Wednesday night, R.A. Dickey started against the Yankees in the Bronx.
Last season, Dickey had a personal catcher: Josh Thole. And it wasn't just last season. First with the Mets and then the Blue Jays, Thole backstopped Dickey's butterflies for five seasons.
This season, Josh Thole's in the minor leagues, at least until the Jays trade Dioner Navarro. So Wednesday night, Russell Martin got the start behind the plate.
We typically think of knuckleball catchers as being particularly skilled in preventing wild pitches and passed balls. But what about pitch-framing? We've recently gained a different sort of appreciation for that once-unmeasured (though well-regarded) skill. I got to wondering about the relative importance of framing knuckleballs, and asked our friends at Baseball Info Solutions to look at some numbers.
Well, the numbers aren't wildly conclusive, but they do suggest that a) Thole's been a good pitch-framer, generally; b) he's framed Dickey's pitches better than anyone else over the last seasons; but c) a significantly higher percentage of Thole's "extra" strikes have been called on non-knuckleballs.
Conclusion: Again, this is preliminary, but it seems that pitch-framing is actually less important for a knuckleballer.
Frame it? It's hard enough just to catch it. Even for an accomplished framer like Russell Martin.
