Austin Hedges has hit .190 for his career, according to Baseball-Reference, across 12 seasons and 898 games through 2026. Not a slump. Not a rough stretch. His averages bottomed out at .152 in 2024 and .161 in 2025, and by the logic of the batting-average graphic on a typical broadcast, a hitter with that profile does not keep his job. Hedges has kept his, with the Padres, Guardians, Pirates and Rangers, and Cleveland is paying him $4 million for 2026. The graphic rarely explains why, because the answer lives in a stat it rarely shows: catcher framing.
Framing measures how many extra strikes a catcher steals for his pitching staff by presenting borderline pitches in a way umpires are more likely to call strikes. Baseball Savant publishes it as runs. In 2019, Hedges led all qualified catchers at about 22.6 framing runs, ahead of Yasmani Grandal at about 16.0. In 2018 he ranked fifth, at about 10.3. A catcher’s defense is not one number, though: his caught-stealing percentage, per Baseball-Reference, was 36.6 percent in 2017 and 15.0 percent in 2023, the latter against a league average of 19.1. The value is real and quantifiable, and it sits almost entirely outside a graphic built around batting average.
This is less an oversight than a design choice, and arguably a defensible one. A broadcast graphic has seconds to carry a number a casual viewer can read without help. Batting average has been in the box score since the 19th century; RBIs and wins need no explanation either. Framing runs require explaining pitch-tracking cameras, called-strike probability and why a pitch off the plate sometimes gets rung up. That is not a graphic; it is a seminar. So the broadcast optimizes for the stat that needs no teaching, even when the teams paying these players are weighing the one that does.
The gap between what teams pay for and what broadcasts explain is the real story, and it is bigger than one catcher. Framing numbers are public on Savant’s leaderboard for anyone to read, Hedges’ 2019 total included. A .190 hitter who keeps a roster spot reads as an inexplicable front-office mistake only if batting average is the only number you were shown. Read the framing column and it looks like a market pricing a skill the broadcast has little incentive to teach.
None of this means batting average is meaningless or that framing is the only stat that matters. It means the sport’s public-facing product and its internal valuation are running on different information sets, and only one of them is visible to the person watching at home. The next time a broadcast calls a player’s roster spot a mystery, check whether the mystery resolves itself in a stat that never made it to the screen.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.