"If you're curious what the Cubs may be looking for in a catcher going forward, I think this piece on Yan Gomes that I wrote the other day sums up the qualities many teams now look for in their backstop."
I think there are kinda 5 areas of defensive catching. Catching-throwing-fielding are three. (By catching, I'm thinking preventing wild pitches and passed balls; throwing preventing stolen bases; fielding preventing infield hits and successful sac bunts.). The more important two are pitch-framing and "working with pitchers", which involves calling pitches, game-planning, etc..
I wonder how important/essential the latter will be moving forward?
1. When robo-umps arrive, that should obviate the pitch-framing factor, no? If a catcher's glove sweeps outside on the catch inside of pulling into the heart, who cares? So long as he's catching the ball and not compromising his catching or throwing? How soon might robo-umps happen?
2. Handling pitchers. So, Gomes noticed Smily tick, and adjust game-plan mid-stream based on what he's seeing from Smily's game-to-game stuff and hitter responses. With modern video and communication technology... Can't you get pretty good video so that coach-Yan can see ticks, and see how hitters are responding? Does it HAVE to be the live catcher behind the plate doing that? Or could coach Yan see and respond to those things from the bench, the things that catcher-Yan is processing now? The Cubs obviously aren't cutting-edge enough to fully maximize communication technology. But won't many smart teams soon be using PitchCom technology?
Won't progressive smart teams soon have their video and whatever technology watching each pitch (and each better) from the bench? Noticing tics? Noticing that today's cutter or curve isn't cutting or curving as well as normal, so maybe we should use it less? And making pitch calls from the bench? Why does the behind-the-plate catcher need to do all of that if PitchCom can do all of that from the bench?
If in future a coach Yan can do from bench what catcher-Yan does now, in future will the smart teams still prioritize pitch-framing and pitch-calling catchers, when robo-umps and bench coaches can control those things?
I guess I'm kinda wondering whether, as we project in the 2024-2028 contention window, whether it's strategic to focus on targeting 2010-2022-era priorities from catchers?
Or will there continue to be lots of things that the behind-the-plate catcher can do and see and communicate, important things that bench-available technology simply cannot see and do and communicate? Maybe so, I'm sincerely asking! What are the intangible "working with pitchers" qualities that a catcher contributes that bench-coach-Yan won't be able to do from the bench?