Which Catcher Is the Best at Scrunching Himself Into a Tiny Ball?

Look, we’ve put it off long enough. It’s time to dig in and answer once and for all the question that everyone has been asking: We’re going to determine conclusively which catcher squishes himself into the tiniest little ball when he gets into his crouch. As you may know, catchers these days often go down on one knee or stick their whole leg out to the side in order to get lower to the ground, because getting lower helps them earn called strikes at the bottom of the zone. Those called strikes are important. What’s even more important, though, is how adorable it looks when a grown man in a suit of armor crouches down and gets all tucked into a teensy little ball like a five-year-old about to do a somersault. At long last, we’re going to do the only thing that makes sense and find out who’s best at turning their human body into a bony little sphere.

One hundred different players spent time at catcher in 2024, far too big a sample for me to investigate, so I ranked them by the number of pitches caught and looked at the top 40. I watched catchers setting up for sinkers and soft stuff at the bottom of the strike zone, where they’d be angling for a called strike and therefore trying to get themselves as low as possible. One-knee down stances were fine, but I threw out stances like the one below, where Adley Rutschman is no longer crouched in a ball. That’s the whole point of this exercise. If you’re not in a little ball, what are we even doing here?

Because we’re doing this in the name of science, I tried to keep the sample conditions as similar as possible. With one exception, I only watched pitches from games in Baltimore and Atlanta, as those parks feature excellent and very similar camera angles. For each catcher, I watched several pitches, paused the clips at the moment when they looked most like they’d been stuffed into an invisible trash can, then picked the one in which they got the smallest. The frames had to be from before the pitcher released the ball, and when possible, I chose frames in which the catcher was presenting a target. What we’re really interested in is how teeny-tiny the catchers can make themselves during their normal crouch, rather than how small they happen to get while they’re preparing to catch the ball. Ideally, they’d be so compact and dense that their own mass threatens to collapse in on them like a black hole:

Once I had all my screengrabs, I set up a 32-player March Madness-style bracket so that I could make the catchers face off one-on-one. I seeded the catchers by their height, as the bigger you are, the harder it is to crumple yourself into a tiny sphere of humanity. When two catchers were the same height, I gave the higher seed to the catcher whose name had fewer characters, because it’s important to credit compactness in all forms. Lastly, because a surprising number of catchers were the same height and had the same number of characters in their names (Pedro Páges, Jake Rogers, and Connor Wong), I used swing length as a final tiebreaker, as it was the only other measure of compactness I could think of. The 24 shortest catchers made it into the main bracket automatically, while the 16 über-catchers had to do go through a play-in round for the two final spots in each region:

Right off the bat, our play-in round eliminated Rutschman, Carson Kelly, Cal Raleigh, Patrick Bailey, Jonah Heim (pictured above), Austin Wells, Yasmani Grandal, and Tyler Stephenson. In a huge upset, the huge Salvador Perez made it past Bailey, because Bailey is a dedicated member of Team Stick Your Knee Way Out to the Side. Sure, it helped him become the best defender in baseball, but it also got him bounced from this competition, because spheres aren’t supposed to have legs sticking out of them, Patrick. Of those first eight eliminated, Grandal stood out as the catcher who made the weakest attempt at transforming himself into a sphere. The 6-foot-5, Jacob Stallings is the tallest catcher on our list, but look how much smaller he makes himself than Grandal:

Seriously, Grandal might as well have been standing up. It’s almost as if he had no idea that he would one day be judged on his ability to look as if he’d been vacuum-sealed in order to retain maximum freshness. Stallings, on the other hand, did an incredible impression of a purple praying mantis. With the play-in round done, the 32-player bracket was finally ready:

The biggest upset of the first round was that Stallings kept right on rolling. As the tallest catcher in the field, he pulled the ultimate upset, taking down the 5-foot-8 Alejandro Kirk. Kirk’s crouch wasn’t even that bad. It’s just that Stallings was incredibly good at turtling. On the other end of the spectrum, Elias Díaz simply did not understand the assignment:

He’s on the left, and I swear that’s the most compact shot I was able to get of him. I’m not even sure you could call what he’s doing crouching. He’s just taking a knee like an old-timey quarterback about to draw the game-winning play in the dirt with his finger. His head is towering above the strike zone. Not at all coincidentally, Statcast says he was the second-worst framer in all of baseball on low pitches. He really needs to get on the ball (by turning himself into a ball).

Over on the right, Perez really did try his best, but he’s just such a large human being. He looks like he’s in that scene from the kids’ movie where the main character’s giant robot friend is about to be discovered, so the giant robot bends over and the main character throws a checkered blanket over him and pretends that he’s a table.

The other big upset was Jose Trevino getting knocked out in the first round. Not only is Trevino one of the smaller catchers in the game at 5-foot-10, but he’s one of the best framers around. He does get himself small, often angling his body slightly both to present a smaller target and give the umpire a better view of the pitch. However, it also makes him much less symmetrical:

At this point, maybe I should mention that although I’m the judge of this all-important competition, I am unable to remain in a catcher’s crouch for more than a few seconds. Thanks to soccer injuries, I’ve had five knee surgeries. I still jog and play softball, but I know that I could get hurt again and that even if I don’t, I’m the world’s most likely candidate to need a knee replacement or two at a very young age. I worry about it all the time, and I worry about the knees of all these catchers. I would kill to be able to do what they do, so as I sit here, I’m doing my best to judge them with compassion. But somebody’s got to win, and that means everybody else has got to lose:

Stallings kept rolling in the Sweet 16. It didn’t hurt that his competition, Páges, didn’t even get into a crouch in any of the clips I could find. He more or less just sat on his back leg with his hand on his hip:

Once we got to the Elite Eight, just about everyone who got eliminated was a baller (literally). On the left, James McCann, who started out by eliminating his teammate Rutschman in the play-in round, finally bowed out. In the middle, Logan O’Hoppe got extremely small, but was ultimately betrayed by his wayward left leg. He’s basically shaped like an uppercase Q. The real surprise for me was Will Smith. He’s the reason this article exists in the first place. At some point during the World Series, I noticed how tiny he made himself when he got into his crouch. Once I did, it was hard to notice anything else. He’s one of the shortest catchers in baseball and I really thought he’d make it all the way, but Freddy Fermin took him down:

That brings us to the Final Four, where Stallings’ charmed run finally ended at the hands of J.T. Realmuto. On the other side of the bracket, Fermin passed Ryan Jeffers to make it into the final. Jeffers is 6-foot-4, very tall for a catcher (and a human), but he really did manage to get very tiny. There he is on the right doing his best impression of a guy who isn’t the same height as Anthony Edwards. Still, it’s not just enough to compete with Fermin on the left. Fermin is maybe the best framer in baseball at the bottom of the zone, and when he really gets down there, he looks like he’s trying to hide his whole body behind his catcher’s mitt:

If not for the fact that his left leg was splayed out a bit too far from his body, Fermin would’ve taken the whole ball of wax. Instead, he ran into a perfectly proportioned buzzsaw in the form of our champion of champions — Realmuto:

Look how perfectly symmetrical he is. His knees are pulled in tight. His right hand is tucked in close to his body. He’s even tucking his chin into his chest. Realmuto is a perfect little sphere of a catcher. I like to think that when the Phillies go on road trips, he gets down into his crouch and the clubhouse attendants just roll him onto the team plane. The only question left is whether Realmuto will be able to defend his title next season:

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