Chooooooooooch is riiiiiiiiiiiiiiich: Phillies C Carlos Ruiz signs three year, $9 million extension.

Valuing catchers is always a pretty fun thing to try and do. It seems like statistical analysis isnt all that helpful, because offense is so little of what catchers bring to the table.

One thing I have been thinking about for a while now is some sort of stat that uses pitch f/x, or possibly some solid pitcher stats, and then tries to use those inversely to statistically assess how well a catcher “calls the game.”

The main reason for this is that I believe that a good catcher can call a good game, or rather, different catchers will call better or worse pitches. Kind of like in poker, where the pros are able to search for and find tells of the other players, call bluffs etc. a good catcher would be able to find tells of the batters, whether they are going to take a pitch, gearing up for a fastball etc.

Any kind of stat trying to figure this stuff out is made pretty difficult because pitchers miss their pitch and so the poor catcher may call the right pitch every time but the pitcher is throwing up meat balls.

Despite the difficulty though, I would be really interested in stat people trying to figure this part of baseball out.

Sorry for the tangent, GO CHOOCH!

He’s a very underrated guy around the league. He obviously isn’t an All-Star but he’s very solid at the plate, runs the bases well and plays hard. You have to take the word of management on his ability as a receiver as it’s hard to measure but in the public eye he seems to have everyone’s faith. I guess I should breakdown and replace my Burrell jersey with a Ruiz jersey.