The Brothers K
July 7, 2010So for the last couple weeks, I’ve been unplugged and out of touch up in the wide open spaces of Montana recharging the batteries. Right before I left, a friend of mine sent me a book that he highly recommended called The Brothers K by David Duncan.
I won’t go into all the ins and outs of the book…just get it. It’s a really good read. It tells the tale of a family of a minor league ballplayer and there’s some really insightful baseball thoughts by the author. Here’s one of them that I really liked. One of the sons is asking his father about “framing the ball.”
“What about moving the mitt after you catch the ball?” I asked.
“Framing the pitch?” Papa shook his head. “That’s not voodoo. You see it in the bigs, I know, but I say it’s stupid. The trouble with framing, see, is that even though the ump’s concentrating on the trajectory of the pitch, his peripheral vision sees the catcher’s mitt move, so that gradually he gets this peripheral feeling that his intelligence is being insulted. And believe me, anything that insults the plate ump’s intelligence is a BAD idea. What happens pretty soon is, anytime the mitt moves, even to grab a legitimate strike on a corner, the ump thinks ‘Frame!’ and calls a ball. That’s why when my catchers tried it I told ‘em to knock it off, loud, right in front of the umps and everybody.
Good stuff. Reminds me of a great post I wrote about framing a while back….
[...] blown away by the author’s grasp of baseball’s inner workings. The first one dealt with catcher’s framing the ball, and this next one deals with a ball player’s thought [...]