How the Twins' Catcher Positioning is Scaling Improvements for the Pitching Staff

[Jamie Cameron]

"Evaluating catchers is really hard, and I don’t think anyone has gotten it right yet," said Ryan Jeffers, in a recent interview at Twins Daily’s Winter Meltdown. What did he mean? How hard is it to untangle catcher performance? What can we make of what the Twins have asked Jeffers to emphasize in supporting his batterymates?

Image courtesy of © John Hefti-Imagn Images

We’ll start by digging into how the Twins' approach to positioning behind the plate has changed in the last five years. If you go back to 2021, Ryan Jeffers was 72nd percentile in MLB in framing (stealing strikes for pitchers by subtly bringing the ball back toward the middle of the zone to blur the edges of the strike zone for umpires). Jeffers has since regressed significantly in that metric. In 2023, he fell to the 25th percentile; in 2024, to the 5th percentile. Zoinks! Did Jeffers suddenly lose his ability to frame? Not so fast. There’s a more reasonable explanation. 

As of 2022, the Twins started asking Jeffers to set up middle-middle, particularly in 0-0 counts. The premise here is setting a clear target for the pitcher within the borders of the strike zone. That might sound counterintuitive. I can hear an annoyed Bert Blyleven on a Twins telecast: "The catcher wanted the pitch down, but he left it middle-middle."

But let’s pump the brakes. Why does this ‘targeting’ approach make sense?

First, let’s make some distinctions. I’ve led you off the path a bit by presenting framing and targeting as antithetical approaches to catching, they’re not. The Twins still emphasize framing. It’s just more of a challenge when you set up middle-middle. Why? Because your receiving arm is doing more of the heavy lifting. Your body position is removed as part of the disguise for umpires.

Let’s dig into why the middle-middle setup may be beneficial, some of the nuances, and the potential pitfalls. The emphasis on a more centralized setup comes from an intertwining of the Twins' pitching and evolving catching philosophies. Get ahead with strike one (that’s the catching part), and be nasty in the strike zone (the pitching part). Leveraged counts are important in baseball. There’s an enormous difference in run expectancy between a 1-0 count and an 0-1 count. If you set up a target down, up, inside, or outside, you’re less likely to get ahead, because your pitcher will be aiming for the edges of the zone.

It’s also worth noting that there’s much more complexity to the middle-middle approach than I’ve described so far. Often, a catcher will position their body middle-middle, flash the pitcher's target elsewhere in the strike zone with a glove snap, then bring their mitt back to the center of the plate.

To get back to some of the more obvious conclusions. If the middle-middle catcher setup promotes leveraged counts (getting ahead), this should increase strikeouts and decrease walks for pitchers, but conversely, it can increase hard contact (for pitches that hit their target and are left in an undesirable quadrant of the strike zone).

At this point, we should dig into miss rate as a relevant stat. There’s a general mythology in baseball (it’s mostly romanticism and nostalgia) that most pitchers' command is better than it really is. Here’s a mind-blowing stat: An average MLB fastball misses its target by 12-13 inches. Wow! Home plate is just 17 inches wide. If you’re wondering about other pitch types, the general range is somewhere from 11-13 inches on average.

As stuff and velocity increase, those numbers may also increase, because the mechanical factors that beget high-end spin and speed also tend to exaggerate the magnitude of errors. For me, it added a completely new lens through which to view control and command, but also, how, where, and why a catcher sets up in a particular fashion. If an average miss is roughly 70% the width of home plate (even understanding that some of that miss is vertical, and some horizontal), setting up middle-middle feels more comfortable.

Before digging into some numbers for the Twins to contextualize this discussion, I want to plant a seed. Perhaps considering balls and strikes is too simplistic a binary for viewing battery performance. Instead, I’ll offer this modification: strikes, good misses, and bad misses. In this alternate reality of pitch classification, what we think of as ‘balls’ have been further subdivided into two categories; ‘good misses’ that batters cannot make quality contact with, and ‘bad misses’, the type of pitch that ends up earning air miles.

Let’s start with some high-level numbers centering on Twins pitching. They ranked first in MLB in Location+ in 2024. That’s a count- and pitch type-adjusted stat that measures how well the pitcher can put the ball in the right place. It’s also worth noting that the Twins were second in MLB in 2024 in pitches thrown over the heart of the plate (27.5%), but 11th in xwOBA for those pitches, which speaks to their ability to be nasty in the zone.

