The headline last week was that Fangraphs has updated the catcher defensive component of their WAR calculations to incorporate framing. Among the largest beneficiaries was our own Yadier Molina, who now sits in the Top 10 catchers of the modern era by the metric.
It’s nice to have some empirical validation beyond our own homerism that Yadi is, in fact, one of the very best at his position of all-time, and a slam-dunk Hall of Famer. But if you look more closely at the numbers and the trends of catcher usage, I think it goes even beyond that.