welp, I post him and he gets hurt the next game. Next man up is Player Profile: Gil Benoit - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports. I will be burning him to try and stay in the hunt with my best hitting player out for 23 games. Just don't think Rodriguez can play catcher with a 27 PC rating. Gil can start against lefties at least. Fortunately Payton's ratings didn't take an injury hit, which is lucky for a 23 game injury.

And to think, I wasted all that time drinking good whisky and chasing little oriental women when I could have been doing something like this. Where the hell did I lose track of my priorities.

Some in my world questioned my signing of this IFA (I'm in the NL so he'll have to catch). He's got another season and a half to finish baking in AAA but I'll be excited to see if his run production makes up for his lack of catching abilities. I'm banking on it.

https://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=9645167

That kid will be a stud. You can always put him in RF too if you do come upon a solid defensive catcher.

Jamier’s response is foolishness. Of course they can’t program in emotions per se, but they could have been using algorithms that were consistent with that emotional response. For example have pitch calling increase in value with each batter faced would produce that outcome. I’m not saying they did, just saying it would not have been that hard.

MikeT said he did analysis and landed at .012 points per point of pitch calling. I did an analysis of mine own looking at data from 2 seasons of all 32 teams in a world (I no longer recall which one). I came up with .0078 points of era per point of pitch calling that I have always rounded up to .008. Or to put it another way 12 points of pitch calling equals .1 ERA points in my analysis. As every other ratting I have measured escalates in value as it approaches 100 I imagine going from 80 to 100 is a little more valuable than going from 50 to 70. Not a huge difference, but a non 0 difference. Remember, I have not tested this. It would just be weird that a phenomenon that is true in power, speed, batting eye, and control wouldn’t be true here.

For what it's worth I've been testing it this season again.

Thus far we've got 745 innings caught for Miguel James (68 PC). He naturally got tired so we've given 377 innings behind the plate to Martin Berry (a SS with 19 PC) because by this point I've become convinced that PC is meaningless.

On the season, James has a CERA of 3.064, Berry has a CERA of 3.032.

Realistically the biggest difference is that James throws out only 15% of runners, whereas Berry throws out 31%. For what it's worth Berry also has a lower passed ball rate. At this point I think I may choose to start James for his bat, but bring Berry in as a defensive sub late in games. He looks to be the better defensive catcher (or at least James' equal) and this will keep James fresh otherwise.

What are their respective OAVvs?

PC directly affects OAV, not ERA. ERA is a composite of many factors including OAV, but you cannot draw conclusions using cERA, it's the wrong conclusion

Posted by bem7742 on 8/5/2019 4:10:00 PM (view original):
Some in my world questioned my signing of this IFA (I'm in the NL so he'll have to catch). He's got another season and a half to finish baking in AAA but I'll be excited to see if his run production makes up for his lack of catching abilities. I'm banking on it.

https://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=9645167

I've had a lot of success playing a very similar IFA in RF while also being in the NL

Player Profile: Marcell Rodriguez - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports

He doesn't have great stamina but I'm fortunate to have both Player Profile: Ed Payton - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports, who plays C and RF, and Player Profile: Chuck Lange - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports as well.

Having Payton and Rodriguez in the lineup can be brutal to opposing pitchers. Rodriguez has only played 17 total innings at C, 0 this season. He has 8 negative plays at RF and 1 positive play this season in 770 innings with a fld% of .939. Certainly not great but his bad can make up for that deficiency.

Not sure I will ever play him at C again.

Update on Payton vs Lange.

Payton is hitting .935 OPS in a pitchers park while catching at a 4.19 era clip.

Lange is hitting .754 OPS and CERA at 3.31.

that’s .88 runs better a game for Lange

I don’t know how to translate OPS to runs per game but I guess RC/27 might help. Lange is at 4.49 while Payton leads my team at 7.63. Would that be a way to look at the importance of Payton being in the lineup?

I understand that PC supposedly influences OAV, but realistically, I'm not going to go through and sort every single at bat by which catcher was playing and the end result, which is what I'd need to get OAV, or things like WHIP or Slugging/OPS allowed, especially when CERA is already provided.

More than that, after a large enough sample size (5+ seasons should do it) of playing different catchers in the same situations, any differences in OAV, WHIP, etc should be fairly accurately reflected in runs allowed. By this point, if they're not strongly correlated, it would just mean one catcher was doing something else to prevent runs, which is (after all) the name of the game.

You have inspired me to try it out. I have a team that is rebuilding, but I am gunning for the leagues SB record (got to have something to play for in rebuild years), so I'm going to be alternating between these two guys at Catcher. Player Profile: Luis Ortiz - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports
and Player Profile: Javier Duran - Hardball Dynasty Baseball | WhatIfSports

Ortiz has played 25 Games at C the team has allowed 109 R 208 Hits 89 Walks and 155 K's
Duran is up next...

I have two guys that have shared catcher duties on my team for 8 seasons.

Saul Arcia, 62 PC, 4861 Innings, 3.71, cERA (with a range from 3.16 to 4.12)
Rube Martinez, 76 PC, 5508 Innings, 3.70 cERA (with a range from 3.48 to 4.24)

Neither their lows nor their highs were in the same season, so it wasn't a pitching staff thing. The largest variation between the two in any one season was 0.59. The average variation was 0.29. Each of them was better than the other in four of the eight seasons.

I don't know what this says about cERA overall, and I know it's two players over eight seasons, which in the grand scheme of things ain't much of a sample size. But, I'm comfortable saying there's no discernible difference between a 62 PC and a 76 PC.

I ran a similar analysis as OP and found no effect, using 8 seasons.

I thought a lot about the experimental design components, and I think mine was setup perfectly. One catcher faced righties, one faced lefties, so they basically caught against randomly different offenses.

If there is an effect, I think it’s probably very small and hard to detect, and has deterred me from
investing too much in PC.

you guys are playing chess while the rest of us play checkers!

There are too many moving pieces to determine so I simply go with what the FAQ reads, Over the long haul, having a catcher with a low pitch calling rating is going to cost his staff .005 - .015 points in batting average allowed which is very significant.

Also, often times a catcher with elite pitch calling will also have average to above average arm and arm accuracy and these type of catcher have a superior ability limit stolen bases or turn stolen bases into outs. This can have a significant affect on ERA.

So a guy like Atchley has played nearly 3500 innings behind the plate and has given up 83 stolen bases while nailing 84 guys as they attempted to steal a base would have a lower CERA than a guy like Douglas who has played 5750 innings behind the plate and given up 452 stolen bases and nailed 152 guys as they attempted to steal a base. The stats don't give the catcher's BAA and since the FAQ reads that the pitching calling rating correlates to BAA, it would take a lot of work to determine if what the FAQ reads is still accurate.