Does William Contreras Give Away His Pitch Calls with His Stances? A Brief Investigation

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The timestamp on the tweet, which I only found out about hours later, was 7:36 PM CT. That's when Kevin Gausman, who pitched most of the last half-decade for the Blue Jays and was dealt to the Cubs just before this year's trade deadline, sent his first social-media missive since a thought about hockey two weeks earlier. It reads like it might have been intended as a direct message—like he was having a conversation already.

Maybe that's true; maybe it's not. Either way, it caught the eyes of many fans, but no one made much sense of it. Twitter is a disaster these days. The replies devolved almost immediately into either pointless name-calling or pleas for the beloved veteran to reverse his recent decision to put his house on the market in Toronto, and to re-sign with the Blue Jays. Seriously, what was once Twitter is useless, anymore.

Being a relatively healthy human being, though, Gausman seems to spend relatively little time on the app, so maybe he hasn't noticed how futile it is to cast interesting pearls before the bots. Again, maybe it's not even that, but that he has a relationship with someone that runs through Twitter DMs and just entered this thought in the wrong pop-up text box. Anyway, here's what he said:

This was just when Logan Henderson was getting done walking Victor Mesa Jr. to lead off the top of the second inning. You can make a case that it was sent at the very lowest moment of the game for the Brewers. Yes, they'd given up four first-inning runs, as the Rays teed off on Henderson, but then they'd responded with a two-run boutade of their own. They needed Henderson to do what Drew Rasmussen hadn't: provide a shutdown inning and maintain the momentum they had just generated. That walk to Mesa was a very bad omen.

It reads like Gausman is suggesting that the Rays knew what was coming. Pitch-tipping is a constant topic of conversation around the game these days, and as hard as Tampa battered Henderson to begin the game, maybe they really did have something on him. If he subsequently cleaned that up, it would explain how the Rays went from hammering him to barely touching him (or anyone else) the rest of the night. Gausman is very familiar with the Rays, having pitched so long in the AL East, so there might be a firm foundation for his suspicions along those lines.

If you imagine that we parachuted into an ongoing discussion of pitch-tipping in the context of this game, the tweet makes plenty of sense. But Gausman is branching that conversation off in a new direction. The long-time hurler seems to be instinctively defending his brethren. He's implying that even if the Rays have something that's telling them what's coming, it might not be Henderson's fault. The other party involved—the one who might be guilty, since Gausman is exculpating Henderson—is catcher William Contreras.

One of baseball's unwritten rules is that batters aren't supposed to peek at the catcher to get a clue about the likely location of the upcoming pitch. Hitters break that rule all the time. Even if they didn't, though, imagine you're in a tense and high-energy environment, and someone is just a few feet behind you, shuffling and leaning and moving. You're going to feel them. You're going to catch a glimpse of their shadow (yes, there are shadows on a big-league field, even ones we don't always see on TV broadcasts and ones cast by stadium lights, rather than the sun). Hitters often know where a catcher is. That's why many catchers set decoy locations or wait as long as possible before getting into their final stance to receive a pitch, even with the bases empty. The gist of Gausman's gossipy note, in my opinion, is that Contreras was giving away either pitch type or location based on his setup for each pitch in the sequence from Henderson to Mesa.

Let's test that claim. Let's take a still-frame look at each pitch in the sequence, at the same moment in Henderson's delivery—and then process some information about what Mesa might have gleaned from that moment.

Pitch No. 1: Changeup Away - Called Strike

This is, for the moment, just our baseline. We're establishing what it all looks like.

Pitch No. 2: Changeup Down and Away - Ball

Ok, something different is happening here. Both knees are down for this pitch; that's unusual. We'll keep an eye on it.

Pitch No. 3: Fastball Up and Away - Ball

At first glance, this is very similar to the first pitch, but you can spot some important (though subtle) differences. Contreras is setting a higher target, but sitting lower to the ground. His body position does say, if you're looking for clues, that he's about to try to get on top of a riding fastball and hold it in place at the top of the strike zone.

Pitch No. 4: Fastball Inside - Ball

The other thing Gausman could have been implying, for what it's worth, is that Henderson losing pitches at the edges of the zone is not necessarily his fault, because Contreras might not be framing them well enough—or that the way he's setting up is not conducive to Henderson throwing strikes. On this pitch, Henderson misses all the way across the plate from his intended target, but it almost nips the inside edge—close enough to doing so that Contreras even challenged the call, albeit unsuccessfully. Note that this is the first pitch of the sequence in which Contreras's left knee is down, but his right one is up.

Pitch No. 5: Fastball, Up and Away - Ball 4

Here, we return to the default fastball receiving stance, when the target is up and away from a lefty: down low in the crouch, glove high.

There are some very good takes in this sequence by Mesa. Of the four balls, at least two were the type of pitch that often gets a swing. It's possible he had an inkling of what was coming, one way or another. Is Gausman right to suggest that Contreras might be to blame for that?

Here's everyone's favorite answer: Maybe. That's the best I can do. I would lean toward 'no,' but 'yes' is on the table, even if it's way down at the other end of it. Here's the essential breakdown.

When a lefty batter is at the plate and a righty hurler is throwing them a four-seam fastball, Contreras has his right knee down and his left knee up 78% of the time. It's the other way around 17% of the time. That's a fairly significant shift since 2025, when the split was 66% and 26%—and in the playoffs, it's been much more extreme. In October, right-handed Brewers pitchers have thrown 173 four-seamers to left-handed batters, and Contreras has been in the right-knee-down stance 92% of the time, against just 5% left-knee-down. That's worth knowing.

It only matters, though, if there's some separation we can detect between that tendency and the stances Contreras uses on other pitches Henderson might have thrown Mesa. There isn't. When righty hurlers thrown lefty batters changeups, Contreras shifted from a 67/27 split last season to an 82/16 split this year. This month—you'll never guess—the split is 92/5. On cutters, it was a 72/21 split in 2025 and an 88/8 split in 2026. Of the 55 cutters righty Brewers have thrown to lefties in the playoffs, Contreras has gone right-knee-down, left-knee-up 55 times—every single time. Contreras has made a major shift toward using the right-knee-down stance this year, across all pitch types and target locations, so there's not much to read into things in that sense.

He does go with both knees down much more often on changeups than on fastballs. Specifically, we might speculate that he goes to that stance when the changeup is supposed to be down below the zone, whereas (as we see on the first pitch, above) he'll keep the left knee up when the goal is to throw it for a strike. He extends his leg farther more often on the changeup than on fastballs. There are subtle differences one could learn to spot, and yes, they can be spotted even by a hitter in the box, if they know what to feel or look for.

Contreras isn't giving away the game, either via framing or tipping his pitchers' hands. There's something there, maybe, but it's tiny. This isn't why the Rays were all over Henderson early in Game 2, and it's not a weakness in Contreras's game. There's a tendency that might be very slightly exploitable, but Contreras has become flexible and unpredictable enough to minimize the risk of that exploitation. Whether this is what Gausman was talking about or not, there's very little chance (though not quite none) the Rays were getting the drop on Milwaukee at any point via the man behind the dish.