The Relationship Between Framing and Blocking

On Monday, Michael Rosen wrote a enjoyable article about catcher blocking. He didn’t simply write about it; he created his personal blocking metric from scratch with a view to grade each catcher within the sport and to grasp how a lot worth a single block or handed ball can carry. The entire article is superb, however one piece specifically caught my eye. Michael put collectively a supercut of Agustín Ramírez’s handed balls, all of which shared a theme. They weren’t the pitches within the dust that you simply’d count on to finish up as handed balls. They had been regular pitches on the perimeters of the zone, ones that Ramírez tried so arduous to border them that he ended up lacking them solely. Michael drew the plain inference: His framing focus, I imagine, might have led to a few of these inexcusable handed balls. On the threat of piling on, listed below are the pitches in query:

I’m so sorry, Agustín. That is brutal, and it makes Michael’s level very bluntly. It additionally makes me surprise concerning the relationship between the framing talent and the blocking talent. Does promoting out to be a greater framer harm your blocking? Clearly, it might and at the least generally does for Ramírez, however it nonetheless doesn’t strike me as a very doubtless speculation total. Furthermore, even when framing does harm your blocking, the trade-off would definitely be price it.

Statcast’s numbers point out that one block above common is price roughly 1 / 4 of a run, a a lot larger swing than the typical referred to as strike. That is smart as a result of a block or a wild pitch lets a runner transfer up a base. Blocking alternatives additionally come round extra usually than framing alternatives. In 2025, Statcast indicated that we noticed 60 takes within the shadow zone (the sting of the strike zone) per sport. That’s 30 probabilities per sport for every workforce’s catcher. Statcast additionally categorized pitches as blocking alternatives, and it recognized 39.7 per workforce sport. That’s much more probabilities, almost 10 extra a sport for every catcher.

Nevertheless, though catchers have extra blocking alternatives (or as the youngsters name them, blockportunities), wild pitches and handed balls simply don’t occur all that always. We noticed solely 0.34 per sport. The common blockportunity has the next than 99% likelihood of getting blocked. Alejandro Kirk was the perfect blocker in baseball in 2025, and he racked up simply 0.19 extra blocks per sport than the typical participant. However, Austin Hedges ran the perfect shadow zone strike price within the sport at 48.6%. The league common was 42.2%, and if we do some arithmetic based mostly on his 1,595 shadow zone takes over 479 2/3 innings, we see that he earned 1.9 additional strikes per sport. That’s 10 occasions the variety of blocks per sport that Kirk saved.

So when you have much more alternatives to dam the ball, the precise variance between framer and a nasty framer is quite a bit greater on a per-pitch foundation than the distinction between and dangerous blocker. When it comes to total worth, Patrick Bailey’s league-best 25 framing runs trounced Kirk’s league-best 5 blocking runs. If you happen to needed to choose one talent to be good at, you’d select framing each time. Furthermore, if there have been a correlation, the variety of additional handed balls that may include being framer is perhaps so small that we’d not discover them until we ran the numbers.

Fortunately, you don’t have to decide on one. I ran the numbers, pulling profession blocking and framing numbers for each catcher with at the least 5,000 pitches caught from 2018 to 2025. That left a pattern of 125 catchers, and I broke their numbers down on a per-opportunity foundation for blocking and per-pitch foundation for framing. The correlation coefficient between framing runs per pitch and blocking runs per alternative is .44. That’s a constructive correlation, which implies that good framers aren’t dangerous blockers. In actual fact, it’s simply the other.

Within the scatter plot above, 72% of the dots are in both the higher proper or decrease left quadrant (or on a borderline). That’s to say that almost all catchers are both good at each framing and blocking or dangerous at each. It’s not all that frequent to be nice at one and dangerous on the different. Pitch framing is completely a hyper-specialized talent, however not a lot in order that it’s utterly divorced from the remainder of a catcher’s job. If you happen to’re good at catching the ball in such a manner you can rack up framing worth, you’re most likely simply good at catching the ball interval — or, on the very least, at retaining the ball in entrance of you.

That stated, when breaking down the numbers for various components of the zone, we are able to see some variations. When you don’t have to decide on between being framer and being blocker, the place you select to focus your framing talents issues at the least a bit. Unsurprisingly, the blocking talent is most strongly correlated with being framer on the backside of the zone and least strongly correlated on the prime. There may definitely be some choice bias right here. Catchers who obtain extra balls on the backside of the zone (possibly as a result of their pitchers are likely to throw extra breaking or offspeed stuff) will naturally be higher ready for all these low pitches. They’ll be higher at each blocking and framing them. It’s intuitive sufficient, and it’s actually arduous to be receiver in all quadrants of the zone.

Nonetheless, the strongest correlation to blocking within the desk above really comes on pitches over the guts of the plate. As soon as once more, gamers who obtain the ball effectively have a tendency to dam effectively too.

Even so, I did discover one spot the place the numbers did present a slight adverse correlation between framing worth and blocking worth, and it’s precisely the place you’d count on it. If we restrict our pattern to the gamers who’ve caught at the least 20,000 pitches, we find yourself with simply 51 gamers. For these gamers with probably the most sturdy particular person samples, the correlation coefficient between blocking and framing on the prime of the zone is -.07. It’s extraordinarily weak, however it’s a adverse correlation, which means that gamers who’re higher at framing on the prime of the zone do are usually worse at blocking.

I’d additionally be aware that we see extra framing alternatives on the backside of the zone than the highest, and that’s been true in yearly since Statcast began compiling framing numbers. Mix that with no matter small blocking bonus comes with being framer particularly on the backside of the zone, and you’ll perceive why one-knee-down catching has utterly taken over the game. Specializing in the low pitches simply appears sensible. Extra importantly, the automated ball-strike system is coming in 2026. Whereas it seems unlikely to obliterate the worth of framing, we don’t actually know the way it will have an effect on the sport on the massive league degree. Ought to framing worth take a success, the worth of blocking and stopping stolen bases may begin to catch up.