Thanks to JOlderdude, we bring you an piece on the view from the inside of the second nation in baseball: Umpires.
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I first started posting on baseball boards in 2000. Every year since then I've seen the topic of "framing" brought up. I'm sure it has been brought up whenever fans of baseball, especially those who have not umpired at a high level, ran out of other things to pick over.
I've umpired at the NCAA level. I've attended clinics by Jim Evans and other instructors of his MLB umpire training school. I've given clinics. I can tell you that framing may have an affect in kid ball. Maybe there are some umps in High School ball that fall for a catcher's position or how he holds his glove. But I do not know an umpire who reached the upper levels of professional umpiring, including the college ranks, who took into account "framing" when calling balls and strikes. The ball, in flight, as it passes the batter and plate is where it is judged a ball or strike. If you wait until the ball is caught, you've missed the pitch. That's the way it is taught. Believe me, you don't get to the bigs, or even to where I ended my career, by being fooled by a catcher's position or where he catches the ball.
But that's just the opinion of an old umpire. The stat geeks might want some numbers. Ok. Here are a couple of references to start with. http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/a-zone-of-their-own/ Johnathan Hale concludes "I used to think that an umpire’s zone was largely negotiated by the pitcher during the game and could differ greatly from one day to the next. Now I’m sure there are some very consistent tendencies that each umpire sticks to (although they may not come up in every game). The next step is to look at is which umps are the most consistent and if they are affected when dealing with particular situations, teams, or players." If umpires are consistent as Hale finds, framing technique by one catcher over another is not showing up. But I agree, there is more work to be done. So Dan Turkenkopf takes the next step. http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/4/5/389840/framing-the-debate He compares catchers in hopes of finding a correlation that he can attribute to "framing." I hope I'm not misleading anyone with this quote from his conclusion, "…the results just seem too outlandish to be correct. Plus, there was only a weak correlation between these values and the team's runs allowed per game (r=-.30 based on those catchers who caught for the same team all year). I find it hard to believe pitch framing can have this big an impact and not be more noticeable. I have the same concern about the results of Hale's analysis of umpires - where the impact is nearly as big. Two other possibilities are that my run value number is wrong (likely, but I think it's in the ballpark) or that there's some underlying issue that affects both of our studies." He tries to find another "underlying issue" and comes up with this: "Long story short, younger pitchers appear to lose at least .6 runs per games to older pitchers based on umpires calls." http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/10/grandpa-gets-all-the-calls/ I don't know if anyone else but these two have done analysis of this sort on the www. It's what I've found. From what I see, Turkenkopf is inconclusive and Hale's study, IMHO, shows a consistency among umpires that would speak against framing.
So, until the stat folks can nail it down better than these two guys, I'm still not buying "framing."