Promising, globally, but let’s get a little more specific. Are Twins pitchers throwing more pitches in the middle of the zone since their change in catcher positioning? Simply put: yes. Let’s compare the number and percentage of pitches thrown in the Heart zones (not just in the zone, but well within it, where strikes are certain but damage lurks) in 0-0 counts by the Twins rotation when the setup was more geared toward framing to what they've done since the change.

In 2021, Twins starters totaled 647 pitches (6.5% of all first pitches) in the Heart zones in 0-0 counts. In 2024, that number was up to 978 pitches (8.5%). Did this result in more strikes? Of course. In 2021, the Twins rotation accrued 324 called strikes over the heart of the plate in 0-0 counts. Last year, it was up to 444 called strikes. More pitches over the heart of the plate, more called strikes, more pitcher-friendly counts. Seems compelling.

Does an increased number of pitches in the Heart zones (particularly in 0-0 counts) result in more contact? Just as predictably, yes. In 2021, pitches thrown by Twins starters in 0-0 counts in the Heart zones resulted in 48 hits, as opposed to 75 hits in 2024, with a more catcher middle-middle setup. (Pablo López was a big part of that problem.) That’s a significant difference. If we can draw a high-level conclusion here, the Twins are walking the tightrope of being more in the zone (and the middle of the zone, especially) early in counts, and living with the tradeoff of significantly more contact by doing so. Before we dig into another layer of data, though, I’ll caveat our discussion thus far as (at best) overly simplistic. The above numbers assume a wholly middle-middle setup in 2024 and the opposite in 2021. That’s obviously not the case, but these data are (at the very least) interesting kernels.

We can see how a pitcher performs in different portions of the plate by run value. Those numbers paint a rosy picture for Twins starters. Using Bailey Ober and Joe Ryan (the two starters consistent across both 2021 and 2024), we can see Ryan improved from a zero run value over the heart of the plate in 2021, to +2 runs in 2024. For Ober, it was even more compelling, increasing from +5 runs over the heart of the plate to +9. That’s a 6-run improvement over two pitchers, and I’d posit that the Twins' focus is on scaling improvement (by as many pitchers as possible) as opposed to focusing on catcher performance. Jeffers's framing has regressed to the effect of about 10 lost runs from 2021 to 2024, but we’ve seen 60% of that deficit made up by the improved performances of Ober and Ryan in the strike zone. 

The challenge that Jeffers alluded to (evaluating catcher performance) is a moving target, because we’re trying to isolate one aspect of a symbiotic relationship, each of the elements of which can’t exist or thrive without the other. Consider the myriad variables we haven’t discussed: how catcher positioning might vary based on pitch type (movement and velocity); the offensive tendencies of the batter; the list is endless.

It’s impossible to pick apart the impact of each side of the battery. What we can see, though, is that the Twins and other organizations are getting more value (in the form of leveraged counts) from middle-middle catcher positioning than they're losing; the approach is advantageous to the battery in certain counts and situations. While I don’t feel confident we can be perfectly certain that the setup is leading to better misses from pitchers, I think we can infer that teams are paying attention to the quality of misses from their pitching staffs.

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[chpettit19]

The press release from the Twins from 2 weeks ago says Tucker Frawley is their minor league catching coordinator. 

This TD article by Seth also lists him as the catching coordinator. 

Did he switch teams in the last 2 weeks or is there bad info out there on who the Twins catching coordinator?

[Parker Hageman]

16 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

The press release from the Twins from 2 weeks ago says Tucker Frawley is their minor league catching coordinator. 

This TD article by Seth also lists him as the catching coordinator. 

Did he switch teams in the last 2 weeks or is there bad info out there on who the Twins catching coordinator?

I also thought there was an error in the press release so I messaged Dustin Morse but there is actually a SECOND Tucker Frawley now taking the role that a different Tucker Frawley vacated. 

[Riverbrian]

10 minutes ago, Parker Hageman said:

I also thought there was an error in the press release so I messaged Dustin Morse but there is actually a SECOND Tucker Frawley now taking the role that a different Tucker Frawley vacated. 

There is only ONE Parker Hageman. 

[chpettit19]

34 minutes ago, Parker Hageman said:

I also thought there was an error in the press release so I messaged Dustin Morse but there is actually a SECOND Tucker Frawley now taking the role that a different Tucker Frawley vacated. 

Now there's something we need a stat for. What are the odds of that?!

[Parfigliano]

2 hours ago, chpettit19 said:

Now there's something we need a stat for. What are the odds of that?!

