Zach Buchanan

zbuchanan@enquirer.com

GOODYEAR, Ariz. – Over the offseason, Tucker Barnhart studied film. Not of the Cincinnati Reds pitchers he’d be catching, nor of opposing pitchers he’d be facing. He watched his fellow catchers.

Barnhart had the front office cut up video of him of several of the league’s top defensive catchers. He watched perennial MVP candidates Yadier Molina and Buster Posey. He watched former Reds farmhand Yasmani Grandal, and he watched Venezuelan backstops Miguel Montero and Francisco Cervelli.

To the untrained eye, they do things differently. Posey has a squared stance, both toes pointed toward the mound. Montero loves to catch with one knee hovering above the dirt. Cervelli staggers his stance, much like Barnhart does.

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But all of them had one trait in common – they were good pitch-framers. After a successful year in the majors as a starting catcher, with a solid defensive reputation to hang his hat on, Barnhart was looking to take the next step. The 26-year-old wanted to be a better framer.

“The less movement there is back there, the better you make the pitch look,” Barnhart said. “The better you make the pitch look, the easier it is for the umpire to call a strike.”

Pitch-framing has become a hot topic across baseball in recent years, with new technologies creating new ways to measure what was previously unquantifiable. Thanks to Pitch f/x, hard data can be found on which catchers fool umpires most often.

Barnhart is not one of them, nor is starter-if-healthy Devin Mesoraco. Last year, Barnhart was rated as costing the Reds 4.4 runs because of his framing, according to Baseball Prospectus. In about a month of action before his surgery, Mesoraco cost the team 1.9 runs.

Both recognize the importance of improving the skill, but neither believes pitch-framing is the end-all when it comes to catching. As an organization, the Reds are right there with them. The franchise has its own proprietary versions of pitch-framing statistics, and pulls pitch data from the major leagues down to rookie league.

But the Reds don’t make pitch-framing the top priority when evaluating catchers. It’s a piece of a much greater whole. Sam Grossman, the team’s assistant general manager who runs the analytics department, figures the Reds fall somewhere in the middle of the league when it comes to emphasis on framing.

“It sort of goes into our overall value equation,” Grossman said. “It’s there. But we’re also trying to think about how a guy interacts with the pitchers, how he helps guys get through games and innings.”

To Grossman, receiving and framing are separate skills, and is unsure that the latter can be taught. To Corky Miller, former Reds catcher and the team’s roving catching instructor, you can’t talk about one without the other. A catcher who is a poor receiver has no prayer of ever being a good framer.

Miller is wary of the run values assigned to catchers for their framing skills – ironically, he consistently rated highly by those same metrics as a player, despite limited playing time – but recognizes how the new technology can help a catcher get better. Like hitters, any catcher in the organization can look at a zone profile and learn on what pitches and in what locations they have trouble getting strikes compared to other catchers. Then Miller can help them get better.

As far as teaching framing specifically, Miller prefers to let that wait until catchers have built a solid defensive foundation. It’s why Barnhart feels it’s something he can attack this spring, and why Mesoraco feels it’s something he can’t touch just yet after two full years without regular catching time due to his surgeries.

“I’m just trying to get back into a stance. I’m trying to figure that out,” Mesoraco said. “At this point, I can’t really work on it. I’m on a limited number of reps. But it’s something that I’m definitely curious about.”

But Barnhart has built that defensive foundation, and now has set upon improving his framing deficiencies. The basics are easy to communicate – beat the ball to the spot, catch the outside edge of the ball – but harder to incorporate. In particular, Barnhart is working on framing the low pitch.

He used to try that by pulling the ball softly up, almost like he was trying to catch an egg instead. But umpires notice that pulling motion, however subtle, and don’t like being tricked. It wasn’t unusual for an ump to tell Barnhart to cut it out.

But Miller offered another method – place the glove slightly under the ball’s trajectory, and push out and up when it’s caught. It gives the impression of a firmly caught, surefire strike. It may only work once in a blue moon, and the batter may hit a homer on the next pitch, it but adds up over time.

“It’s something that can obviously change an at-bat, which in turn affects the game,” he said. “That one at-bat may affect whether you win or lose.”

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