What Explains MLB’s Dramatic Drop In Passed Balls And Wild Pitches?
Image credit: (Photo by Bailey Orr/Texas Rangers via Getty Images)
We at Baseball America have written a lot about wild pitches, pitch blocking, one-knee down catching (OKD) and traditional setups over the past few years.
But this post by MLB’s Senior Data Architect TangoTiger inspired one more quick post on the subject.
I’ve tried to focus on what the data shows us over the years when it comes to pitch blocking, but the dramatic dip in passed ball/wild pitch rate beginning in 2022 is worth examining.
In 2022, the passed ball/wild pitch rate fell off a cliff. It went from being around the well-established high point we had been residing around for much of the past decade to one of the lowest numbers ever.
A mea culpa on my part. At the time, I saw that data and the steady increase in one-knee catching setups and noted that this dip was happening as more and more MLB catchers adopted the one-knee approach. I didn’t say correlation equaled causation, but I didn’t flag at the time what I believe now is a key driver of the change.
In talking to catchers and coaches since then, I think there’s a logical answer to the dramatic decline: 2022 is the first year where MLB allowed PitchCom. By 2023 the tech had reached near-universal adoption in the majors. Now, either the pitcher hears the catcher’s pitch call in his ear, or he simply tells the catcher what pitch he is going to throw.
So beginning in 2022, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of wild pitches and passed balls. It happened just at the time where catchers went from flashing numerous complicated signs with runners on base to the catcher and pitcher easily understanding what pitch is going to be thrown. And with that, baseball eliminated a massive cause of crossed-up catchers expecting one pitch and getting a different one.
There may be other factors at play, but one pro catcher estimated that 20-25% of his passed balls over the years came from cross-ups. The drop in passed balls/wild pitches in 2022 compared to 2021 was 16%.
So when you see that dip in 2022 and 2023, while I can’t prove it empirically, it probably is largely based around the adoption of a technology that improved catcher-pitcher communication.
If you want to try to see other trends at play on this chart, you could make a point that the passed ball/wild pitch rate began to climb in the 2010-2015 era, which not coincidentally coincides with an increased awareness on how catchers’ receive pitches to try to “pitch frame” to nab more borderline strike calls.
It’s hard to prove that just by looking at the data, but there’s a clear logic to this. If a catcher is trying to receive pitches at the bottom or edges of the zone in a way that makes it look like a strike, they may be trading off some level of ease of receiving in exchange for more called strikes. So the rise of more wild pitches and passed balls at that point seems to be a potentially logical off-shoot of a new trend in catching.
That rise in the 2010-2015 range has nothing to do with one-knee down catching, because that really wasn’t being done at the major league level at that time. The one-knee revolution in the majors begins around 2017-2018, when catching coach Tanner Swanson brought it to the Twins. By 2019, the Twins were adopting it in the minor leagues as well. It quickly spread to many other MLB teams and by now, it’s the dominant approach for MLB catchers.
Multiple studies we have done at Baseball America seem to indicate that it is hard to find any difference in the blocking rates of one-knee MLB catchers when compared to MLB catchers with traditional setups, although the ability to get more called strikes on borderline pitches goes way up for one-knee setups as compared to catchers with traditional setups. And looking at this chart, it’s hard to see any clear rise in passed ball/wild pitch rates as one-knee catching went from being almost non-existent in 2017 and 2018 to the dominant form of receiving in 2022 and 2023.
But if anything, the cost-benefit analysis for catchers to use one-knee down setups in the majors has gone up with the adoption of PitchCom. Even if you believe that one-knee setups increase the risks of wild pitches and passed balls (which is something for which seems to be no confirming data in the major leagues), if wild pitches/passed balls are at a historically low rate, the benefits in pitch framing become even more magnified.
