Baseball Shorts: Framing

In today’s episode of Baseball Shorts, we pay attention to the term Framing. Where does it come from? Read on and you will find out.

Framing is the art of making a borderline pitch look like a strike. The intention is that the catcher moves his hand a few inches towards the strike zone to “convince” the home plate umpire the pitch was a strike.

But where does the term framing come from? Even though I could not find any information about the origin of the term, it is very likely it has the following background.

When you watch baseball on TV, quite often you see the strike zone drawn above the plate. This “frame” makes it easier for the fans to see if a pitch was a strike or not. Also in tutorials, the strike zone is drawn next to the batter to show where it exactly is.

Now, by pulling a borderline pitch towards or inside the “frame”, the umpire may call it a strike. Thus the catcher is framing the ball towards to strike zone or frame.

Below, you can see a couple of good examples of well framed pitches.

In the clip down below, the art of framing is shown by catcher Caleb Joseph.