TAMPA, Fla. — When Brian McCann was a promising catching prospect for the Atlanta Braves, they appreciated his powerful bat, his intuitiveness in calling a game, his strong arm and quiet hands behind the plate. Putting a value on his bat was straightforward. The logic of pitch sequencing could be deconstructed. His arm strength could be quantified with a stopwatch.

But how much were those soft hands worth?

The modern art of pitch framing — presenting a borderline pitch to the umpire in such a favorable light that it is more likely to be called a strike — has been around at least since the late 1960s, when Johnny Bench popularized one-handed catching.

But the science behind it is relatively new.

“There wasn’t any,” McCann said of the emphasis on pitch framing in 2005 when he broke in with the Braves. “You just caught the ball, and that was it.”

Now, thanks to pitch-tracking cameras that provide reams of newfound data, pitch framing has become one of the darling statistics of the quantitative analysts. As detailed in the book “Big Data Baseball,” which chronicled the Pittsburgh Pirates’ integration of old- and new-school methods, the free-agent signing of Russell Martin before the 2013 season was a smart way to reduce the number of runs allowed, because he excelled at getting strikes called on pitches that were just outside the strike zone.