The Catcher Who Couldn't Throw | Baseball Bits

[Music] the 2012 pittsburgh pirates were a mess they led their division at the all-star break only to completely fall apart and finish the season with a losing record and they had a catcher who couldn't throw out a base stealer to save his life ron barajas was the bucco's primary backstop he'd actually been average at throwing out runners throughout his career but that season he surrendered 93 stolen bases while only catching six would-be base stealers that's a 94 success rate for those who ran on him as we'll learn later on those six caught stealings are highly suspect the veteran barajas has been brought in to replace ryan domet who is one of the weirdest baseball players in his own right domit was admired for his great hitting at the catcher position but when saber matricians began tracking catcher framing and retroactively applying it to past seasons domit was revealed to be perhaps the least valuable player in modern baseball history in terms of war he would have been way better off as a designated hitter but of course this video isn't about ryan domet rather his replacement rod barajas that's right the pirates replaced the worst catcher ever with something even more peculiar the catcher who couldn't throw [Music] if you steal bases how efficient should you be it depends on the situation but the accepted shorthand answer to this complicated problem is a 75 success rate if you successfully steal and 75 or more of your attempts you're likely helping your team if your success rate is less than that you're likely hurting them over the past half century major league baseball has toiled to achieve that 75 percent mark in 1967 teams averaged 0.7 attempts per game were successful about 60 of the time they really didn't know what they were doing they were basically winging it fast forward 15 years and 1982 was during the peak of league wide base stealing that was when ricky broke the single season record for steals with 130 attempts and efficiency increased 1997 produced similar numbers attempts were still over one per game and base stealers were successful 68 of the time still short of that 75 mark which leads us to 2012 the year of rod barajas's misfortune 0.9 attempts per game 73.9 success rate stolen base attempts are clearly declining league wide in search of overall efficiency in fact in 2020 teams averaged 0.65 attempts per game with 75.2 percent success rate of course there's no need to worry about efficiency if the catcher can't throw opponents stole bases against rod barajas with an unprecedented combination of volume and efficiency if we pretend that barajas was every base runner who ran against him in 2012 he'd crush even the most efficient seasons from history's greatest base dealers combined with backup catcher michael mchenry yeah we've really come full circle here on baseball bits the 2012 pirates surrendered the most stolen bases by any national league team that decade while only throwing out 11 of attempted thieves i've sorted through a lot of low bit rate 360p footage to piece together exactly what happened here i just want to prepare you all for low quality video of a man failing to throw out base runners while clearly having some sort of philosophical crisis perhaps i'll cleanse the palette with some hd footage of a runner getting thrown out it's only fair if you watch enough of these barajas stolen bases you begin to ask yourself how did he even manage to throw out six base runners well here's the thing he didn't on april 13th rod barajas threw out nate sheerholz of the giants the footage has been scrubbed likely by old bobby manfred himself he doesn't want you to see it luckily i have the other five april 30th against the braves michael bourne is on first base and this is basically a dream matchup over a five year stretch from 2008 to 2012 bourne led major league baseball and steals by a large margin the braves attempt what must have been a hit and run it doesn't work and by some miracle rod barajas throws out michael bourne except he didn't instant replay shows that bourne was incorrectly called out when he was in fact safe there was no replay review at the time to overturn it so it goes down in the books as a caught stealing even though bourne swiped it cleanly july 6th against the giants justin christian attempts to seal second and it's just a good clean throw can't really say anything else about this one july 13th against the brewers niger morgan attempts to steal second and it's not as perfect as the other one but it works all the same so far assuming that april 13th was legit he's three for four on these caught steals but then came august 5th pirates are playing the reds who have ryan ludwig on base let's see what happens here oh and he's in a run down and uh he's out the pitcher aj burnett caught ludwick in no man's land on the pick off this shouldn't be a caught stealing by rule it is had ryan ludwig dove back to first base and been tagged out it would have simply been a pick off but because ludwig was tagged out attempting to advance to second rod barajas is credited with a caught stealing on a play where he didn't even touch the baseball that's not legit august 27th against the cardinals john jay on first and oh no it's happening again it's happening again oh deary me another bogus caught stealing for barajas so even though the record books have him throwing out six runners i can only credit him for three that is upsetting somebody's gotta make him pay for this right there was one team that had barajas figured out and boy did they make his life miserable the 2012 pirates had seven games where they got absolutely bullied on the base pass i defined these as games with four more stolen bases against without any runners caught four of those seven games came in a span of a few weeks against the same opponent the milwaukee brewers let's watch a couple september 1st aj burnett is on the mound carlos gomez takes off for second base and barajas fails to transfer the ball from mid to hand there's no throw while standing on second carlos gomez thinks to himself that was pretty easy i guess i'll steal third then he steals third later in the game ryan braun is on first and aj burnett does a lazy pick-off move yeah that'll stop him aj braun steal second ricky weeks caps off the day with a steal of his own he picks the perfect pitch to run on and there's no throw from barajas fast forward to september 18th aj burnett on the mound again nori aoki is the game's first base runner and he knows exactly what to do at this point rod barajas begins to wonder where it all went wrong unsurprisingly ryan braun decides to follow suit it's not a bad throw from barajas but braun is still safe alright enough of this pixelated crap here's a catcher throwing out a base runner in hd ah it's like a