Article: By Seizing the Corner, Miguel Amaya Has Turned One

[Matthew Trueblood]

In the frigid cold of this week's series between the Colorado Rockies and the Chicago Cubs, the North Siders' young catcher got back-to-back starts. It protected their aged backstop from the cold, but it might also be the first glow of a star on the rise.

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

 

Miguel Amaya hasn't put all the pieces of his offensive profile together yet. He's still figuring out how to consistently deliver the barrel of the bat to the ball, on an upward swing plane. He's hitting the ball much harder in 2024 than he did as a rookie last year, with seven of his first 10 batted balls harder than 95 miles per hour and an extra few miles per hour on his 90th-percentile exit velocity. He's only struck out twice, and has greatly reduced his whiff rate on a per-swing basis. Still, because most of his contact has been on the ground so far, he's a step or two away from becoming a hitter Craig Counsell can slot in any higher than eighth in his lineup.

Defensively, though, Amaya has already made his most important strides. Last season, he was the Cubs' best pitch framer, but he was far from a finished product. Without losing anything but the very top of the zone, Amaya slightly underachieved, because he also didn't gain his pitchers anything extra, save along the bottom edge of the strike zone. Until August, he was still using the old-fashioned catcher's squat, rather than the newly popular setup with one knee down. It allowed him to sturdily steer the ball upward when it had the plate but was dipping below the knees, but it limited his ability to claim the lateral edges of the plate.

As you can see, things have changed this year. Amaya ranks sixth among the 35 catchers who have been behind the plate for at least 100 plate appearances on the young season in Adjusted Strikes Looking (SL+), the proprietary metric TruMedia uses to evaluate catcher framing. According to Baseball Prospectus, among the 39 catchers who have caught at least 20 innings, Amaya ranks first. 

Although the large samples (pretty much every pitch a batter doesn't swing at) help pitch framing become a telling statistic much sooner than most others, it's too early to say with any certitude that this will stick. Amaya is off to a great start, but you can see the noise in the data at a mere glance above. There have only been two opposing lineups and a couple of umpires in the mix. Even if it turns out that Amaya is maturing into one of the game's best framers, it will look different than it has in the first week of the season.

There's something material to see here, though, and that reinforces the reality of the improvement. Here's Amaya, last June, not quite able to earn a strike call on a glove-side sinker trying to come back to the edge of the plate.

Notice how, because of the two-footed crouch, Amaya has to turn his trunk and reach across for the ball. He still extends his arm through the ball at the catch point, but he doesn't smoothly restore it to the middle of the zone. There's a jab to it, because he has to twist his upper body in addition to carrying his mitt up and to the left.

Now, here's the new, improved Amaya, earning Javier Assad a strike that wasn't his on Tuesday night.

There's much in the setup change here. His splayed legs let him shift more fluidly in multiple directions. He's lower, so he doesn't have to reach down as much for a ball at the same height, easing the steering motion after ball hits mitt. Subtly, as many catchers do in this stance, he also sets his shoulders slightly at an angle, with the left one forward. That lets him get his arm out to the ball without an apparent movement of the torso, so the umpire doesn't think he's reaching more than he is.

The real magic, though, is in the catch itself. Watch slowly, a few times, the moment when he goes and gets the pitch. All the best framers of the last handful of seasons have excelled in precisely this motion. Anticipating the location and getting a pitch close enough to that prescription to make life easy, Amaya doesn't catch and freeze with the mitt. Nor does he catch it and then carry the ball across. Rather, catching the ball is a snatching motion that unavoidably entails that leftward move. Between the timing of the extension and the preset of his shoulders, Amaya doesn't show the umpire how he's moving the ball a foot toward the center of the zone. It just looks like he's reaching forward.

Nailing detail work like this is how the Brewers have become reliably excellent at pitch framing. From 2018 through 2023, under Counsell, they were 78 runs better than average, the best in baseball. The Cubs, meanwhile, were 11 runs worse than average. Counsell himself doesn't carry the wisdom and genius of the Milwaukee catching cabal with him, but he hired old baseball acquaintance Mark Strittmatter away from the Rockies to be the new catching coach, perhaps hoping to bring his new team up to date in this vital sector.

Amaya is still young enough, and has varied enough talents, that he could yet blossom into a star-caliber catcher--even a fixture behind the plate, for years to come. It didn't seem likely even a year ago, and there are things left to shore up to make it come to fruition, but the progress he's already made is both encouraging and massively valuable.

 

 

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