ARLINGTON, Tex. -- This past Thursday's game against fellow left-hander Framber Valdez represents rookie Kyle Teel's only true night off since being called up a little over a week ago. Early on, the division of labor into his third series with the team has tilted toward the newcomer rather than an even split with fellow rookie Edgar Quero, with Teel catching six times out of nine.
Normally, that would be too small of a sample and margin to be worth commenting on, and both are DH-ing and pinch-hitting too often for anyone to feel buried. But Will Venable indicated more intent behind the most recent division of labor.
"We want a little more out of Edgar, to be honest, defensively," Venable said. "Defensively, it’s going to be the receiving with Edgar. Edgar has done an outstanding job with the game-planning, the game-calling. Probably more advanced than I thought he'd be coming into this season. Kyle is a little more advanced with the receiving. We’d like Edgar to get there and that’s an area of focus for him."
While it's notable to hear Venable describe substandard performance in such a blunt manner -- and he rather quickly pivoted to saying pitch framing a developmental point for both catchers -- the Statcast numbers indicate the White Sox manager was addressing something fairly clear-cut, and also that both parts of his answer were true.
Statcast has Quero's framing as three runs below average so far on the year, but his later start to the year makes that less notable than the pure rate. After 34 games caught (29 starts), Quero's 35.6 percent strike rate is the lowest mark among major league catchers with 750 called pitches or more. Having just crossed the 100 called pitches threshold, Teel is ranked 52nd out of 76 such receivers at 40.9 percent. And to be fair, Quero is also the youngest active catcher in the majors and Teel is the second-youngest, and both have been upfront about their receiving being a work in progress all year.
"I'm working on my framing every day with Drew [Butera] and trying to help my pitchers, trying to steal strikes," Quero said.
In the breakdown of catching zones provided on Baseball Savant, glove side and down seem to be most pressing areas for Quero, alongside the general principle that stealing low strikes is the top priority for any catcher. Teel's data is largely too sparse to draw big conclusions from, other than his focus on directly below the zone is being rewarded.
"There's the most opportunity at the bottom of the zone," Teel said. "If you're catching the pitch at the bottom well, it helps you with the left and the right side, although it kind of hurts the top of the zone. I feel like the best place to really hone in on is the bottom of the zone. That's where the most framing opportunities are."
The presence of Butera as a dedicated catching coach adds some heft to Venable discussing Quero's issue as something that can be handled by negotiating a mix of playing time, with mechanical work on the side. As a testament to such, Butera said they've already been putting some tweaks into play.
"We've made some adjustments the last three or four games, just loading more into his body," Butera said of Quero. "It allows him the freedom to work both side-to-side and north-south. That alone will help his glove-side adjustments. I think he's done a great job, and receiving to me is very important and he wants it really bad, so he's making the right strides and the right adjustments to get better."
Different pitches call for different glove arm motions, and catchers can find themselves slowly drifting toward certain setups and arm paths over time. Some of this is conscious, as Teel has discussed emphasizing low strikes comes with sacrificing some ability to present pitches at the top of the zone. Quero had been more or less selling out for low strikes, starting his glove near the ground and pulling it up mid-pitch every time. To demonstrate "loading more into his body," Quero demonstrated holding it at his stomach, giving himself a shorter path to move side-to-side, or really any direction.
"I'm loading with my glove coming more from my body," Quero said. "Not too down, so I'm more in the middle with the ball right now and I feel pretty good. It's helping me out to be faster with the pitches up, the pitches down."
If that sounds different from what Teel said, it should. Teel is taller and thus his move to the top of the zone is smaller. And Butera emphasized that the two catchers have different bodies, builds and skill sets, and their optimal movement patterns are going to be pretty distinct from one another. When one is catching and the other is watching from the dugout, they're taking notes on each other's pitch-calling more than anything else. But a through-line is that Butera wants both young receivers to be consistent with their base, so that their weight distribution keeps them in position to react however their needed to.
"If you're favoring one pitch one night, it might affect others, but part of my job is to recognize that and get them back into a solid base," Butera said. "It's a constant adjustment. You're never going to catch one guy the same as the next guy. It's about anticipation. It's about understanding who is on the mound, understanding the misses, anticipating the misses. So that's why to sit there and be really judgmental on my part for him would be tough. Because Quero's getting to know our pitchers just as they're getting to know him. I think he's made some really good adjustments the last three or four games and the numbers have shown it."
Teel probably put it best when he said that the details and precision required for framing in professional baseball are such that what he thought made him an elite receiver in college, probably only was enough to make him average at best in this environment. After going through his own self-described lull with his framing earlier this season, Teel has seen an upturn by putting an emphasis on "finish pitches," and maintaining that extra moment of presenting the ball to the umpire.
"He kind of just would roll through pitches, and still had a really good movement with his glove," Butera said. "But there was no final product to present to the umpire. He's doing a really good job of a quick glove, moving into a finished product."
And if after Quero beat him to the majors by six weeks, Teel can improve enough on a developmental point to overtake him on catching workload, the Sox are hoping their young receivers keep returning the favor to each other for a while. Working on this story since the middle of the Astros series has involved checking the updated Statcast numbers every day, and both of their framing percentages have kept ticking up incrementally with each new game they play.