breath of fresh air all right we're going back in ryan braun steals second again it's a good pitch to run on and a bad barajas throw chad quals comes in during the top of the 7th and ricky weeks immediately swipes a bag oh look ryan brawn's on base again surely he won't oh he will neil walker almost makes a crazy tag but bronze steals second for the third time today jonathan lucroy commits catron catcher violence by swiping a base of his own carlos gomez tacks on the brewers seventh steal of the game with their clever choice of camera angles you can tell the broadcast always knows what's about to go down the brewers absolutely racked up steals against the pirates their league-leading stolen base total was generated at the expense of barajas and the buckos milwaukee stole 34 bases in just 15 games against pittsburgh on surface level we're just watching the brewers mercilessly bully a 37 year old catcher but once i studied enough film i came to a completely different conclusion what if this mess isn't the fault of rod barajas what if he's just the fall guy [Music] pop time no not that one pop time is how scouts measure a catcher's ability to throw out base runners simply put it's the amount of time between two pops the pop of the pitch in the catcher's mitt and the pop of the ball in the middle infielder's glove at second base in the pop time world a tenth of a second is a big deal and two tenths is an eternity it's most frequently measured with a stopwatch in non-game situations often resulting in unrealistic results that's how you get baseball dads who think their teenage son is the next yadier molina thankfully statcast tracks it at the major league level removing the human element in the process in 2019 the best catcher by average pop time was jt ralmuto that seems about right he threw out nearly half the base runners who stole on him that season the worst pop time belonged to the veteran stephen vogt who is recovering from major shoulder surgery the gap between elite and average about a tenth of a second as the average mlb catcher has a pop time of 2 seconds flat remember that number the gap between average and poor doesn't seem like much either but those fractions of a second make all the difference so how bad was barajas i timed 10 relatively accurate throws to second base counting frame by frame you know what i got for the catcher who couldn't throw i got two seconds flat he was average this is a revelation ron barajas was around average at getting the ball to second base yet he couldn't throw out a runner if his life depended on it so where did all that time go in measuring pop time we're measuring catchers in pittsburgh we should have been measuring pitchers pitcher pop time let's measure how long it takes to deliver a pitch out this stretch the control will be steven strasburg strasbourg is right-handed and has been perfectly average at preventing steels throughout his career i timed a variety of different pitch types from a variety of different strasbourg starts between 2018 and 2019. the commonality was a runner on first base the average time between the beginning of his motion which is when his front leg moves and the pop in the catcher's mitt was 1.53 seconds now let's do the same with the 2012 pirates ace aj burnett over the course of 10 stolen bases it took him 1.68 seconds on average to get the ball to barajas that is absolutely massive in terms of catcher pop time those 15 100th of a second are enough to make an average catcher the worst in the league all along it was burnett getting brutalized by the brewers and he wasn't even the worst pirate's pitcher at holding runners base steelers were 17 for 17 against jared hughes and that beautiful man only tossed 75 innings we also haven't addressed the quality of pitches for throwing out these base stealers what's the ideal pitch to throw out a runner high fastball that's basically what a pitch out is but the 2010's pirates were like high fastball never heard of her they pitched low in the zone because they really craved ground balls aj burnett himself is a great example he experienced a career resurgence in pittsburgh by throwing more sinkers than four seamers ron barajas was dealing with bad locations from slow pitchers and it was all by design he was the catcher who couldn't throw but only because he played on the team that couldn't throw and here's the crazy thing it might have been worth it what the 2012 pirates really did was punt the very idea of throwing out base runners chucking rod barajas under the bus in the process i mean look at this what is this how is this rod barajas's fault aj burnett trusted the process after that infamous game in which the brewer swiped seven bags against his pirates he reiterated that his focus was purely on making pitches not holding base runners if he executed his pitches the steals wouldn't matter at first glance the 2012 pirates didn't pitch any better with runners-on than the national league as a whole both parties were about 40 ops points worse than they were with the bases empty but then there's the percentage of runners left on base if wiley baserunners were free to move about the base pass with barajas behind the dish one might expect them to have an exceptionally good chance of scoring yet they didn't the pirates were very much middle of the pack at keeping runners on base from scoring runs they were also middle of the pack and straight up runs aloud which is a solid outcome for a pretty ragtag group of pitchers despite the organization's eventual failures with morton call and glass now they got a lot out of veteran pictures with diminished stuff ultimately it's shocking that this obvious weak point wasn't exploited more the pirates led the league in stolen bases allowed but not by a huge margin apart from getting embarrassed by the brewers they mostly got away with having a catcher who couldn't throw barajas and the pirates parted ways after that bizarre 2012 season pittsburgh responded by inking a two-year deal with russell martin who was productive both as a hitter and behind the dish with martin in tow the buckos broke their streak of 20 consecutive losing seasons won the wild card game and saw andrew mccutchen win mvp all this just one year after they couldn't throw out a base runner as for barajas he called it quits the following spring the newly retired backstop began coaching in the padres system in 2020 he served as the catching and quality control coach for san diego a team that you guessed it was among the league's best at throwing out would be based stealers baseball [Music] if you want to support baseball bits check out the foolish baseball patreon there's still a couple days to get into this month's exclusive video q a it only costs five dollars and you'll see your name in a future video like this thank you [Music] you

