Are HOF Catchers worth the money?

[tcblcommish]

Originally Posted by Pelican

True. Spoken like a former catcher. When my youngest son took up catching in Little League, it totally changed my focus as a doting parent. At any other position (except, of course, pitcher), I could wait for the crack of the bat, and look to see if the ball was hit to (or near; or by; or through) my kid. And after the game, amazing how beat up he was from blocking pitches in the dirt, squatting in the heat, chasing pops. As an OF, for me it was truly a lot of standing around, waiting for something to happen.

I played catcher for quite a while, even in men's baseball leagues, you do get beat up. I remember after a tournament, I caught every game and when I got home after it was all over, I had bruises all over me. Sore and pretty tender and just fatigued. I honestly have no idea how these catchers play as much as they do, I didn't even face guys throwing 90+.

I love having a great catcher on my team but usually prefer great fielding and arm. Hitting is a bonus. Never really had too many HOF catchers though.

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[Syd Thrift]

Just from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, a "Hall of Fame" catcher doesn't really get all the way into it, I don't think. They've lowered the effectiveness of pitch framing to put it more in line with the modern era but I think you've got to ask yourself a few questions:

- How much better than other catchers is my guy offensively? I don't think WAR quite gets at catcher value as fully as it could in this sense; you can have a .180 hitting catcher kind of easily nowadays. Whether or not catcher defense is still as important as it used to be, there are are fewer good hitting catchers to go around compared to pretty much every position except shortstop.

To a great extent, replacement level really varies from team to team. Do *you* have access to a pretty good but not great guy you can use at catcher? The drop-off from a MIke Piazza to a Dan Wilson might not be all that much, but if all you can scrounge together is, like, early career Brent Mayne or, worse, Rob Johnson, Piazza's a big, big difference.

- Are your settings for framing the default settings? I pushed mine up from 5 (the defaults) to 7 precisely because I'm playing in an earlier era where people hadn't done studies, it was just a thing everyone had suspected, and most importantly MLB didn't get a hold of those studies and train all catchers up to a minimum level of competence in this sense. Anyway, this is why I did this, and if you bumped up your framing for similar reasons, a guy with good ability will be worth that much more.

- What kind of pitchers do you have? Good framing increases strikeouts and decreases walks. My guess is that this is done on a rate basis, so if your team is full of finesse guys, a good pitch framer will probably have less of an effect than if your team is all power pitchers.

- What's your offensive environment like? People steal less today than they did in the 70s and 80s and now that the game distributes steals more realistically (i.e. you'll have a few speedsters in the league with good SB rates and a lot of slower guys who get picked off or just steal badly) this IMO makes arm more important if you're in an environment with a lot of steals. In the modern environment, maybe not so much, but if you're, like, doing a 70s replay, Johnny Bench is going to be super useful.