Red Sox catchers could immediately make Sale look better

Chris Sale is going to improve an already-dangerous Red Sox roster simply because he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball and he’d improve any team significantly. But what if the opposite effect is true, too? What if simply moving to the Red Sox could improve Sale?

Though Fenway Park isn’t necessarily the most friendly home for lefty pitching, there’s an enormous reason why Sale ought to be happy to be in Boston, and it’s not just the presence of elite fielders like Mookie Betts and Jackie Bradley Jr. behind him, though that certainly helps. It’s because the 2016 White Sox catchers were among the poorest pitch-framing groups on record. Simply by getting away from the South Side, and to Boston’s more efficient catchers, Sale could look like a more effective pitcher.

“Pitch framing,” for those not familiar, is the ability of a catcher to receive a pitch in a way that he makes it more likely an umpire will call a borderline pitch a strike. Though it’s been known in the game forever, it’s only had the ability to be quantified in recent years, and we’re seeing teams value it. The Twins just gave $24.5 million to Jason Castro, despite the fact that he rarely hits, because he’s a quality framer. The Diamondbacks just gave two guaranteed years to Jeff Mathis, despite the fact he never hits, because he’s also a quality framer. It’s an important skill.

It’s also a skill the 2016 White Sox simply did not have, as Alex Avila and Dioner Navarro ranked extremely poorly in pitch-framing metrics. Looking at Baseball Prospectus’ pitch-framing metrics, which considered 114 catchers this year, Navarro ranked 114th, costing his pitchers -16.8 runs. Avila was 100th, at -6.8 runs. For an idea of the spread, the two best framers, Buster Posey and Yasmani …

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