Channel: Foolish Baseball

Views: 1,408,170

Rating: 4.9222522 out of 5

Keywords: rod barajas, the catcher who can't throw, throwing out runners, stolen bases, pop time, catcher pop time, 2012 pirates, 2012 pirates stolen bases, best catcher arm, worst catcher arm, ryan doumit, michael bourn, jt realmuto, jt realmuto throwing out runners, rod barajas stolen bases, aj burnett stolen bases, yadier molina throwing out runners, caught stealing, rod barajas pirates, The Catcher Who Couldn't Throw | Baseball Bits, foolish baseball, baseball, mlb, baseball bits

Id: H4YTRD3r_-A

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Monk_Philosophy]

At first I thought it was gonna be just a bunch of shitting on him but it was both enlightening and uplifting

[u/imatthewhitecastle]

i think this is his best one so far. he takes a really obscure statistical anomaly and investigates it from every angle in a way that's really easy for anyone to understand. i love it! a lot of other baseball videos are things big baseball fans are already familiar with (pujols being slow, tulo/lincecum being briefly great at around the same time, pedro being ridiculous in the heart of the steroid era), but for him to find something really interesting on a mediocre team is so cool. especially impressive because it looks like the pirates really knew what they were doing to prioritize ground balls at the expense of stealing, but nobody else (besides the brewers for a few games) picked up on it until he did here in 2020.

[u/ruddyirishhamface]

Part 2: The Catcher Who Could Only Throw ft Jeff Mathis

[u/1990Buscemi]

I was expecting this to be on Kurt Suzuki, to be honest.

[u/mansontaco]

Foolish himself roughly said this video will be a void on human intelligence so I'm interested

[u/Ryuuken1789]

This is brilliant and Statcast should heavily consider adding pitcher pop time as a stat. You can tell Barajas' arm at his age was very weak and inaccurate, but he still got up and transferred the ball quickly enough to make league average pop time.

[u/mabook01]

His job title is catcher not thrower lol

[u/joeschmow]

Say what you will about Ray Serage screwing over the pirates in the long term. I’ll be damned if I could find a guy who could get half as much out of Liriano as he did.

[u/[deleted]]

It's only been about 100 years that it's been known that you steal bases on the pitcher at the major league level. Barajas was getting old by the time he got to he Pirates but he was actually a more than decent glove.

Teams ran a lot in the 80s because of pitching dominance. As a general rule, power pitchers have slower deliveries. If not for the juiced balls, the game should have cycled back around to the run game with every guy throwing 97+, which is a shame because SBs are very exciting things.