Joe Mauer Wasn't Built to Be a Catcher. He Became One By Choice.

I think people forget that Carlos Delgado came up through the minor leagues as a catcher. They forget that Joey Votto signed as a catcher, and they even forget that Bryce Harper was a catcher in high school, as well as at the junior college where he played before being drafted first overall in 2010. It's easy to forget those things, because none of those guys were really catchers. Harper (and agent Scott Boras) got that right away. When Harper signed with the Nationals almost 15 years ago, he did it as an outfielder. He converted before even trying on a professional set of catcher's gear, because when you can hit like that, you don't hold yourself back by squatting nonstop and taking foul balls and surviving (this used to be a thing, kids, we swear) collisions at the plate.

Votto, Delgado, and Harper are just three of several examples of players who moved out from behind the plate pretty early in their professional careers. Plenty of others made the same move, and while some of those were because the player in question lacked the mental or physical chops to play that difficult position, it was more often for a simpler reason: they wanted to be big-leaguers. In fact, they wanted to be stars. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's everything right about their decisions. If you want to be the best big-league hitter you can be--the most explosive, the most successful, the most famous, the richest, or just the longest-lasting--you don't play catcher. To play catcher, in addition to being smart and charismatic and having a strong arm, you have to want to catch. You have to want that worse than stardom. You have to want it worse than the Hall of Fame.

Because of that, there aren't enough catchers in the Hall. Sometimes, a couple of the ones who are in there get ridiculed, because the Veterans Committee went through a phase during which they let in some of the wrong people, choosing them for reasons of favoritism rather than on merit, but there are too few catchers in the Hall, not too many. Great players who choose to stay at catcher accept some risk that they won't reach the Hall, or (since few players actively think about the Hall of Fame during the phase of their career during which they make these choices) that they just won't become All-Stars or sluggers. Catching is, itself, a sacrifice. That's one reason why most catchers aren't guys with Delgado's or Votto's or Harper's talent, but those without speed, or without bat speed, or without some other ingredient of stardom. It's a position played by many guys who don't have a choice, because they couldn't make it as shortstops or center fielders, or even first basemen or right fielders.

Joe Mauer had a choice. He was built like Votto, Delgado, and Harper, with their huge frame and their surprising blend of fluidity and strength. He could have moved out from behind the plate the moment he signed with the Twins. He didn't want to. Catching would eventually be taken away from him, but only by force--by medical coercion. 

It's not just that guys built like Mauer usually don't choose to catch. They're also badly made for it. Because of his height, Mauer was at a massive disadvantage as a pitch framer. In fact, he might not have been given much of a chance to catch, had he come along a decade later. The low pitch is hard to catch and hard to keep in the zone for a guy who stands 6-foot-4. That's one reason why so few catchers have ever been that tall.

We can't quantify Mauer's pitch framing for the first few years of his MLB career. PITCHf/x didn't become ubiquitous until 2008, so we can't pinpoint Mauer's strengths and weaknesses as a framer (except by sharing our memories) before that time. Here's where he was in 2008, though.

This chart shows Strikes Looking Above Average (SLAA) by pitch location. The picture tells the story better than I can. He was great at shaping the top of the zone, but lousy along the bottom edge of it. Here's his 2009 chart.

He still wasn't able to expand the zone at its bottom, but Mauer got better at shaping the zone at all four corners, including widening it slightly. In one year, he went from 3.1 runs worse than average as a framer to 5.7 runs better than average. Armed with technology (even if no one around him in the Twins front office understood how to make use of the data they had), Mauer improved significantly almost overnight. Here he is in 2010.

That blue band is getting a little thinner, and Mauer started really widening the plate on the third-base edge, where he could use his body to literally frame things for the umpire. For the final three seasons of his catching career, he did all that better and better.

The strike zone started drifting downward around this time, league-wide, which was a detriment to Mauer. Yet, he was able to move with it, even though the injuries were really piling up by thiat point. He never stopped working to improve behind the plate. He wanted every inch for his pitchers, and he learned how to do that as well and as fast as he could, despite his size and the way it made him seem miscast in that role.

Mauer wasn't a great hitter for a catcher. He was simply a great hitter, and a catcher. If he'd only done the first his whole career, as so many other players who looked and swung like him did, we'd have an easier time understanding what an extraordinary hitter he was. If he'd done that, he'd have had more than one season with the kind of power output we saw in 2009. If he'd done that, his career hit total might have been closer to 3,000 than to 2,000.

Personally, I notice the absence of those things on his record, but I don't miss or regret them. I'm grateful to Mauer for choosing to catch. He wanted every bit of baseball he could get his arms around; that meant putting himself in the heart of the thing. He chose baseball over football, but he also chose catching over some portion of baseball. Tuesday evening, he's going to reap the reward for that. It'll be well-earned.

Research assistance provided by TruMedia.