“There are certain situations, runner at first and second with nobody out or one out, where there’s a possible double steal, and 10 times out of 10 the catcher will look over and the manager will put the sign on,” Wakamatsu said. “We’re challenging these guys to put the sign on themselves, and twice the other day [Moore] put it on. That’s growth. Fast-forward five years from now, you’ve got a major league catcher, a Carlton Fisk-type who’s running everything and not worried about what the manager says.”

A lot of wildly incorrect or unprovable beliefs that people have about baseball are “supported” by the same kinds of adages and anecdotes. Some of them are demonstrably untrue, while some of them fall with catcher defense into the realm of what I like to call “baseball voodoo.”

There’s a simple fact here; if catcher defense or mojo or whatever you want to call it had a significant effect, we’d be able to isolate it. We’d be able to point to it and say “that guy makes his team two wins better because of his ability to call a game” and “that guy makes his team two wins worse because the pitchers all hate throwing to him.”

We can’t, which means one of two things:

1) It doesn’t exist (I actually view this as the less likely possibility);

2) It exists, but its effect is so small that it can’t be isolated from a variety of other noise. We’re talking about fractions of wins in all likelihood, in either direction.

And really, if you stop to think about it, it isn’t even intuitive; why would King Felix need to throw specifically to Rob Johnson to be good? He’s been fantastic throughout his minor-league career, pitching to whatever catcher they told him to…but suddenly he makes it to the major leagues and he “needs” Rob Johnson? Or what about a pitcher like Garrett Olson, whose once-promising career we’re watching slide into the gutter? Why doesn’ t the team pair him with Johnson full time to make him better, if he’s this amazing thing that turns pitchers into super-pitchers?

Catcher ERA is the latest attempt to “isolate the effect”, but it doesn’t succeed (or really even try, to be frank) in isolating whatever the catcher’s contribution might be from what the pitcher would do on their own. That’s why we all like to make fun of it; it’s a made-up stat that tries to create the impression of causation when all it can show is correlation, and weakly at that.

Finally, while Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre are both excellent baseball minds, managers and players are probably the worst people to try to talk to about this sort of thing. Not only does the natural human inclination to try to explain random variation come into play, but managers in particular have a strong incentive to try to “talk up” their .100-hitting catcher, and something like this mysterious, amazing “catcher defense” pixie dust is perfect for the task.

Here are a three statements, none of them mine, which make viable points. 1) Last year, from Tony LaRussa on catcher Yadier Molina, who was hitting a picturesque .160 or so at the time. “I don’t care if he’s hitting .000, he’s our catcher.” The obvious implication is that offensive production is not particularly important at that position. 2) Old baseball adage, one that actually holds pretty much true ….”A good catcher can save more runs than he can drive in.” Self-explanatory. Third, from (IIRC) Joe Torre, “All the offensive and defensive numbers added together don’t add up to even half of what a catcher does.” Now I haven’t tried to look up the exact quotes here, and I’m sure some will be after me for that, but the fact remains that there are no statistical measures for a catcher’s most important contributions to a team’s success.

Earning the trust and confidence of the pitchers and being able to judge their strengths and weakneses on a day to day basis, (because it often changes drastically from one start to the next,) adjusting to game conditions as the conditions themselves change, these are unmeasurable but make up the bulk of a catcher’s contribution to winning.

I’m not suggesting that this is rocket science; this part of the job is more properly art than science.

As for my credentials, as for statistics I enjoyed a career in MES management in a high-tech manufacturing environment, a field driven by statistical collection and analysis. And some time ago I played college level (although not a major program) baseball. To be more accurate, I got to have a terrific view very near and barely above field level. Depending on whether the field in question had actual dugouts or not. Saw quite a bit of very good ball though.

The point I’m making is this. Stats are great, but don’t confuse the values used in rotisserie leagues with measuring value in “real” baseball. They are similar, but are absolutely not the same. Statistics can no more measure the ability to “call a game” than they can measure the value of a “good clubhouse guy.”

Try to not use reductio ad absurdum in your answer, too. I have a ton of respect for scouts, and nobody’s advocating eliminating them. Let’s talk about this like sensible adults.

If you can’t quantify it, how can you know that it matters?

“WE SHOULD IGNORE THE THINGS WE CAN’T QUANTIFY”!

Of course that is wrong. There are lots of things about a catchers defense that are difficult or impossible to quantify, but we know it matters.

Despite the fact that CERA is ridiculed so much, the criticism isn’t that it doesn’t measure anything, the problem is that sample sizes don’t allow an accurate enough measurement to be meaningful.

However, I do think that “calling a good game” and “managing a pitching staff” are things that are teachable. So there’s really no reason to focus on a guy who (supposedly) does those well, if his other baseball skills aren’t up to snuff.