Via Pedro Moura, a pretty nifty story about the difficulty of predicting what a professional baseball player will do...
Iannetta has become comfortanly above-average at achieving extra strikes for his pitchers after seven years of being terrible at it. With every game he catches, it becomes more apparent that this trend is real.
Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto's perspective explains its significance.
"To do what he's done is kind of remarkable and definitely uncommon," Dipoto said this week. "What it does is it just blows a hole in the theory of nature vs. nurture. Clearly, (players) can be nurtured. Chris was not born with this skill. He formed this skill. There are many things in baseball that you canât change. I donât know how much better you can make your arm strength. I donât know that a guy who throws 85 (mph) can ever make himself throw 95. But clearly a guy who has not been a top-of-the-league pitch-framer can turn himself into that through sheer hard work and intelligence.
"Good for Chris. Good for us."
One good reason to believe this improvement isn't necessarily real: Iannetta's always been a lousy pitch-framer, going some years back. One of the very worst in the majors. Year in and year out. Should we reall think of him differently after only six weeks?
One good reason to believe this improvement's for real: Iannetta says he didn't realize there was a problem until late last season; once alerted, he went to work. And the results do seem dramatic. Just look at this page and see for yourself. This season, Iannetta ranks fifth in the majors in extra strikes.
Then again, it's only 21 starts behind the plate. Meanwhile, Iannetta's got a .101 batting average this season.
It's been six weeks for the ages, that's for sure.
