Embracing Art Instead of Science, William Contreras is Back to Framing Well

Pitch framing was the first huge, game-changing insight we gained when PITCHf/x started capturing data on every pitch thrown in MLB, over 15 years ago. It's something many people around and within the game had talked about as a skill over the previous decades, but technology allowed the industry to measure it quantitatively and in granular fashion, for the first time. As such, it's one of the most science-forward aspects of the sport, in terms of the way it's discussed, dissected, and taught.

At its heart, though, all sport is art. It's expression through physical movement, and it's about emotion and purpose, even if most people who consume it tend to think about outcomes and efficiency. Science can inform many parts of the endeavor of playing baseball, including framing, but it can't satisfactorily convey what's happening, because science is about those outcomes and the causal relationship between movements, whereas sports are really about the process, and the aesthetic, emotive, visceral relationship between movements.

That paradox--being an artist in a highly competitive environment, where the prevailing language is centered on science, not art--is easier to resolve for some players than for others. What knits all ballplayers together is their competitiveness, but for some, that competitive drive is easily couched in functional terms: I do X because it achieves outcome Y. For others, competing means staying so much in the moment and so much in your muscles that the kind of abstract, objective thought around which framing models are built feels completely alien, and completely unacceptable. Willson Contreras, of the Cardinals, has never been a good pitch framer, largely because he's so much the latter kind of person that his competitive drive interferes with his framing, rather than augmenting it.

His brother, William Contreras, is a slightly different breed--but only slightly. Both players show raw emotion, swagger, and some defensiveness, on and off the field. William is a little bit less explosive, temperamentally, but not necessarily more cerebral. When the Brewers got ahold of him in December 2022, they quickly went about re-training him as a receiver, because whatever efforts his employers in Atlanta had made in that vein, they'd failed to connect.

There were some basic, ineluctable, important mechanical changes Contreras needed to make, and Charlie Greene, Nestor Corredor, and Walker McKinven helped him make them. However, you could sometimes see the way Contreras's brain and body rebelled against the rigidity of state-of-the-art pitch framing, even in his first sterling season with the Crew.

This spring, that discomfort was even more evident. He got off to a poor start, and although things leveled out a bit in May, he was still far from being the version of himself we saw in 2023, when I checked back in on him late in that month. In the aforelinked articles, we talked about him being a bit more herky-jerky down in the zone than he was last year, and about struggling with some specific pitch types and matchups. Some of the essential mechanics--the smooth uplift through the ball on low pitches, setting up on the proper knee and in the right depth of crouch on those at the edges--were just not as good as he'd shown last year.

There's good news, though. In fact, it's probably great news. Since June began, Contreras has flipped the script:

And better yet, he's done it his own way. Contreras is in his groove, rocking and rolling behind the plate. He hasn't come back into the fold and regained his textbook excellence as a framer; he's found his own way to achieve similarly strong results. This is a more sustainable version of Contreras, the Framer, because it's a more authentic reflection of who he is.

There's always some danger in statistically evaluating a catcher's framing over a short sample, the way I'm doing by offering his season split into chunks this way. That's not because we lack for a robust total sample; every regular catcher receives plenty of pitches in any given period to loosely estimate his success as a framer. In a given week or month, though, you might run into some especially pitcher-friendly or -unfriendly umpires, and it can distort the data. So, to break out of our prison of outcome-centric thinking, let's look at a pitch on which Contreras didn't get a borderline call.

You can argue that Contreras is a hair late--a little bit too snatchy--on this one, but it's a fringe call, and the umpire seemed never to have been disposed to give it. Still, there's some improvement to see here. Early in the season, Contreras was waiting until the ball was in his mitt on this type of pitch, then yanking conspicuously. It wasn't smooth, and it wasn't convincing. This catch was sound; it just wasn't rewarded with what would have been a slightly generous call.

Overall, though, he is getting more strikes, and it's not just because the Crew have had a few recent games in which umpires left the corners wide open. 

You have to give some credit for the above to Tobias Myers, who had great command Wednesday. The strike zone was also big all night, in both halves of each inning. Still, this is a pitch witch which Contreras especially struggled early in the campaign. He got into the habit of locking out his elbow reaching for breaking balls like that one, and it made it impossible for him to carry the ball smoothly up through the zone, the way he did here.

Let's take a look at a very different pitch, with the same result.

See how different those two setups are? In one, Contreras is hunched, his glove arm tucked inside a high left knee and his upper body leaning forward, bringing his eyes low and giving him stability. In the other, he's very upright, with the right knee up instead of the left but the mitt above his legs, anyway. Plainly, much of the reason for those differences lies in the pitch and location he's calling for. You want to be up higher for a high fastball than for a low breaking ball. Framing orthodoxy says you should be on different knees based on which side of the plate you want the ball to come to.

Here's the thing: Contreras isn't actually hewing to framing orthodoxy. He's not quite defying it, either. He's just absorbed a wide variation of different ways to set up, and he's using the full array. Sometimes, he sets up with his right knee up for a glove-side fastball from a righty pitcher. Other times, he sets up with his left knee up for the same pitch. Back in 2022, he simply set up his body wrong on a consistent basis. (Atlanta really doesn't know what they're doing when it comes to framing instruction.) In 2023 and very early this year, he was more often set up the way a sharp catching coordinator would have him, but for teams with sufficiently attentive advance scouting staffs, it was possible to figure out what the pitch call and location were, based on how Contreras set up. He went into those setups late enough to scupper any systematic effort to steal signs, as it were, but according to two sources, at least one team used a shout code from watchful teammates to give locations earlier this season against the Brewers.

Now, that would be impossible, because Contreras is moving (seemingly) according to nothing but his own gut. His setups still mostly fit what you'd expect, based on how framing is coached and what he's done in the past, but there are alternatingly subtle and obvious variations from the mold. Contreras is modulating his setups based not only on situation, pitch call, or location, but how he feels and what he's thinking. He hasn't shut down his brain, but he's in his muscles, not in his head.

This has all kinds of positive knock-on effects, too. We've seen him become more creative as a pitch-caller, doing things no hitter would anticipate, like calling for a high breaking ball going away from a same-handed batter.

Notice that that's not a missed location, but exactly the one Contreras called for. He wanted to start off a fairly dangerous hitter with a pitch that could have been obliterated, were it not perfectly located. Although he literally pushes buttons to call pitches on PitchCom, Contreras is breaking away from the push-button way of thinking about baseball. He doesn't have one of a series of four or five setups, based on pitch call and location. He doesn't have a selection of eight or 10 pitch and location combinations. Instead, he has as many different setups and options as there are pitches in a game.

All athletes are artists. Many don't want to admit it. Contreras, whether he would put it this way or not, has gradually evolved into a master of the art of pitch framing, even if it comes somewhat at the expense of the science of pitch framing. It's made him better, even within the last six weeks, and it could be a key to the Brewers sustaining their first-half success in run prevention over the balance of the season.