Pretty good if it's father-son

[Linus]

This was interesting.  It brings me back to my basic beef with framing as a metric.  It’s a real thing but it can’t be accurately quantified.

[chpettit19]

30 minutes ago, Parfigliano said:

Pretty good if it's father-son

That would need to be accounted for in the Frawley Factor.

[Karbo]

I'll be happy to see the auto strike zone and do away with this framing stat.

[tarheeltwinsfan]

6 hours ago, Parker Hageman said:

I also thought there was an error in the press release so I messaged Dustin Morse but there is actually a SECOND Tucker Frawley now taking the role that a different Tucker Frawley vacated. 

No way. What are the odds?

[DocBauer]

This was an AMAZING breakdown! It really made a TON of sense, while continuing to prove that it's almost impossible to accurately measure what is a good defensive catcher. Maybe it really comes down to what each team is looking to GET from their catchers.

I've always said that the most important part of being a catcher is calling the game, and working with the staff, and providing CONFIDENCE for the staff. (BTW, Jeffers really showed just how intelligent he really is during his interview in the Meltdown. If you haven't listened to it, please do so).

I often shake my head in the various debates here on TD concerning Jeffers vs Vazquez. So much division on opinions! A fairly recent OP on TD had someone post pitching numbers over the past 2 seasons between Jeffers and Vazquez and while the numbers weren't far off, it would seem Jeffers was the better receiver. But there's still so much randomness from those close statistics...who caught who the most, as well as the quality of the stuff thrown by each pitcher, etc...that no real conclusion could be reached.

That Jeffers is the younger player, with a much better bat, and more potential is a fact. That Vazquez has been well below average as a hitter is also a fact. But if we look beyond offense and OPS and just focus on the results of the Twins pitching, I think it's fair to say both catchers are doing the job that's intended: lead the staff to perform well.

Is Vazquez overpaid? Yes, probably. Has his offense been less than hoped for and generally pretty bad? Yes. But his salary put aside, he's a veteran catcher who has the confidence of the staff, and the team in general. Same with Jeffers. 

It's doubtful Vazquez is back in 2026, but not impossible. The Twins are probably going to look to find a different partner to pair with Jeffers for 2026 and beyond. But I do wish, for a moment, both sides of the "who's really better" behind the plate would just realize and accept that BOTH seemingly do their primary job pretty well, which is handle the staff.

[thelanges5]

Vázquez can be a good mentor for Cartaya and Camargo. They’ll be battling in 2025 to determine who is backing up Jeffers in 2026 ⚾️

[Jeff K]

10 hours ago, DocBauer said:

This was an AMAZING breakdown! It really made a TON of sense, while continuing to prove that it's almost impossible to accurately measure what is a good defensive catcher. Maybe it really comes down to what each team is looking to GET from their catchers.

I've always said that the most important part of being a catcher is calling the game, and working with the staff, and providing CONFIDENCE for the staff. (BTW, Jeffers really showed just how intelligent he really is during his interview in the Meltdown. If you haven't listened to it, please do so).

I often shake my head in the various debates here on TD concerning Jeffers vs Vazquez. So much division on opinions! A fairly recent OP on TD had someone post pitching numbers over the past 2 seasons between Jeffers and Vazquez and while the numbers weren't far off, it would seem Jeffers was the better receiver. But there's still so much randomness from those close statistics...who caught who the most, as well as the quality of the stuff thrown by each pitcher, etc...that no real conclusion could be reached.

That Jeffers is the younger player, with a much better bat, and more potential is a fact. That Vazquez has been well below average as a hitter is also a fact. But if we look beyond offense and OPS and just focus on the results of the Twins pitching, I think it's fair to say both catchers are doing the job that's intended: lead the staff to perform well.

Is Vazquez overpaid? Yes, probably. Has his offense been less than hoped for and generally pretty bad? Yes. But his salary put aside, he's a veteran catcher who has the confidence of the staff, and the team in general. Same with Jeffers. 

It's doubtful Vazquez is back in 2026, but not impossible. The Twins are probably going to look to find a different partner to pair with Jeffers for 2026 and beyond. But I do wish, for a moment, both sides of the "who's really better" behind the plate would just realize and accept that BOTH seemingly do their primary job pretty well, which is handle the staff.

I agree with your comments except the one around Vazquez possibly back in 2026.  I guess he could miraculously rediscover how to hit, but i would not bet a thing on it.