Good morning, and welcome to episode 686 of Effectively Wild.

daily podcast from baseball perspective presented by the play index at baseballreference.com.

I am Ben Limberg of Grantland joined by San Miller of baseball perspective. Hello, Sam. Hello.

And we are joined for the first time in a couple hundred episodes by B.P.'s director of

technology, Harry Publitus. Hello, Harry. Hello. So we talk about catcher stats on this podcast,

or I talk about catcher stats in Sam Wissens sometimes. And so you have been one of the driving

forces behind all the new catcher stats that we've gotten to play with over the last couple years.

And you have a new one this week. And it is kind of the, I don't know, maybe it's the,

maybe it's the last piece of the puzzle. Maybe it's not. We can talk about that. But you wrote

something for ESPN magazine this week about game calling. And you came up with a game calling

stat and you rated game calling. And this has kind of been the final frontier for catcher stats.

We've had framing. We've had throwing. We've had fielding badded balls. But we have been missing

this game calling element, which pictures and catchers tell you is very important. And now we have

numbers. So tell us how we have these numbers. How did you put a number on game calling and what

does it mean exactly? What does game calling encompass? These final frontier

years are frightening. So because there's a lot of unknowns. So we did the process really started.

Oh gosh. About a year ago, when I did a piece with ESPN about framing. And we talked about what

was going to be next. And I said, we hope by some time early in this season, 2015 that we would

have something on game calling and turned out that wasn't quite so early. But what happened was

it was kind of a side effect of DRA, which as we produced DRA, there's a core calculation that

we figured out the value of expected versus actual outcome of each plate of parents.

I should say that is deserved run average with the new BP pitching stat, which you can hear Jonathan

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