Why didn’t umpires refuse to be played by catchers framing strikes? Seems to me they could instruct catchers not to move their gloves into the strike zone (except to throw out runners attempting to steal). 1st violation is a warning, 2nd violation is an ejection. Is this not within their powers? Would the league not have backed up the umps? Pitch framing is simply cheating, as far as I’m concerned.
Maybe you’re alone in this.
The hideous one is not alone.
Pitch framing is complete bullshit. The entire concept of it is to fool the umpire and cause them to make an incorrect call. It certainly makes sense to do it, it’s the “smart” thing to do, but that doesn’t make it any less bullshit.
Just one more reason why automated umpiring is the way to go.
“Pitch framing” or its equivalent has been around in baseball for a very long time.
At least, catchers’ ability to hold pitches in the area of the strike zone has been highly valued. A criticism of Yogi Berra in his early days was his tendency to move his glove with borderline pitches that were starting to tail out of the strike zone as they reached the plate, instead of holding his mitt as steady as possible.
It should be on umps not to be fooled by catchers “dragging” pitches back into the strike zone.
Of course, when robots completely take over calling balls and strikes, this will not be a problem. 
Automated balls/strikes calling can’t come soon enough.
This!
Framing is an excellent skill for a catcher to have because MLB & the umpires allowed it to be. Looking forward to taking this away from the Umps and Catchers.
Keep in mind the automated ball/strike calls for MLB in 2026 will only be a challenge system. Umpires will still make all calls (which will still obviously be influenced by pitch framing). The automated part will only kick in if a batter, pitcher, or catcher challenges the call (2 per team per game).
And hopefully in the near future it will be completely removed. I’m hoping 2027.
I live in a city with a Triple A team (highest level of minor league baseball before the MLB) and have season tickets. We go to a lot of games. They’ve been testing both fully automated and the challenge system for the last few years in Triple A. I really liked the automated system. No one argued calls (except for fans who didn’t know what was happening) and play moved along quite well. Evidently, players and coaches overwhelmingly liked the challenge system better. There is a bit of drama albeit artificially created when a challenge happens, but it slows play down for a few seconds. And since players and coaches liked it so much, I’m afraid our hope for our robot overlord umpires will remain a distant fantasy.
I’m much more interested in baseball history and haven’t been watching the modern game, so if I may ask an un-informed question:
Is there evidence that pitch framing actually works by influencing umpires’ calls?
I’ve seen catchers doing it forever and every time I think, “How could that possibly affect the umpire’s judgement? They know they’re going to do it. It happens after the pitch and it’s incredibly obvious”. There’s no way to completely insulate human judgement from undo influence, but it seems like any decent umpire who’s made it to the big leagues isn’t likely to fall for it.
Whatever the answer, I don’t approve of the modern rules changes and if I were still watching, I wouldn’t want to get rid of human umpires. Indeed, it’s the movement toward this sort of thing that keeps me from returning to baseball.
It’s a human game. Umpires making bad calls every so often is part of the game. Leave it alone.
I realize of course, MLB has made rules changes in the past. And some of the new rules make sense - I certainly understand pitchers not wanting to hit (safety, fatigue, not looking like a doofus), but that change takes away strategy and use of tactics like the double-switch. And speeding up the game certainly makes sense… but I still wish they hadn’t.
I guess I’d rather see old fashioned baseball. I’d really like to go to one of the places where they demonstrate the 19th century version of the game.
At the youth level this happens pretty often actually. 13-year-olds think they know how to frame, but they really don’t. I’ve heard more than one ump tell a youth catcher that moving the pitch from the edge of the plate to the middle is more likely to get a ball call than just holding it there.
The framing stuff isn’t really “stealing strikes” so much as it is “not giving up strikes”.
A lot of it is about starting low (mitt below the zone, sometimes even on the ground) and then moving the mitt up to catch the ball. This helps with low pitches quite a bit because you don’t dip your glove to make the catch - in fact the opposite in some cases.
The “glove snap” approach where you pull the ball off the outside corner and hold it on the edge doesn’t really work. Umps aren’t stupid.
Not sure where you live, but around me there is a yearly “old time baseball” festival in Forest Park featuring multiple teams from Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa playing 1880s era baseball. It’s fun.
People said the same thing about tennis. But now that automated line calls are ubiquitous, the actual gameplay is so much better. No interruptions due to challenges; no players harboring resentment against bad calls. It keeps the focus on the basics.
It’ll be the same in baseball. No drama about the calls, no players feeling cheated, just the batter trying to hit the pitches. That is the central point of baseball; and removing questionable calls and the possibility of questionable calls will put the focus on pitcher-batter duel.
I’d think the challenge system will be even less popular with fans than the current approach. With only two challenges, the impact on game outcomes will be minimal, but fans will remember those delays. Which makes me wonder if this is a nefarious plot to further delay the robots.
And as long as I’m being conspiracy-minded, I wonder how much of this is players not wanting to take a stand and risk pissing off the umps. As long as the umps are calling the pitches, it’s not a good idea to get on their bad side.
Yes - mountains of it. PitchFX can pull all the data needed to show what a pitch should have been called. We can then line up every single pitch thrown in the MLB, see what it was called, what it should have been called, and who the catcher is for those pitches. We can also see which umpires are more susceptible to framing, and who is less so.
Heaven forbid the sport retains any of its drama. I’m in the messy-old-fashioned ball park on this one. The more human foibles thrown into the mix, the more fun.
Especially in a world with ubiquitous gambling!
I’m of two minds on this.
Yeah, technology is changing the game, not unlike how advanced statistics / sabermetrics has changed how the game is managed, and it often doesn’t feel like the same game I grew up loving. And complaining about blind umpires is a time-honored tradition for baseball fans.
OTOH, with HDTV, slow-motion replay, and computer tracking of pitches, we now see that a lot of ball/strike calls aren’t just off by a little, but by a lot, and some umpires are particularly inaccurate. I don’t generally like the idea of removing a human element from a game, but this is one where I do think that the improvement will make for a better, fairer game.
I’m the same.
I’m sometimes tempted to agree that the human element is part of the game, and a dramatic strike three call adds to the feel of the game. But I realize that I’m thinking of the good umps who rarely miss calls. When it’s a matter of minute differences between umps – this one consistently gives you the inside corners, this one has a slightly higher zone – it’s part of the fun.
But then there are the umps who just flat out miss calls or whose strike zone seems to change inning to inning, pitch to pitch. And those actively detract from the game. So on balance, I think robots will be a good change.
Well, yeah, and as I said, the focus should be on the batter trying to hit the pitches. That is main point of baseball. Arguments about questionable calls are not what baseball is about. And taking it a step further, when there’s no question about the ball vs strike calls, the focus can actually be on the batter vs pitcher duel.
It’s not like umpires will be replaced; they’ll just not need to call balls and strikes.