There’s a story about Gene Bearden in Veeck as in Wreck that I’ve written about before. As a 27-year-old rookie in 1948, the knuckleballing Bearden posted a 2.43 ERA in 37 games and 29 starts for the Indians, winning 20 games and finishing second to Alvin Dark in Rookie of the Year voting. But he couldn’t sustain his success. In Bearden’s sophomore season, Casey Stengel, who had managed Bearden during his successful 1947 PCL campaign with the Oakland Oaks, was hired to manage the Yankees. Stengel, the story goes, knew that Bearden’s knuckleball “usually dipped below the strike zone after it broke, which meant that [he] was totally dependent upon getting the batter to swing.” So he instructed his hitters not to swing at the knuckler until there were two strikes, forcing Bearden to elevate it or throw his unremarkable fastball or curve. The scouting report spread around the rest of the league, Bearden became more hittable, and his walk rate rose. Working primarily out of the bullpen, he posted a 90 ERA+ from 1949 on and was out of the majors after 1953.

It’s an interesting story, and the stats mostly support it. Bearden was probably due for some regression, Stengel’s advance scouting aside—his BABIP in 1948 was some 40 points below the AL average (low even for a knuckleballer), he walked more batters than he struck out, and he allowed only nine home runs in 229 1/3 innings. But in 1949, his walk rate rose by more than two batters per nine, and he allowed 11 runs in nine IP against the Yankees, posting a lower strikeout-to-walk ratio (0.17) against them than he did against any other team. (Admittedly, Bearden struggled against the Yankees in 1948, too. The Yankees were good.)

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Framing-related links of the week
It’s been an eventful week for framing on the internet. If you're here because you’re interested in catcher receiving skills, you might also want to take a look at these three articles:

Estimated historical framing: More great work by Max Marchi, who used Retrosheet pitch-by-pitch data to estimate framing performance going back to 1988. He also took a look at how receiving skills age. Next on his to-do list: estimated framing for minor leaguers, and the quantification of game-calling.

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There’s a strange thing that happens to normally rational baseball writers when discussing the Yankees. People who would normally question every assumption and demand to see some empirical proof blindly believe that the Yankees have mastered the dark art of picking up past-their-prime players and restoring some of their former success. The only evidence is anecdotal, so we know we’re being naughty and going off the reservation, sabermetrically speaking. But like Luke Skywalker, we’ve searched our feelings, and we know it to be true. And we’re only kind of kidding.

When the Yankees traded for a struggling Ichiro Suzuki last July, The Great Grant Brisbee—after acknowledging the absurdity of what he was about to say—wrote this:

No intro section this time; I should have a couple framing-related features on the way early next week, which I don't want to tease too much. Let's get right to the leaderboards and frames of the week.

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The building I grew up in had manually operated elevators. They were quaint prewar contraptions that required an attendant to slide a metal screen across the entrance and a pull a hand crank to start the ascent and stop at the desired destination. (They looked a little like this.) When you got to your floor, you felt like you’d earned it. Or you would have, if not for the person paid to take you up and down.

Those elevators had been there as long as the building, so they had tradition and inertia on their side. And most of the time, they did the job as well as a more modern elevator. But they had a tendency to get stuck between floors, they broke down fairly frequently, and they were expensive to service. Eventually, it became clear that to complete another repair would only postpone the inevitable at additional cost, and the manually operated elevators were replaced by the boring kind with buttons. I don’t remember any outcry about preserving the historic human element of the elevators, probably because by that point the would-be preservationists were sick of climbing stairs.

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An Effectively Wild listener named Dewitt sent in this suggestion a few days ago:

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Four teams asked five players to do things this season that they’d never done prior to 2013. This article is about how well those things have worked for the first six weeks, and whether they can continue.

1. Shin-Soo Choo: start in center field
It’s not that Choo has turned into a superb center fielder. That was never the plan. Starting Choo in center, a position he hadn’t played at all since 2009 and hadn’t played regularly since 2002 (as a 19-year-old in A-ball), was always going to be an exercise in extreme double-entry bookkeeping: Would the runs his bat added outnumber the runs his glove gave up? So far, the answer is an easy “yes.” Choo’s .347 TAv ranks 10th among players with at least 100 plate appearances, and he’s second only to Miguel Cabrera in VORP.

