Grandal, why not just adjust his zone down while Grandal is catching?
I feel like this boils down to “why don’t umpires just try harder not to be fooled by framing?”
I don’t know if catcher framing is simply about “hoodwinking” an umpire. The home plate umpire has a lot of responsibilities before a pitch is thrown, right? He has to watch the pitcher for balks (admittedly, not a huge part of the job), he has to be aware of a batter calling “time”, some freaks want him to also be monitoring a pitch clock, he has to make sure his little clicker has the right ball-strike-out count, he has to make sure his home plate brush is in good working order, all while preparing to judge a pitch that’s going to be arriving at the plate in .5 seconds. And he’s wearing a mask. It makes sense that he uses several forms of visual input to figure out if a ball is a strike or not.
Here are some suggestions for the author:
1. Headline should lead in to the article.
2. There’s a difference between exaggeration/poetic license for effect vs just being wrong. Please learn this difference.
Some suggestions for the commenter:
1. There is a difference between offering constructive feedback and being a dick.
2. See item #1.
My favorite part of watching a .gif of a solid frame is the reaction from the hitter.