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BP Unfiltered: New Pitch Blocking Research

October 18, 2011

This morning the Hardball Times published a fabulous piece of research by Bojan Koprivica on catchers blocking pitches.

Bojan's work builds on the knowledge established by previous research on the topic by Dan Turkenkopf and Dave Allen. There is a lot of meat to chew on Bojan's article, but I highly recommend taking the time to digest it if catcher fielding is a topic that interests you.

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Mike Fast

 

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IvanGrushenko
10/18
Yay Bojan!
Reply to IvanGrushenko
froston
10/18
Hey Mike, how long until someone rolls together your research with Bojan's, along with some other things like arm and caught stealing numbers, to create an advanced all encompassing catcher's defense metric?
Reply to froston
mikefast
10/18
That's something we want to do here at BP sooner rather than later. There's still a few important loose ends to tie up. The most notable one I can think of is figuring out how to separate the effect of the pitcher from the catcher in the running game; and following close behind that, separating the effects of the hit-and-run from SB/CS.

So, ironically, the running game is probably one of the least-well understood parts of catcher fielding at the moment.

Beyond that, pitch calling is probably the hardest part of catcher fielding to quantify at the moment, and I don't hold out any hoping of cracking that one in the immediate future.
Reply to mikefast