TODAY is the opening of “Moneyball”, the film starring Brad Pitt about the success of the small-market Oakland Athletics. Based on the best-selling 2003 book by Michael Lewis, it recounts how the club used statistics like on-base percentage (OBP) in the early 2000s to identify players whose skills were being undervalued by other teams. Despite having one of the lowest payrolls in the game, Oakland made the playoffs every year from 2000 to 2003.

However, richer franchises wised up to the value of getting on base in the years after the book's publication and bid up the price of high-OBP hitters. And the salaries of the Athletics' young stars rose as they aged, making them too expensive for the club to retain. As Oakland fell on hard times, many defenders of the game's traditional management style gleefully penned “I told you so” articles, arguing that whatever inefficiencies the Athletics had exploited in the market had been exhausted. Even Gary Huckabay, the founder of Baseball Prospectus (BP), a well-known website dedicated to quantitative study of the game, loudly pronounced in 2007 that “baseball analysis is dead.” In response, advocates of the statistical revolution pointed to the Tampa Bay Rays, a more recent example of a small-market team using numbers to secure the “extra 2%” advantage needed to compete.

Clearly, most of the low-hanging statistical fruit was picked a long time ago. But the “long live Moneyball” camp got quite a boost this week with the publication of a stunning new study by BP's Mike Fast on “framing”: the catcher's influence on whether the umpire calls a pitch a ball or a strike. If umpires were perfect, or replaced with computers, the catcher would have no effect—what matters is where a pitch crosses home plate, not where it hits the mitt. In fact, however, umpires are human, and Mr Fast shows they can be duped by skillful catchers far more than most fans would ever have thought possible.

The study's methodology is straightforward: it simply compares the ratio of balls to called strikes when pitchers throw to a given catcher to those same pitchers' ratios with other catchers. It shows that the king of framing is José Molina, a backstop with a strong defensive reputation but by far the weakest bat among the three catching Molina brothers. Mr Fast finds that Mr Molina has managed to transform balls into strikes on a massive 3% of pitches caught. If accurate, that would mean that his framing has saved his teams 47 runs per 162-game season. That gap is as big as the difference in offence between a superstar like Prince Fielder and a league-average hitter like Plácido Polanco, and is worth some $20m a year on the free-agent market. (Mr Molina is earning $1m this season.) Conversely, Jorge Posada—a veteran catcher whose hitting is probably Hall of Fame-caliber—comes out at a ghastly 34 runs below average per 162 games. If the gap in framing ability between Mr Molina and Mr Posada is even half as big as Mr Fast's numbers suggest, then this article I wrote during the 2009 World Series encouraging the Yankees to play Mr Posada instead of Mr Molina was gravely mistaken.

It is hard to believe framing matters quite as much as the study suggests. But Mr Fast has powerful retorts for sceptics. First, he notes, framing outcomes are highly consistent over time: catchers who rack up unusually high or low numbers of borderline strikes in a given season tend to continue that trend the following year, even if they change teams. Second, the magnitude of the framing numbers lines up neatly with the estimate of catchers' effect on pitchers' performance derived in a recent study published in this year's Hardball Times baseball annual.

Most convincingly, Mr Fast illustrates framing technique with video. He selects two pairs of pitches that cross the plate at the exact same point. In the first example, one catcher drops his mitt nearly to the ground before grabbing the ball, whereas the other squeezes it with just a slight glove movement. The second one shows the Pirates' Ryan Doumitlowering his head as he watches a low pitch into his mitt. Mr Molina, in contrast, corrals it while looking straight ahead. In both cases, the catcher who moved less got a strike call, and the one who moved more was stuck with a ball. It is easy to see how the umpires are fooled: the backstops look so different that it seems impossible to believe they are catching the same pitch. Umpires are particularly distracted by head-bobs like Mr Doumit's. “I have rarely, if ever, been able to identify such a striking mechanical difference between major-league players that has correlated so directly to performance differences,” Mr Fast writes. “For the borderline pitches I reviewed where the catcher had otherwise quiet and stable mechanics, the presence or absence of the catcher head drop predicted the umpire's strike call 31 of 32 times.”

The implications of Mr Fast's study are vast. The first question is whether good framing technique can be taught. Can any reasonably competent backstop keep his glove and head steady once he knows to try? If so, then most of the laggards will soon catch up, and Mr Molina's advantage (and value) will be short-lived. If not, then scouts will need to start paying a lot more attention to framing when evaluating catchers.

The article should also have big consequences for pitchers. Hurlers who have been throwing to poor-framing catchers are probably severely undervalued, and smart clubs should seek to stockpile them for cheap. Conversely, a savvy general manager could invest in a great-framing catcher and see his skills reflected in better numbers for his pitching staff. Those pitchers would then become overvalued, and could be pawned off in trade for more than their true worth. How long will it take for baseball's most quantitatively minded franchises to capitalise on this new information, and then for the rest to follow suit? The answer will provide a good measure of whether the game's labour market is anywhere near as efficient as the “Moneyball is dead” crowd would have you believe.

Framing also raises philosophical questions about what fans want out of sports. Would baseball be better off if every pitch were called perfectly by a machine? It has already taken a step in that direction by authorising instant replay on contested home run calls. Just as the Orioles were gypped when a 12-year-old named Jeffrey Maier reached onto the field and turned a playable ball into a home run in the 1996 playoffs, the Pirates have the right to feel robbed every time Mr Doumit nods a strikeout into a walk.

On the other hand, the missed call in the Maier game was caused by a random, unpredictable act committed by a non-player. In contrast, Mr Fast shows convincingly that framing is a skill. Perhaps the interaction between catcher and umpire is just as much a part of the game as that between pitcher and hitter. Everyone loved to watch Ozzie Smith win games with his glove, and José Molina is the Ozzie Smith of framing pitches. Now that fans know to recognise and appreciate Mr Molina's mastery of his craft, they would feel cheated if automated ball and strike calls took it away from them.