Pitch framing will mean nothing when they get that electronic strike zone going.
I rarely say this to you, sir, but -- from your mouth to God's ear.
While we are lauding people for their pitch framing, shouldn't we also be giving medals to those fielders who can trap fly balls and make it look like they caught them? Oh, wait, that's cheating and can be challenged...
The first step to the electronic strike zone is going to be the ability of a manager to challenge particularly egregious ball-and-strike calls. The league office's critiques of poor plate umpires just isn't culling out individual umps' personal feelings for and against certain teams and certain players.
It should *never* be the case in a multi-billion-dollar industry, but right now there are some players who have argued with particular umps in the past who will *not ever* get a close call in their favor. It's the old "You touched me! Your pitchers are not getting another called strike from me for the rest of the game!" syndrome. Heck, these days the reason could even be as petty as "You didn't thank me for awarding you a time-out!" Truly, an ump tossed a player out of the game last month and *publicly* gave that as his reason.
As long as you have humans making these judgments, their emotions will sway those judgments. The game has done away with the possibility of any other bad call (intentional or not) impacting the results of a game. So, the precedent is clearly set -- it's acceptable to take the final decisions about whether calls are correct or not out of the on-site umpires' hands.
Ball-and-strike calling impacts a game far more than anything else the umps do on the field in a game. And is the only area of what they do that cannot, as of now, be challenged.
That must change, or else we will continue to see the Don Denkingers of this world determining who wins World Series titles, not the players.
So, within my lifetime (which will only be another 5 to 10 years), I think we will see either a challenge process for balls and strikes put into place, or a full-on move to the automatic strike zone. And then maybe we can stop rating catchers on how well they can cheat and make that trapped ball look like a catch, er, I mean, make that pitch six inches off the plate look like a strike, especially to an ump who really wants to call it a strike in the first place, regardless of where the pitch was actually located.
