Tampa Bay Rays have found another secret advantage

The Tampa Bay Rays are always on the cutting edge of analytics and finding advantages no matter how small. Turns out they found an advantage with their catchers that greatly aided their pitching staff.

The Tampa Bay Rays have always run one of the lowest payrolls in baseball and have found every conceivable way to extract value from its roster. As other teams have gotten smarter, the Rays have had to work even harder to find value on the fringes.

Turns out in 2019, the Rays were able to generate value in the most obscure way possible with their catching corps. The Rays catching tandem of Mike Zunino and Travis d’Arnaud was the best in baseball at framing the top part of the zone. This advantage was uniquely beneficial to the Rays because of the way their pitchers use fastballs.

Starting with all qualified catchers, you can see that Mike Zunino and Travis d’Arnaud were fifth and sixth best in all of baseball at framing in the top of the zone (zone 12). d’Arnaud was the better of the two, with a strike rate of 56.8% in the upper third of the zone. Zunino was no slouch either at 55.9% in the same area of the zone. If you expand the sample to include all the Rays catchers, you see that each of them stole strikes at an above average rate when working in Zone 12.

Now that you see the granular advantage Rays catchers were creating, we can understand the value for the pitching staff. If you look at the entire Rays pitching staff heat map on fastballs, you can see that they targeted the upper portion of the zone. It was the perfect storm for the Rays. The catching corps could steal strikes at the top of the zone which matched up perfectly with Rays pitchers having the fastballs that excel up in the zone.

Unfortunately for the Rays, Travis d’Arnaud left for Atlanta in free agency breaking up half of their sneaky good catching tandem. That being said, Michael Perez is the next man up on the depth chart and he, unsurprisingly, is very good at framing Zone 12 with a 53% strike rate.

The Tampa Bay Rays found an advantage lining up the strength of their catchers to that of their pitchers. In the battle against the Yankees and their limitless payroll, they are going to need every run they can get, no matter how small.