How the Cubs Will Fix Matt Thaiss's Pitch Framing to Shore Up 2025 Catching Corps

[Matthew Trueblood]

Chicago might not be done trying to upgrade behind the plate, but the player they've already acquired has unexplored upside—and they might prefer to create value through great coaching, rather than paying for raw talent.

Image courtesy of © Jonathan Hui-Imagn Images

In a perfect world, you'd certainly ask for more offense than Matt Thaiss promises, even from a backup catcher. He does offer a couple of redeeming qualities, but in most of the offensive essentials, he's below-average. Here are his percentiles among all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances in 2024, in various categories and skill measurements.

PA	Swing%	Chase%	ZSw-Chase	InZoneWhiff%	PHiA/SW	100+/Sw	LandAng	LaunchAng	LowHit%	MedHit%	HighHit%
186	24.4%	86.8%	87.8%	0.2%	24.9%	35.7%	68.5%	52.1%	40.3%	19.8%	79.2%
ExitVel	10thExitVel	90thExitVel	Hit95+%	Well Hit LA	Sweet Spot EV	BABIP	Barrel%	FBDst	xWOBA	wOBA	SAEV
20.5%	10.8%	54.3%	56.5%	65.3%	54.3%	67.2%	47.4%	68.9%	21.3%	33.0%	22.7%

Thaiss makes very good swing decisions, and his key power indicators—90th-percentile exit velocity, average launch angle on well-hit balls, and average exit velocity in high-value launch angle bands—are slightly better than average. Almost all of that positive stuff is undone, though, by his calamitous lack of feel for contact. If you isolate his work against righties, the strengths get even stronger—but he doesn't swing and miss any less often. It sets a fairly low ceiling on his offensive game, unless the Cubs can find a way to ameliorate it.

Defensively, though, it's much easier to imagine a stark improvement. Last year, Thaiss was worth -4.6 runs as a pitch framer, according to Baseball Prospectus. In 2023, that figure was -2.5 runs, and it was -1.1 in very limited work in 2022. Thaiss, the college catcher whom the Angels converted immediately to first base after drafting him only to move him back to the battery three years later, has not been able to overcome the whiplash of that series of development choices. In truth, the Angels just aren't good enough at basic player development to recover from galaxy-brain player development errors like moving a catcher off the position, then back to it after multiple seasons away.

The Cubs can be, though. There's some low-hanging fruit in terms of fixing Thaiss as a framer, which is really the difference between a version of him that's narrowly a viable part of the roster at all and one that makes you perfectly comfortable using him as a secondary backstop. Catching coach Mark Strittmatter and company had some success last season bringing along Miguel Amaya as a receiver, and the team just went out this fall and added venerable catching instructor Jerry Weinstein to the organization. Those two have every chance to turn Thaiss into an average catcher, in terms of framing. Here's how.

First of all, and most simply, Thaiss catches off the wrong knee when setting up for a pitch on the third-base side of home plate. This is so seemingly basic—screamingly so—that it seems impossible that big-leaguers would get it wrong, but believe it or not, it happens often. Some instructors (wrongly) tell their pupils to pick the knee they're more comfortable putting down, regardless of pitch type or desired location. Some catchers are even capable of succeeding that way. Such cases are desperately rare, though, and the theory of comfort over position is ill-founded. Here's Thaiss catching a ball targeted for the third-base side of the plate this year.

This is Thaiss's standard setup: left knee down, upper body leaning forward against the right leg. On this pitch, his hurler did him no favors, missing all the way across the plate, but Thaiss had no chance whatsoever to salvage the strike, because of his setup. Here's how the best framer in baseball, the Giants' Patrick Bailey, sets up and receives a pitch aimed for the third-base side of the plate.

