15-year-old right-hander Osiel Rodriguez may be the top international pitching prospect in the 2018 class, Ben Badler of Baseball America writes. The young Cuban pitcher threw 96 MPH at the Nations Baseball Showcase this past Thursday, striking out three of the five hitters he faced while retiring the other two on ground balls. Rodriguez threw 13 of his 17 pitches for strikes at the showcase. Badler notes that Rodriguez led Cuba’s 15U league with a 0.39 ERA across 69 innings in 2016 while striking out 127 hitters. He is eligible to sign beginning on July 2nd of 2018 and will certainly garner heavy attention from MLB teams.
Some other items across MLB…
- In another piece at Baseball America, Tim Newcomb sheds some light on the work of Ryan Smith (product manager for Wilson baseball gloves) to continually evolve the “colors, patterns, lengths, designs or features” of gloves. The trends are defined mostly by the needs of MLB’s top players. “There is no way we could be as good as we are if we didn’t have pros so in tune with their glove working on their craft daily and giving us feedback,” Smith says. The piece mentions Todd Frazier, Dustin Pedroia and Ivan Rodriguez as players who have had particular influence on Wilson’s products.
- Framing data is flooding baseball, Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs opines. The standard deviation between framing runs accrued by MLB teams has declined significantly over the past ten seasons, as Sullivan shows us. Also in his piece are graphs depicting called strikes above average; graphs which show that year-to-year relationships are disintegrating. “A good framer in 2016 was still likely to look like a good framer in 2017, but that couldn’t be said with very much confidence. The data is getting increasingly random,” Sullivan writes. The piece is fascinating for anyone interested in advanced defensive statistics and baseball trends.
Featured image courtesy of USA Today Sports Images
Watched some video on Rodriguez. The stuff is filthy, but man, that is an ugly, high-effort delivery. I shudder to think of the strain he’s putting on his still-growing arm.
Quoting the late Dr. Jobe…”Throwing is good. Throwing really hard can be bad.” and in regards to your point about his still-growing arm…”When they’re 18, the bones are softer, the cartilage is softer, they should definitely be limited. Once they’re 21 or so, they’re more fully developed. When they’re younger, they can’t tolerate quite the same trauma.”
Framing data is a joke! The umpires don’t look to see the frame to call balls/K’s! How could you be so good 1 yr. and the next mediocre
It does have a lot of variables, but you’re crazy if you think it doesn’t impact the umpire. There’s a big difference when it comes from watching guys like Barnhart and Martin compared to offensive catchers like Sanchez.
Precisely. It’s always looked like a garbage stat from an observational point of view, and now everyone should understand the lack of statistical validity.
Catchers and pitchers getting crossed up, with the catcher expecting a fastball and getting a breaking ball…. they almost always get called a ball regardless of where the pitch actually goes because of the fumbling the catcher has to do to keep it in front of them.
Every professional umpire will tell you it isn’t so, that the only information they use to call a pitch is its relationship to the strike zone, not how or where the catcher receives or handles it. Now if you are saying that umpires can be inconsistent about where they call balls and strikes, I’d agree. But that has nothing to do with catchers framing pitches.
JD what evidence do you have to support your assertion?
Framing is real and with inflated value of pitching it becomes even more important over a 162 plus games of a marathon season!
Until they do a study of which umpires call strikes based on “framing”, I will choose to believe the framing variance is caused by the variance in the Umpire behind the plate. Each time a Catcher “frames a strike”, an Umpire got fooled. I wouldn’t be surprised if MLB already knows which Umps are the biggest fools.
We need robo-umps if for no other reason than to kill pitch framing…although there are plenty of other reasons.
And spare me the “it’s a skill” argument. Wow, you fooled a 63 year old union employee. What a skill.
Taking pitches is a skill, too. And it shouldn’t be punished by poor officiating.
I’d much rather watch a catcher who can hit and throw out baserunners than watch some .200 hitting noodle armed schmo who’s really good at subtlety moving his glove an inch.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Did you see the piece on MLB Network about when Eric Burnes used digital upiring for ball and strike calls? 100% accuracy and the players felt more at ease because they knew there was a static zone that was consistant.
And what if pitch framing is more mythical than real? Are robo-umps still the solution?
Time to move on from those sloppy humans. Get technical baseball. Computerize the home ump. Big deal. No squabbles. Cuts time. Honest play. No framing. Like cheating is a good thing for who? Kids
Will that mean instant replay for every foul tick to determine if the catcher needs to throw to 1B to complete the strike out, or if the batter lives to see another pitch? Not everything the home plate Umpire does is balls and strikes. To have one stand behind the plate, and not call the pitches just seems dumb.
As an umpire myself, framing only helps or hurts in two ways…When a catcher frames a borderline pitch, instead of letting his glove drift…The pitcher gets the call…
Or if a catcher just butchers a strike, then his pitcher isn’t getting the call…Plain and simple…
If a catcher frames a ball it’s still a ball, no matter how pretty he makes it look…only borderline calls does it make a difference…
At least that is my philosophy…but I’m no ML umpire just high school, showcase, and JuCo.
And no robot umpires, if the umpires aren’t meeting their percentages, then they need to be let go or demoted…
An Umpire makes the call in his head right before the ball touches the catcher’s mitt. Framing doesn’t do anything except anger the pitcher and the fans.
That’s why the framing stats aren’t consistent. Numbers don’t lie
Reading the article it’s clear that the pitch-framing advocates don’t have any good theories about why the stats are so unstable (a problem shared with defensive metrics). But then, I have never heard a good theory about what catching skill is at work in pitch-framing. If you’re finding a statistical relationship that is difficult or impossible to explain, and then you find that your statistical relationship is falling apart, then it’s time to revisit your hypothesis. That’s how it works in the sciences, anyway. It’s how you separate the real from the bogus.