In the Yankees broadcast Michael Kay just asked what would happen if every time the catcher moved his glove after making a catch the umpire called it a ball. David Cone and Paul O’Neill seemed to endorse the idea. Nice to see others in the game coming around to the idea that framing is wrong.
The interesting thing was that the Tigers catcher, Dillon Dingler, was framing strikes. They were edge strikes, but strikes nonetheless. Every pitch, Dingler was pulling the ball more into the zone. I suppose that’s important, so it appears to the ump as a natural action, not one that is specifically meant to alter the outcome of the pitch.
Or – – the umpires could just watch the ball instead of the glove! I’m a little baffled that umpires are fooled by a catcher moving his glove; if you need to look at the glove because you’re not capable of judging the path of the ball, then maybe you shouldn’t be an MLB umpire. After all, hitters who can’t follow the path of the ball don’t make to the big leagues.
I used to catch in fast-pitch softball, and I never intentionally shifted my glove to fool the umpire because I figured they wouldn’t fall for it and might compensate the opposite way (this was before ‘pitch framing’ was ever talked about). However, I did try to fool them by trying to keep my glove in the strike zone on pitches close to the edge – so it’d try to snag outside pitches toward the end of the glove pocket, but catch inside pitches in the heel. I have no idea if it worked – at that level, the umpires were pretty inconsistent in their calls regardless, so maybe I wasn’t fooling them, they were just making bad calls.