Taylor Rogers hits his spot, which makes Bailey's job easier, but the pitch is high and out of the zone, by modern standards. Nonetheless, Bailey snags it and steers it down into the zone for the called strike with relative ease. He can do so because he's set up with the right knee down, making his left leg the edge of a frame he presents to the umpire. The ball comes right to the center of his frame, along the inner edge, but because he's in an upright posture rather than leaning way forward, he can subtly turn his right shoulder backward, making it look like he's reaching back to the heart of the plate for a pitch he's really only reaching forward to collect. Starting with a high mask and high chest also gives him the stability and the visual line to bring the mitt up high, catch the ball in the lower portion of it, and drive it downward, as though he had to do so to catch it. This is why Bailey was worth nearly 200 extra called strikes relative to what was expected this year.

The way Bailey uses the left leg to set an edge and shape the zone is not the only reason why the proper way to catch on the third-base side of the plate is with that leg up and the right knee down. There's also a question of the glove action it allows you. When the left leg is up, the catcher can use it as a kind of fulcrum for the arm. Especially when catching a low pitch, you want to let the mitt hang loosely, then rotate slightly as one comes up through the ball at the catch point. That gives the impression of a smooth collection at a higher point, as opposed to any hint of stabbing down or dipping and lifting. Here's Thaiss trying to frame a low pitch, with the left knee down.

There's a problem with his mitt action, for sure. Firstly, he sets the target too long, trying to help his pitcher see and lock in on a spot but cuing the umpire to look for the ball up, which made the ball down at the knees look lower than it was. Secondly, though, look at the way he drops his mitt. He shows the center-field camera the back of the hand, then strikes out at the ball. Here, by contrast, is Cleveland catcher Bo Naylor catching a low pitch, with the left knee up.

As you can see, Naylor gets extremely low in his crouch, an advantage he had because he was asking for a low pitch, whereas Thaiss was looking for Griffin Canning to throw one high in the counterexample. However, Naylor's torso still stays upright. He gets the fluid motion of catching the ball off the corner at the knees by starting with his mitt down on the ground but the open side showing to the center-field camera. He coiled his arm to invite a smooth swing of his albow, out and up at once, with the glove naturally reorienting itself into the catching position. Good catchers execute this movement dozens of times per game. Thaiss struggles with it, because it's much easier to do with the right knee down, and he always has the left one down.

Here, perhaps, is an even more stark example of that arm motion, from Detroit's Jake Rogers. The way he kicks his leg out to surround the ball and get low on the low pitch make it easy for him to steer the arm upward at a steep angle, while still looking natural.

Now, let's look at how Thaiss operates at the top of the zone. 

His mask and his shoulders start low—so low that he has to catch the ball above his own mask level. To catch it means blocking his own line of sight of the ball momentarily, which is why he's not able to catch it quietly and his mitt drifts away from the center of the zone before he can wrestle it toward it. Low to high just isn't effective, the same way high to low can be. It's easier to fool an umpire by sinking deeper into the crouch than by starting low in one and rising up at the hips and shoulders and head, especially because going high to low doesn't involve the same disruption of vision.

Here's how the pros do it. Bailey:

And Naylor:

Bailey starts and stays so high that the ball never threatens the top of his mask. He has the elbow hinge we've talked about. He's using the other knee, on the other side of the plate, to set the edge the same way. Naylor is a little lower in his set than Bailey, a little more athletic and adaptable to a big miss, but he's still considerably higher than Thaiss. Watch his hips, his shoulders, and his head. Unlike Thaiss's, they all stay almost perfectly still, making it much easier to catch the ball quietly and make it look like it was in the zone all the way.

As all of these comparisons imply, too, there's an issue with Thaiss's right foot that needs to be addressed: he's too stiff and locked into it.

