Fastest Guns in the ABL

Six of the quickest catchers of the 2010 ABL at a glance

As someone who's just kind of dabbling into the scouting world, one thing I really liked to take to the park with me this season was the stopwatch. A lot of other scouting info can only be gained only through experience and judgment, and while I think my talents in those areas are developing, there's nothing like empirical evidence. And one area in which I managed to gather data was catchers' moves from home to second base.

This can be accurately defined as a "glove to glove" time; that is, from the time the pitch hits the catcher's mitt until the ball hits the glove of whoever is covering the bag. Therefor it includes not only the strength of the catcher's arm but the quickness of his hands.

Below I've included all the catchers who've shown what I consider to be above average moves to second in 2010. And since we're prospecting here, I'm going to by MLB standards. Obviously this is significantly higher than college standards, so the handful of guys listed below are exceptional in this category. Sometimes a catcher will also make a "lazy" throw down to second, or maybe they juggle the ball a bit, so I've thrown out any obvious statistical outliers and averaged what was left.

But first, I'd like to make a few caveats. First off, these are all based on a small sample size so there may be a significant margin of error. Second, just because a guy didn't make this list below doesn't necessarily mean that his arm sucks. There could be plenty of other reasons why so-and-so didn't make the cut, up to and including the fact that I never got a time for some catchers in the league. so with that out of the way, here's the data:

Reflections/Photo Post: Fire @ Miners, 7-14-2010

Tyler Ruch's walk-off sac fly put the Miners over
the Fire in the bottom of the 9th.

EDIT: I made some corrections to this. I got my middle infielders dyslexified and referred to Matt Wessinger as Bret Schwartz. My bad. I am now giving Wessinger the credit where credit is due, and Schwartz is still cool. Thanks to the reader who made the catch; and let this be a lesson to those who would blog at 1 a.m.

It was a month ago to the day that I first saw the AIA Fire take on the Mat-Su Miners for my first game of the ABL season. Well, as chance would have it -- and I totally did not plan it to be this way -- I found myself, again, at a Fire at Miners game on the 14th of the month, which was last night. I took some pictures and made a few notes, but  most of all I was trying to get some video footage for the series of scouting videos I plan to post up on YouTube over the off-season. But for now, I'll share some of my thoughts and photos from the game with you.

One guy I should have had the camera on was Matt Wessinger (Miners). He looked phenomenal at second base tonight. He made some very good plays with the glove, including a great charge and off-balance flip to first to beat Will Watson by the thinnest hair and save an infield single against his team. Very good soft-handed defense on his part.

I have to tip my hat to Fire pitcher Harrison Helms, if for nothing else, creativity. With Miners on first base, Helms was having a fun time making them get their uniforms dirty diving back under the tags as he tried to keep them close. His best pickoff move of the night, though, was probably the one where he hid the ball in his hat as he pretended to wipe the sweat from his brow before making the throw to the bag. I suppose I could have just missed it all these years but I have never seen that before.

Reflections/Photo Post: Panners @ Miners, 6/16/2010

Goldpanners C Austin Wooldridge has major league arm
strength when throwing to second.

The Mat-Su Miners fans had a nice cold one in this match-up, and I'm not talking about beer (though there was plenty of that going around, I'm sure). The night's battle with the visiting Goldpanners of Fairbanks was a long, chilly contest. The cloud cover has been continuous throughout the week, and as the game went on the wind began to blow out to right field and the rain started sprinkling. The 50 or so fans who stuck it out were all huddled together under blankets and sleeping bags, trying to block out the cold glacial breeze. Nonetheless, we got in a solid ballgame. And I got a few good pics and some good looks at some good players.

Tonight my stopwatch fingers were most successful with the catchers, timing their throws down to second. Both starting catchers really impressed me with their raw arm strength. Austin Wooldridge (Panners) and Kevin Whitehead (Miners) were both continuously throwing down to second in the neighbordhood of 1.9-2.0 seconds, glove-to-glove, which are solid major-league times. Kevin Roundtree came in for the Panners a later in the game; I only got one time on him but his throws in general didn't look as strong. That being said, he was hitting the target really nice, including a sweet throw out of DeBiassi in the seventh.

Kyle Brule got the start for the Goldpanners tonight. He started off strong and looked like he was hitting the catcher's glove exactly where it was set up. He was really making the mitt pop too, bringing a hard fastball. Things kind of unwound for him, though, about the time that Miners' DH David Lyon tagged him for a homer over the right field wall, and that was pretty much it. I really like what I saw when he was cruising early on, I guess the Miners might have just rattled his cage a bit.