One of the first things I got into when indexing plays, either at Baseball Reference or Baseball Savant, was to look and see what pitchers get the most called strikes out of the zone. I wrote about the topic for Fangraphs a few months ago which discussed Chicago Cubs’ starter Jon Lester‘s pattern of getting what I referred to as the ‘phantom strike’. I looked into the catching metrics, to include framing data, to see if his catchers were creating those opportunities. Essentially, it was out of the ‘glove’ of his catchers, post-David Rossera; Ross averaged 9.3 runs saved through his pitch framing skills. His predecessors did Lester no such favors.
Much like the Lester/Ross combo, the Arizona Diamondbacksappear to have a sneaky pair of batterymates. Actually, sneaky might be a slight but they are definitely getting away with something.
