Shea,

I appreciate your time and your willingness to humor me with this analysis. I’m not sure how familiar you are with my program, but I've been running The Catching Camp for the last 22 years and have worked with over 16,000 catchers worldwide in that time via, live camps, private lessons, remote video analysis, etc. Feel free to check out the “About” portion of my site for more background on me.

This won’t be the first analysis I’ve done for an athlete at your level, and I want to make sure you understand that anything we discuss related to this will 100% stay between us unless you decide otherwise.

As I mentioned, I have been developing an e-book over the last several years and have gone back over a lot of material in order to keep my information up to date and to properly reflect what I believe to be the best approach to receiving. I pull a lot of content from MLB for instructional purposes and the hard data that BaseballSavant and Baseball Prospectus has given people access to is truly revolutionary.

With more and more emphasis being put on receiving efficiency, I was curious to see which catchers at the MLB level were the most proficient at earning strikes towards the bottom of the zone, and using BaseballSavant’s video library, attempt to find some commonality with the physical approach to the skill.

This will be the portion of the analysis that I want to tread carefully because nothing i’m about to say is in any way meant to disrespect you or as an insult. But, what I found was that when it comes to the run value attached to your receiving skillset in 2023, Baseball Savant has you rated 74th out of 74 MLB catchers this season. Baseball Prospectus 72/74.

I dove into the data and the video and found something very interesting…

Out of all MLB catchers you actually have stolen the 14th most strikes on pitches thrown below the strikzone and should have been called balls (graph on the left). But, on pitches thrown to the bottom of the strike zone that should have been called strikes, only Keibert Ruiz has lost more (graph on the right)..

Now, I’ll admit, I do think some of the issues you’ve had have been due to your staff doing you no favors with a ton of misses to the opposite of the plate from where you called for the pitch. But upon diving into the video to see if there was a consistent reason other than that, a fairly obvious, but easily fixable one presented itself.

You do a nice job getting your body and glove underneath the ball to start, but what I am seeing is a release of the glove load too early. You are routinely bringing the glove up to “neutral” before you can be sure it’s the correct angle of attack, or you bring the glove up above the break point of the pitch and end up chasing it out of the zone.

Take a look at some of the clips below…

In all of these clips, you do a great job in setting up to create a positive attack angle from the ground up, but you don’t wait long enough to take advantage of that setup, and it causes your mitt to get pulled outside the strikezone at pitch contact.

VIDEO 1:

In this clip you can see your glove leave the ground far too early and you end up above the ball. Part of the issue here is that you’re lifting your glove off the ground from your shoulder. If you wait just a little bit longer to move the glove off the ground, slow your approach to the ball and create the upward movement by extending your arm from your elbow, you’ll not only protect the bottom of the zone, but you’ll create the counterforce necessary to prevent your mitt from leaving the zone after the contact of the ball. If my glove is going to move in any direction after contact, I’d rather it be towards the strikezone.

Here’s J.T. Realmuto with a similar pitch, location, pitcher handedness showing what I mean:

Notice how his glove stays below the ball at all times. And, when he finally makes his move towards the ball, his glove is moving up. His glove never moves away from the strikezone.

VIDEO 2:

In this clip you can again clearly see your glove being pulled off the ground early from your shoulder and is almost immediately above the break point of the pitch. The only place it can go from here is back down. Now watch how Jason Delay (top 12 most valuable receiving catchers in MLB in 2023) handles a similar pitch:

You can see how insanely long Delay waits to start his move up and focuses more on staying underneath the ball, protecting the bottom of the zone. This could definitely have gone either way, but it isn’t ever called a strike if his glove is ever moving down at pitch contact.

VIDEO 3:

Pretty much the same theme here, and you can see how your extension is in a downward motion towards the ball rather than working up underneath it. Here’s MLB’s No. 1 rated receiver Austin Hedges handling a similar pitch.

Similar theme here, as his extension towards the ball is in an upward trajectory. He waits as long as he can to ensure his glove stays underneath the ball. Hedges is actually also a guy to take a look at to see what he does when is accidentally comes off the ground too early or too abruptly. He does a pretty good job of stopping his downward action with the mitt and immediately reverses course to get his mitt moving back towards the zone.

VIDEO 4:

This was a tough pitch. Set up away, possible bunt, lefty coming across to the side of the plate you were calling for the pitch. But, once the glove gets above the ball, its going to be very tough to keep this pitch looking like a strike no matter where it’s thrown. You can see the force of the ball and the downward angle of attack pushing the glove below the strikezone and inevitably leading to a ball. Take a look at how William Contreras (BaseballSavant’s No 3 rated catcher) receives this pitch.

You can see his path to the ball is always underneath it and lets that momentum carry his glove back towards the zone instead of pushing the ball lower.

To wrap up:

The first thought I had when I was looking through your video is that you have an incredibly high ceiling as far as your receiving goes. You have already established the angle of attack. Your approach just needs to slow down a bit, and let the mitt work under the ball longer. I think if you make that adjustment alone you’ll see a huge difference in your receiving efficiency.

I certainly appreciate your openness to the information and willingness to read through what I found.If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You have my cell in the IG message.

Regardless of anything you may or may not take from this, I appreciate your time and wish you all the best this season!

Best regards,

Jay Weaver

Owner | Co-Founder

The Catching Camp