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Let’s start with the results of last week’s blind framing test. (If you haven't taken it, and you want to know, go back and do it before you see spoilers.) I gave you 10 pairs of pitches, with one called strike and one ball in each pair, and asked you to tell me which was which. The catch was, I cut off the umpire calls at the end of the clips (because, well, it would've been pretty easy otherwise). These were the strikes:

1. Left, Morrow vs. Machado
2. Right, Halladay vs. Jones
3. Right, Volquez vs. Betancourt
4. Left, Pettitte vs. Molina 
5. Left, Latos vs. Navarro
6. Right, Resop vs. Gomes
7. Right, Halladay vs. McDonald
8. Left, Harrell vs. Seager
9. Left, Roth vs. Kinsler
10. Right, Anderson vs. Ortiz

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Some players’ stat pages are interesting for any number of reasons. Others are nondescript, save for a single defining stat that stands out so much more than all the others that you quickly come to associate the player with that particular category. Marco Scutaro is a “single stat” guy.

Scutaro’s defining characteristic is that he makes more contact than anyone else. When someone says “Marco Scutaro” 10 years from now, you won’t think about that one time he led the league in sac flies, which his black ink would have us believe was the only time he led the league in anything. You might remember his unusual career arc: a utility guy throughout his 20s who “clearly was put on Earth to be a reserve,” according to Baseball Prospectus 2006, Scutaro bloomed late and became an above-average starter at shortstop in his early- to mid-30s. But mostly you’ll remember that his bat touched the ball on roughly 95 percent of his swings, and that he cut down on his K’s as his career went on while the rest of the league’s strikeout rate rose.

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Last July, Sam Miller administered a blind BABIP test, providing nine GIFs of batted-ball outs and nine GIFs of hits but cutting them off just before the point at which contact was made. The purpose was to test whether we could tell which would be which, based on all the visual information we had about the pitch prior to the point of contact. We failed with flying colors.

So this is a catcher framing version of that. Below you'll find 10 pairs of GIFs. One pitch on each row is a called strike, and the other is a ball, but I've cut them off before the umpire starts to signal either way. All of the pitches are from this past Wednesday, and all of them are on 0-0 counts.

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Jose Valverde recorded a save against the Royals last October 1st, in his final regular-season game of 2012. He also recorded a save against the Royals yesterday, in his first regular-season game of 2013. Between those two games, Valverde lost his job as closer, spent six months looking for work, and finally re-signed with the same team, which supposedly had no interest in bringing him back. Because the trip was so circuitous, it’s worth recounting how he got from point A to point B, even though the two points look so similar.

During the winter, when we’re starved for baseball and wondering where free agents will end up, we treat each new report and rumor as if it might mean something. Where there’s smoke, there’s sometimes a signing. Of course, most rumors don’t lead to confirmed reports. They’re based on bad information, or good information that goes stale. They get published, tweeted, and blogged about briefly before being replaced by the next rumor, which usually has just as short a shelf life. It's hard to ignore the mostly non-news in the moment, but when the offseason is over and we know where all the free agents fell, it’s fun (and often illustrative) to sift through the conflicting reports and rumors and wonder where they came from. So that’s what we have here: an annotated timeline of how Jose Valverde wound up at the back of the same bullpen.

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Several months after Yadier Molina made his major-league debut, we panned his career prospects in Baseball Prospectus 2005. “He’s every bit a Molina,” we said, “like his brothers in Anaheim: admirable defensive skills, inadequate bat.” Molina was 21 at the time, and catchers tend to peak later than players at other positions, so we acknowledged that there was “hope for improvement.” But not much improvement, evidently: “Expect Matheny levels of production with maybe a handful more homers.” Matheny levels of production are pretty terrible, even with a handful more homers. Given that pessimistic offensive projection, the comment’s conclusion didn’t come as a shock: “best suited to a backup role.”

Well, we nailed the part about the defensive skills. The rest seems silly now. But it didn’t start to look silly for a few seasons, and it took a few seasons more for it to become outright wrong. Through his age-27 season, Yadier’s career TAv (.237) was lower than his brother Jose’s through the same age (albeit in many more plate appearances).

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