Brewers Catchers Set the Best Targets in the League, and Yes, That Matters

An exciting new way to measure command hit the baseball Twittersphere last month. It uses computer vision and that catcher's target to approximate that skill, and in the process of offering a new way to evaluate a pitching skill, it also unveiled something that makes Brewers backstops special.

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In August, former Phillies front-office wonk Doyoung-Tom Kim released an open-source method for evaluating pitchers' command, calling it OpenCommand. The model has been a hit in analytical circles, both because it seems to be well-designed and because Kim shared the coding and data he used to produce it, encouraging others to utilize and build on his work. Sure enough, after Kim got the ball rolling, others began doing interesting work with the data. For instance, Joshua Rodrigues of Baseball Prospectus wanted to know how often catchers set their targets in the horizontal center of the zone. Once he found that that varies from one catcher (and team) to another, he also found something unsurprising, but interesting: setting more central targets produces more pitches in the zone.

And hey, look at that. The Brewers do that more than any other team in the league, by a fair margin. Catchers William Contreras and Gary Sánchez set up in the middle of the plate over 80% of the time; they're demanding that their hurlers fill up the zone. and the pitchers are obliging.

A couple of caveats are worth mentioning here. Obviously, not every target is a real, suggested destination for the ensuing pitch. For multiple reasons, catchers sometimes offer decoy targets, or set their glove where the pitcher should "start" the ball, before letting the pitch's movement take it elsewhere. It's also true that the Brewers throw more fastballs than any other team in the league, which means setting a relatively central target, because fastballs are usually intended to be in the zone. There's even a Jacob Misiorowski factor, if you will. If you have Misiorowski (or Trevor Megill, or Abner Uribe, or the good version of Kyle Harrison) firing the ball in, there's little reason to get cute. Ask them to hit the center of the plate; hitters will struggle to handle it even if it's middle-middle.

Building on Rodrigues's finding, Lau Sze Yui attempted to model the value of catcher targets. The Brewers don't break the scale on this one; they don't even finish first. They're markedly above-average, though.

Yui's work has to apply one theoretical plan to every team, though. It can't quite capture the interaction value of the Brewers setting targets with plenty of zone around them, as part of their overall pitching philosophy. For instance, the Brewers' walk rate this year is not one of the best in the league. At 8.7%, they're close to average. For a team to throw as many fastballs as this one does and still walk this many opponents suggests that their real control is worse than average. Setting central targets and calling pitches that are easy to keep on the plate are probably vital to the team getting the great results they've gotten, overall.

The more layers you peel away in search of the Brewers' advantages over the league, the simpler their process seems. There's tons of nuance involved, and it all takes the expertise and skillful personal management of Chris Hook, Jim Henderson and others to accomplish, but the team really does find value on the mound from establishing the fastball and having their catchers set clear targets in the zone for their pitchers to hit. That sounds as old-fashioned as seeing the ball deep and hitting it the other way, but hey, that's how the team's offense keeps beating projections and expectations, too.

Modern baseball is unavoidably complex and technological. Teams have to keep doing great research, using advanced tools and evolving. However, much of that work can be put toward the goal of simply executing better on principles as old as the game itself. The Brewers do that better than anyone else, and every fancy new model that rolls out only seems to confirm that the club gets most of its edge from their old-school implementation of new-school notions.