Because Major League Baseball hasn’t quite given into the inevitable robot umpires that will someday (soon) oversee our national pastime, teams all around the sport are still doing their best to exploit whatever disadvantage the human eye holds.
This is how you get a generation of ballplayers to to value framing pitches as strikes over actually throwing strikes. And if making a pitch look like a strike requires less effort (read: money), then there’s no reason to invest in the latter.
Which is how you end up with a case like Willson Contreras writhing in pain on Wednesday after his arm was shattered by the bat of New York Mets slugger J.D. Martinez while catching for Miles Mikolas.
It seemed easy to call this a freak injury in the moment, but that’s only because the explanation is so obviously senseless you almost can’t believe a team would put its $87.5 million All-Star backstop in deliberate danger.
Yet here we are. Teams know calling balls and strikes is so subjective that if you place a catcher directly in the swing path of a hitter, you just might be able to block an umpire’s field of vision enough to convince them that a low ball was actually a clear strike.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it leads to this:
In an attempt to help catcher Willson Contreras get more low strikes, the #STLCards have him moved up closer to the plate. However, JD Martinez's bat hit Contreras on the left forearm during his swing.
Contreras is out of the game. He was in obvious pain, yelling out right away. pic.twitter.com/0XCgzBQG0D
— John Denton (@JohnDenton555) May 8, 2024
Officially, the injury goes down as a forearm fracture requiring surgery and a 6-8 week recovery window. Contreras could be back after the All-Star Game in July. What the injury report won’t say is that the cause was workplace indifference to employee safety.
“It’s a huge risk,” Cardinals manager Oli Marmol told reporters about moving catchers closer to the plate after the game. “It’s been talked about. Even in the offseason it was a topic in discussion because there was an increase in [catchers’ interference calls]. The more catchers are evaluated on framing, the more catchers are getting closer to the pitcher in order to get that low pitch.
“The risk is high. We just experienced it.”
Marmol on if he's been able to talk to Contreras yet: "Yeah, that's why I was a little later coming in. He's OK. He reiterated that we have enough in that clubhouse to continue to take our shots, and he's going to be diligent in his work in order to get back so, keep going." pic.twitter.com/jLULJQOPyT
— Bally Sports Midwest (@BallySportsMW) May 8, 2024
This is what happens when you try to Moneyball every aspect of the game. How much is a strike truly worth if the risk is putting one of your most important players on the shelf?
St. Louis might not be the last to find out the answer to that. Not in a copy-cat league. If one team is getting better calls because of positioning, many will follow their lead. Which is how you go from catcher’s interference being called once every 50.6 games in 2023 to once every 32 games in 2024.
This is where JD Martinez was standing before getting Willson Contreras with his swing. https://t.co/ITgKz6SWKy pic.twitter.com/QBOGoiUcn5
— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) May 8, 2024
There is simply no reason a catcher should have to put his arm anywhere inside the batter’s box and any coach who suggests that as a legitimate strategy should be laughed out of the room. Instead, it’s debated and settled on during the offseason as if the game is played on paper.
Pitch framing is certainly a skill the same way flopping is a skill in basketball. The only difference is that we know, some day soon, robot umpires are going to make that skill irrelevant. There’s no need to game a system that’s already on the way out.
This injury was so avoidable you have to consider firing the coaches who put Contreras in this position. Or at the very least, the next time one of them suggests standing in between J.D. Martinez’s bat and a baseball, have them demonstrate how they’d do it first.
