Piazza was framed

[batmagadanleadoff]

By those who continue to rate Piazza as one of baseball's worst defensive catchers of his era.


Grantland returns to the world of pitch framing where �Jorge Posada could hit like Albert Pujols and Jose Molina could hit like Jose Molina, and Molina would still be better�.

http://grantland.com/features/brad-asumus-pitch-framing-dennis-eckersley/

The piece links to a recent Baseball Prospectus article wherein new methodologies were devised to extend the Pitch/fx technology (more or less) all the way back to 1998.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=25514

"Amateur dermatologists should take note of the nearly 14 wins of career value added by one Michael Joseph Piazza, an impressive and often-overlooked addition from an �offense-first� catcher".

According to those findings, from 1998-2014, a period encompassing Mike's entire Met stint, Piazza was one of the 10 best pitch framing catchers in all of baseball.


So maybe Jerry Grote really was the Mets best catcher ever.

[duan]

That actually makes some amount of sense in that there seemed to be a fairly well accepted line that pitchers liked throwing to Piazza. Someone on a BP podcast (I think, but maybe it was one of the fangraphs ones) made the point that he wasn't like Javy Lopez where pitchers (Greg Maddux especially) felt he hurt them.

ON EDIT
Though the same articles say that Lopez was good too. So much for that.

[nymr83]

Lopez was good because he set himself up outside of the "box" catchers are supposed to be in

[Edgy MD]

It's a problem with the defensive understanding of a player that folks tend to think in binary terms about players. Either they're defensive stars or defensive abominations, with little room for the nuance in between.

And which one they are isn't so much linked to their defensive performance as their defensive reputation, their apparent character, and their batsmanship.