Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
A lot of the time here in my Soapbox, I push back on people acting curmudgeonly and essentially tell them to lighten up. Every once in a while, though, I’m the curmudgeon. That day is today.
A handful of teams have started calling pitches from the dugout this season. That is, a coach is relaying to the catcher and pitcher which pitches to throw. This kind of hand-holding drives me nuts.
The culprits, to this point as best we can tell from beat reporting, are the , , and .
My hunch is that, as the years go by, we’re going to see more and more teams adopt this method and I utterly hate it. I still remember scoffing when I would see coaches calling pitches at the varsity level in high school. It feels like that’s the level where we can start to trust the catcher and pitcher to learn how to call games together.
The relationship there is a strong one, unlike many positions in this or any other sport. The pitcher is the most important player on the field and the catcher is tasked with receiving and presenting his pitches well for the umpire (though framing has become less relevant in the era of ABS). Many times, the catcher is not necessarily a “boss”-type authority but is the on-field general. The leadership aspect, for me, is undercut when a catcher has to look at the dugout for guidance on every single pitch.
Do I need to lighten up here? Yeah, probably. It’s fine, though. I’m human. When I see a coach calling the game from the dugout instead of a catcher, my skin crawls. I told you I was the curmudgeon here. Maybe it’s a personal thing since my brother, the catcher, called pitches for me from the time we were 11 and 12. He even scolded me when I’d shake him off. That’s just how we were taught.
I understand it happening at lower levels and even with some varsity high school coaches who don’t want to let go, but if there’s a star catcher, I still firmly believe he needs to be calling the game for his pitcher. It’s part of the job. By college or the minors, every catcher absolutely needs to learn how to call a game from behind the dish on his own, without leaning on a coach.
Come the major leagues, good grief, man. We’re talking about the best of the best of the best players in the world. What MLB catcher can’t call his own game back there? They are capable game-planners and don’t need someone overseeing their every move. Remember back when there were unlimited mound visits and late in playoff games — namely the — there was a parade of mound visits slowing the game to a crawl? This is in that ballpark. With mound visits limited, the players have shown they are more than capable of planning without going to the mound to talk about every big pitch. If catchers are trusted with game planning, as they have been for the history of the sport, they’ll prove themselves quite capable of calling a game.
I strongly believe there’s a feel to the game, too, which can’t be understood from the dugout. The catcher is right there behind the box, observing every move from the hitter. Some of the best game-callers ever could read the hitters and react. It doesn’t always work, but calling games from the dugout isn’t always going to work, either.
We don’t need to dictate to professional catchers how to call pitches. They are adults, have been catching their whole lives and have made it to the highest level. Trust them.
