Fire Gardy

This year that the All Star game, Tim McCarver brought up a theory about how difficult it is for a catcher to win a batting title; his point was that what Mauer has done in his career, and is doing again this year, is truly remarkable. He pointed out that a catcher’s body gets beat up so badly during a game and over the course of the season, that it’s practically impossible for catchers to hit in their last couple at bats, and by the end of the season their bodies are done for. Well, in typical McCarver fashion, he said something that everyone’s heard a million times before — it’s a good thing he’s a highly paid analyst, otherwise we might hear something during a broadcast that we’ve never heard before. And it makes sense, too. Catcher is a very difficult position, and everyone’s heard those horror stories about guys who used to be catchers and now their knees are shot and their hand is all mangled up, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that while they were developing those long-term injuries, well, they might have been in a little bit of pain.

Baseball Prospectus doesn’t usually take things like that at face value, though. Tim Kniker opens the issue:

This seemed an interesting little theory from an ex-catcher that begged for some numbers to back it up. This comment also got me thinking about a potentially even larger issue: Does the wear and tear of playing at certain defensive positions on the field lead to reduced offensive production? Does this happens during the course of the game, and/or throughout the season?

I encourage you to click through and see the stats, as they’re pretty interesting. I’m not going to re-post BP’s stats here, since that’s basically their lifeblood and I don’t want to steal it. But I will talk about their conclusions.

Kniker broke it down thusly: He separated all the players out into their respective positions, and measured their batting averages* in each at bat of the game (ie, the 1st-3rd at bats, the 4th at bat, the 5th-plus at bats). Then he looks at what positions got better and worse in their progressive at bats.

* I was originally surprised he went with measuring batting average, but then realized that we’re talking about winning batting titles. So I guess batting average is the stat that makes sense in this discussion. Though I’d be interesting in seeing the research re-done using OPS or something. I feel like that would be more interesting and telling.

And as it turns out, catchers tend to improve as the game goes on more than almost any other position. Outfielders actually improve the least (and CF has it the worst). So the conventional wisdom doesn’t have it exactly right, it seems.

So what does this say about the original point, about Joe Mauer? Is he even better at staying at his level throughout the game, and is that is leading to the batting titles? It is interesting to note that his batting average was pretty consistent in his first three times up year-to-year, but in the one year he didn’t win the batting title, he had a very low batting average in his late-game plate appearances. One thing to point out is that every in year, he typically performed worse in late-game plate appearances than he did in his early-game plate appearances, as compared to other catchers.

In 2007, when Mauer failed to win the batting title, his late-game plate appearances were pretty poor (.243 in 2007 vs .351 in 2006 and .333 in 2008), but perhaps more interesting is that while most catchers improve a lot in each successive plate apperance throughout the game, Mauer does not (as much, anyway).

When looking at the course of a whole season, Kniker found that in 2008, catchers dipped -.024 points of batting average in their 301+ PAs vs their first 300, but that 2008 was an outlier and normally catchers don’t fall by that much in the second half. Really, the position as a whole is right in line with all the other positions. It appears that McCarver’s conventional wisdom about catchers getting beat up and it affecting their hitting just doesn’t hold up with reality.

Kniker concludes:

When we see the three years in perspective, the data suggest that there isn’t really a significant impact on catcher performance in terms of batting average during the latter portion of the long regular season. Perhaps the likely cause is that any fatigue that might occur with any one position’s performance at the plate is likely to be equaled by pitcher fatigue, such that it all evens out in the end.

I don’t know why he didn’t bring it back around to Mauer, but I’m going to go ahead and do that myself.

I’ve been thinking for a while about why Mauer’s able to hold up over the long season and seems to be able to hit like a DH despite playing C, and that maybe he’s just such a physical freak of nature that he’s able to withstand the beatings more effectively than most catchers. Apparently, however, that’s not the case at all. First of all, most catchers are not actually adversely effected by the physical beating they take, either in the game or over the course of the season. Secondly, Mauer is one of the few catchers who is adversely effected, and his hitting does suffer slightly (by “suffer,” I mean “improve less than others”). It’s just that Mauer’s talent level is so astronomical, and his numbers start so high, that he just hits better than anyone else anyway.

Calcaterra is absolutely right that the Twins need to sign Mauer to a long term contract, and they need to do it soon:

The smart money still has Mauer staying in his hometown, but if it gets to be spring training and nothing is done, the odds will begin to drop. The Twins don’t need the hassle, the bad P.R. or the spectre of the Red Sox or someone driving up the price. They need to get a long term deal done for Mauer this winter.

He’s the best player in the AL, and he shows you why just about every game. I’d enjoy it while you can, because Bill Smith doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can do anything right.