Comments on: Rick Hahn’s offseason review: The catching platoon

By: 2016 Preview: Infield | South Side Pinstripes

2016 Preview: Infield | South Side Pinstripes — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:39:49 +0000

[…] ¹ Ethan Spalding of BP South Side wrote in more detail about Navarro and Avila replacing Flowers this… […]

By: South Side - Baseball Prospectus

South Side - Baseball Prospectus — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 11:02:13 +0000

[…] season hasn’t started yet, and we have already spilled a decent amount of ink on the White Sox‘ catching situation. Well, injury-prone backstop Alex Avila is already […]

By: Jarrin Paryzek

Jarrin Paryzek — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 17:06:13 +0000

Avila’s Snapchat prowess has already far exceeded that of Flowers.

By: JofpGallagher

JofpGallagher — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 16:56:16 +0000

Harry put some numbers/stats to the game calling part in this article below. Granted, the article didn’t seem to go into deep on that, but notice Avila on the top.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/12880518/mlb-best-game-caller-dodgers-catcher-aj-ellis

I live in Ontario so I follow the Bluejays as well. I can tell you that Bluejays pitchers loved to pitch to Navarro. Particularly Marco Estrada (Navarro practically became his personal catcher despite having Russell Martin right there)

I guess that with the framing game repeating steadily Hahn didn’t want to take the risk. Think of it, that’s all Flowers brings to the table. What if it wanes a bit? What if Flowers experience a small injury that still allows him to play but it affects his framing skill. His knees don’t hold well. Flowers is a one trick guy. Without it, he is just a liability. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to bring in other catchers that can offer more albeit it may look not that much on paper.

Also, framing skills are more beneficial when the pitching staff in not elite. White Sox have a good pitching staff, maybe Hahn thought they (The pitchers) are better equip to survive the loss in framing.

By: Ethan Spalding

Ethan Spalding — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 15:13:22 +0000

Thanks for the kind words. Couple things:
1) I do think framing is significant enough that if we could be sure that it was totally stable, this would be a bad, and maybe indefensible, downgrade. But it may not be.
2) For most years pre-2015, CSAA and any framing stats based off of it is actually *very* stable. The best players in year n-1 tend to be the best players in year n. HOWEVER: as I mentioned, the y2y correlation has fallen apart, which is quite possibly due to the fact that teams are aware of the value (as I detailed in the article).
3) I actually talked over this article with Harry before publishing, and he did mention pitch calling. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available stats to defend this assertion. It’s quite possible that it’s true, though from what Sox pitchers (particularly Sale) said about throwing to Flowers last year, it’s possible he did improve in that department along with his framing.

By: JofpGallagher

JofpGallagher — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 12:13:10 +0000

Excellent analysis. I concurred on everything you say. Particularly with the line “….Flowers put up a .223/.289/.376 slash line, good for a well-below average .237 TAv….”

I believe the advantage on framing was not worth enough to justify having Flowers striking out with men on scoring position over and over…and over.

Pitch framing, as I have noticed, is very volatile. One season a catcher has [——x—–] many runs saved, and next year it’s [–x–] this many. I think the White Sox didn’t want to take the risk with Flowers as being good at framing is Flowers ONLY ace on his sleeve. If that fails, we have a terrible player in the line up. With Avila and Navarro, Hahn decrease that risk as they can contribute in other many areas.

Also, you forgot to mention that according to Harry Pavlidis, Navarro and Avila are top notch game callers (Where Flowers is not). Albeit game calling “runs” are less impactful than framing “runs”, it helps to mitigate the loss in the framing dept.

By: Southside - Baseball Prospectus

Southside - Baseball Prospectus — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 10:04:09 +0000

[…] a problem that Rian Wiatt discussed on Friday: the catcher situation might be Real Bad. There are very real questions about both the health, durability, and productivity of both Alex Avila and Dioner Navarro. PECOTA thinks that Hector Sanchez is basically identical to […]