He's almost trapped on top of his right foot, like it's an uncomfortable stilt. Sifting through video of Thaiss, this problem is not uncommon. The knee down provides stability, but getting the most out of it requires a catcher to have good technique in the setting and the movement of the leg that isn't being kneeled on. That sometimes means the long leg kickout, to help get low. It sometimes means getting the foot planted outside the frame of the body, to set that edge and have a leverage point for all movements on the other side of the body. It sometimes means repositioning to a wider base just before the pitch is thrown to create a bigger zone and facilitate the turn of the right shoulder. Thaiss isn't executing any of those consistently, yet, and thus, he's not getting any of those benefits.

All of these things are coachable, though. They're teachable movements. I chose three above-average framers to compare with Thaiss, which might feel like three members of a totally different species than him. In fact, though, these are three players very close to the same size as Thaiss, and none of them are notably more athletic than he is on the bases or at the plate. Their edges over him are in understanding the rudiments of catching, because the Angels don't seem to have effectively instructed him on any of them.

In summary, look for the Cubs to do three things with Thaiss, mechanically, when they go to work with him this spring:

1. Make which knee he puts down in his setup dependent on pitch type and location, as well as handedness of batter. Left knee down works better, in most cases for pitches high and/or on the first-base side of the plate, especially to right-handed batters. Right knee down, which Thaiss currently uses almost not at all, works better for most low pitches and all of them to the third-base edge of the plate.
2. Encourage a more upright posture with the upper body. Let the mitt drop, but keep the elbow internally rotated, so the arm can smoothly swing up through the ball on low pitches and so that the mask stays above the ball on pitches at the top edge, permitting a quiet catch and centering.
3. Redistribute weight and balance within the setup, so that whichever foot is up is more free to be repositioned and the whole body can move subtly to catch a pitch that's off-target, rather than having an anchor that forces an obvious, off-balance lean.

These are the key principles, as it happens, that most often show up in the rebuilding of a catcher when they enter the Brewers system—whence came Craig Counsell, whose attention to detail definitely extends to this part of the game. Under Counsell, the Brewers turned William Contreras from a borderline DH to a fine and occasionally even plus receiver, using exactly the trio of changes described above. While the gap in teams' evaluative understanding of framing closed long ago, there's still a major difference between the good and bad teams when it comes to educating and developing good receivers. That's been especially true the last few years, as a new state of the art in framing has developed, more predicated on fluidity and dynamism than on being quiet as a mouse and solid as a rock, the way David Ross and the great framers of the last generation were.

The Angels are on the wrong side of that divide. The Cubs were, too, until recently. They hope and believe that changed, when they hired Counsell and he (in turn) hired Strittmatter. Bringing in Weinstein, an octogenarian but one of the true gurus of the craft at the moment, has to have given them added confidence. If, as an organization, they can turn Thaiss (and/or Moises Ballesteros) into an above-average framer, both Strittmatter and Weinstein will have earned triple their salaries. While Thaiss has no star-caliber upside, making him an average-plus defensive catcher would turn his offensive profile from underwhelming to delightfully acceptable. He'd become a pitch-perfect complement to Amaya, for however long that was needed, and the team could even consider carrying three catchers once Ballesteros is ready, so that he could sometimes act as the DH while learning the game-planning rigors of catching in the majors on the job.

Any team who has to pay free-agent prices or trade young talent for every fistful of extra runs they score or prevent is doomed. Scouting and player development are most often cited as ways to get teenagers into the organization and mill them into stars, but sometimes, good staff work is just finding a player with an aptitude for improvement and an easy path to doing so, and handing them to a gifted group of coaches and instructors. The Cubs won't stop looking to bolster the catcher spot, but by acquiring Thaiss at a cost so low it's virtually zero, they've given themselves room to profit from their own improving developmental infrastructure. If it pays off as neatly as it very well might, they'll have created some extra flexibility as they seek to fill other, more important gaps on the roster.

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[LBiittner]

Great article Matt. Love the research.

But, now you've made me hate the Thaiss acquisition even more.

[Development DL]

Love the detailed , bio mechanical approach to this piece .  Runs saved or gained on the margins of minimal expense, are gold . 

We appreciate the detailed work .