Pitches becomes an art form

When the ball hit Randy Knorr’s mitt, the Toronto Blue Jays catcher moved it back over the strike zone.

You know that was a ball, and now you made everybody in the stadium think it was a strike.

When a game’s on television, the center-field camera zooms in on the mitt, where the catcher does his best to massage balls into strikes.

In a sabermetric age where everything is measurable, teams can calculate how many runs a catcher can save by mastering the art of pitch framing.

Webpages galore are devoted to the topic, with stat-geeks analyzing the location of every single pitch and tabulating which catchers are best at winning balls and losing strikes.

“It’s like those pitches away that when you think that it’s a ball, he can make those a strike,” Lobaton said.

Rays manager Joe Madden once said that Molina is worth 50 runs per season based solely on pitch framing.

“Any pitch that can change a count that way, whether it’s going to be a 2-1 or a 1-2, that’s the biggest swing you can possibly have right there,” Nationals reliever Drew Storen said.

“The pitcher hates it because he wants to be able to pitch and throw, knowing the pitch he throws, that if it’s a strike, it’s going to be called a strike and not taken outside of the zone.

Now a Nationals assistant general manager, Boone would be so intent on keeping still that if the bases were empty he would let the ball glance off his webbing and roll to the backstop rather than move his mitt to catch it.