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May 23, 2011 BP UnfilteredCatcher Interference LeadersIn the eighth inning of Sunday night's game against the Chicago Cubs, Carl Crawford reached base on a catcher interference call against Welington Castillo. That marked the twelfth time Crawford had reached via catcher interference in the last five seasons. He easily leads the major leagues over that time frame. The following table shows the batters who have reached at least twice by catcher's interference. I included data from spring training for the three years I have it in my database.
Those 15 batters account for 60 percent of the 93 catcher's interference calls in the majors over the last five seasons, and they account for half of the 26 catcher's interference calls in spring training the last three years. Crawford alone accounts for 13 percent of the regular season calls. Here are the leading catchers involved.
These 12 catchers accounted for 43 precent of the regular-season calls and 19 percent of the spring training calls. Since there are many fewer catchers than batters, we would expect individual catchers to account for a larger share of the calls than individual batters, all else being equal. The lower totals among individual catcher leaders, as compared to the batters, suggest that batters have more influence on the occurrence of catcher interference than do the catchers themselves. Just for completeness, let's look at the leaders among pitchers.
The pitchers don't seem to have as much of an impact as the other two parties. Snell is on the list mainly because of April 11, 2010, when Adam Moore committed catcher's interference on David Murphy twice in one game. Marcum probably owes his spot on the list to Zaun, who committed two of the offenses. Bannister had the honor with three different catchers: John Buck, Miguel Olivo, and Brayan Pena. So should we count those bases toward Crawford's on-base percentage? (This article by Bob Timmermann is a good resource on catcher interference totals prior to 2007.)
Mike Fast is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
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I remember catching in my little league days, and this one team had a strategy where it had its worst hitters intentionally try to hit my (and the catchers' of other teams) mitts during their swing to get cheap CIs. It got so bad, our league had to suspend the CI rule.
I doubt Crawford, et al are doing it for the same reasons, but it seems odd to reward a batter for hitting the catcher's mitt.