I want to preface this post by saying that Yadi is one of my favorite Cardinals and I am happy to see him doing well this season. I think many posters share my warm feelings for the youngest of the catching Molinas. 

However, I like to keep as objective an outlook as possible on my favorite players and I have read some comments recently regarding Yadi’s defensive prowess that made me wonder just how quantifiable that contribution really is.  My intent here is to aggregate some data and draw some conclusions where there seem to be some obvious points.  That being said, my fervent hope is this post will generate some interesting discussion and possibly some additional data. 

Most of my concerns around Yadi’s value are based on his bat and his legs.  There seems to be a fairly universal opinion that his defensive contributions at least atone for his lack of offensive production, and many would say his defense far outweighs any offensive shortcomings.  I have always been of the opinion that his defense makes him a valuable player so long as his OPS+ can stay around 85-90 (85 last year and currently 104 for 2008). 

I decided to limit my analysis to the results by catcher for the six starting pitchers in 2007 who had 10 or more starts:  Wainwright, Looper, Wells, Reyes, Pineiro, and Colonel Welley.  Both the colonel’s data and Wells include starts as well as relief appearances, but I don’t think any of the others relieved in 2007.  Please correct me if I am wrong. 

I only had a limited amount of time to gather data, but I would welcome any additional input on either the current season or Yadi’s entire career.  All data are from baseball-reference.com.  I wish I had some additional information like day v. night, home v. road, opponent, etc., but we will have to make do with the readily available data.

To refresh everyone’s memory, the other catchers for 2007 were Gary Bennett and Kelly Stinnett.  I am sorry to bring up the memory of Kelly Stinett, but sometimes we endure painful memories in order to advance our understanding of the game.  I will apologize in advance for HTML ignorance, but hopefully the data will format well enough to be useful.  The opponents’ aggregate hitting line for the three catchers (vs. starters only) for 2007 was:

Bennett .270/.324/.414 for an OPS of .737

Molina .267/.333/.435 for an OPS of .768

Stinnett .277/.370/.431 for an OPS of .801

I will leave it to the more sophisticated to expound on the statistical significance of the above variation.  Overall, Bennett’s numbers look a little better, but it made me wonder if there was any variation due to the spread of the workload amongst the various starters.  Here is the breakdown by percentage of plate appearances against the given pitcher:

Wainer             67% Molina, 33% Bennett

Looper             68% Molina, 25% Bennett, 6% Stinnett

Wells                67% Molina, 15% Bennett, 18% Stinnett

Reyes               51% Molina, 40% Bennett, 9% Stinnett

Pineiro              90% Molina, 0% Bennett, 10% Stinnett

Wellemeyer      27% Molina, 27% Bennett, 46% Stinnett

The overall opponents’ aggregate hitting line for the pitchers in question was:

Wellemeyer      .224/.310/.353/.664

Wainer             .269/.331/.338/.719

Looper             .269/.332/.432/.753

Reyes               .261/.330/.464/.794

Pineiro              .279/.313/.490/.803

Wells                .287/.371/.460/.831

Since this is my fanpost, I get to make the somewhat arbitrary determination that OPS is the primary metric to consider.  After all, that is how I evaluate a hitter, so it seems reasonable to use the same metric to evaluate the effectiveness of pitchers.  Had anyone looked at these numbers at the conclusion of last season that would have been astounded at Wellemeyer’s clear superiority over the other starters in this regard.  I know this will be somewhat circular, but let’s take a look at whether the mix of pitchers a particular catcher caught might have some effect on the numbers. 

Wellemeyer was by the far the best, but he was caught a disproportionate amount of times by Stinnett and Stinnett had the worst overall numbers.  So let’s use that as one more reason to eliminate Stinnett from the mix.  Incidentally, only one catcher had an opponent’s OPS over .864 and that was Stinett (twice) with an OPS of 1.064 when catching Reyes and a whopping 1.228 when catching Looper.  Now the comparison comes down to Yadi vs. Bennett. 

Bennett primarily caught Wainer, Looper, and Reyes with only 112 PAs catching Wells (the worst pitcher) and 72 PAs catching Welley (the best pitcher).  So there doesn’t appear to be any real advantage to Bennett in the assignment of starters.  Yadi primarily caught Wainer, Looper, and Wells, so maybe he gets a little break from having to absorb 501 PAs of the Kipster (by the way has any other MLB team every had both a Kip and a Skip on the same roster?).  Wells did perform marginally better for Bennett with the primary difference being fewer walks – one every 8.5 hitters when Yadi was catching and one every 22.4 hitters when Bennett was behind the plate.

When Wainer pitched he seemed to perform pretty consistently irrespective of who was behind the plate.  Looper was very good with Molina behind the plate, .237/.294/.383/.677 and struggled with Bennett at .324/.364/.474/.838.  I sure wish I had the day/night split on Looper by catcher as he was one of the best in MLB in day games.  Iron Bill fared much better with Bennett, .238/.321/.378/.699, than with Yadi at .257/.326/.509/836 with the primary difference being that he was twice as likely to throw a gopher ball with Yadi calling the pitches.  Bennett didn’t catch any of Pineiro’s games and did far better with Wellemeyer.  Bennett’s splits with the Colonel were a stellar .206/.286/.302/.587 compared to .242/.329/.468/.797 with Yadi.  In fairness to Yadi it appears that he mostly caught Welley out of the ‘pen as he only caught 73 PAs in 9 games.

It is also interesting to note that starters combined to allow significantly more walks, more HRs and record more strikeouts when Yadi was behind the plate. I don’t know how significant the numbers are, but the biggest difference seems to be in HRs allowed.  When Yadi caught the opposition hit a HR every 35.9 PAs, but only once every 44.6 for Bennett.  This is even more pronounced for all the pitchers not named Wainwright as the Yadi’s number is 29.5 compared to 43 for Bennett. 

One final area to address that probably underscores Yadi’s value more than any other measure I could find:  the running game.  As many of you may recall, Bennett was particularly inept at throwing out baserunners and only caught 1 of 19 in this group for a success rate of 5.26% while Yadi gunned down 16 of 32 or 50%.  What does that mean about overall success and, in particular, runs scored?  After all, the only real statistics that matter are wins and losses, so runs allowed trumps all other numbers.  Yadi was pretty superior in this regard as his pitchers allowed .117 runs per plate appearance while Bennett’s pitchers allowed .130 runs per plate appearance.    If you average 40 PAs per game that means a difference of about .5 runs per game, or 4.68 for Yadi and 5.2 for Bennett.

In summary, there are a few things you can probably (somewhat tentatively) conclude from all this:  1)  Yadi probably was not any better than Gary Bennett in getting his pitchers to throw strikes, or limit baserunners;  2)  Pitchers not named Wainwright throwing to Yadi were about 50% more likely to give up a home run; 3)  Yadi’s primary defensive skills, at least in comparison to Bennett, seems to be to both record outs and limit bases in the running game.  If you were comparing Yadi to a major league regular who would likely throw out somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of attempted base thieves, then you would expect this advantage to be less.

Like I said in the introduction, my primary purpose here is to promote discussion and possibly encourage further study of this topic.  I still love Yadi, but he has to continue to hit well to be a plus player.