Master of the Margins: Russell Martin’s Pitch-Framing Wizardry and Hall of Fame Quest

Everyone who has followed the game of baseball has followed the careers of their favourite players, whether it was Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and the Big Red Machine of the 1970s, sluggers like Frank Thomas or Jim Thome in the early 2000s, or the uber athletes who amazed every time they were on the field, like Ken Griffey Jr. or Rickey Henderson.

There are many different ways to play the game of baseball and there are many different ways to be great at it. The pitcher who throws 102 mph and strikes out a third of the batters he faces can be just as effective as a pitcher who has mastered the knuckleball and makes a living on making the best major league hitters look silly. A slugger who blasts 500 home runs can be just as valuable as a guy who can steal a ton of bases and play elite defence. At the end of the day. Making the major leagues is incredibly hard, and to be recognized as one of the best to do it is even rarer. Only 1.5 % of all major leaguers are inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Blue Jays have of their share of representatives in Cooperstown. Rickey Henderson spent 44 games with the team and got a World Series ring out of it, Scott Rolen brought his elite third base defence and to Toronto for parts of two seasons, and let's not forget the late Roy Halladay, a two-time Cy Young winner, eight-time All-Star, and the master at finishing what he started, leading the league in complete games seven times. Who will be the next Blue Jay to will enter Cooperstown? The 2025 Hall of Fame ballot features a few former Jays: Curtis Granderson played 104 games in Toronto, Omar Vizquel played 60 in his final season, Troy Tulowitzki was a key part of the 2015 and the 2016 squads, and Mark Buehrle spent his final three seasons in Toronto. But one notable name with an interesting case for induction is Russell Martin.

Russ had an excellent career. He played for 14 seasons, was a four-time All-Star, hit 191 Home Runs, and amassed 38.9 career WAR. Most notably, though he was a winner: Between 2008 and 2016, his team only missed the playoffs once. Getting into the Hall of Fame can be tricky, especially for a ctacher. There are only 17 catchers in the Hall, and the statistical case may make it hard for him to get in. The average WAR for a Hall of Famer at the position is 53.6, and as previously mentioned, Martin is only at 38.9. He never finished in the top 10 in MVP voting. Mickey Cochrane is the lone catcher to make it to Cooperstown with fewer than five All-Star selections, but he boasts accolades Martin doesn't: two MVPs and three World Series championships.

There is one saving grace that may earn Russell some well-deserved support: His ability to frame pitches. Framing is hard to see, as the goal is to make pitches look like they were strikes all along. If you do your job well, it's undetectable. Some fans even argue that framing is cheating or a form of deception, fooling the umpire into calling something that isn't true. Regardless, earning strikes for your pitchers is always going to be beneficial, and Russell Martin was one of the best in baseball at doing just that. Baseball Prospectus put in the work to quantify the value of pitch framing, calculating the run value of all the strikes a catcher earns (or fails to earn). Martin grades out as one of the best. Here’s how many runs he saved, solely by framing, from 2006 to 2016, the first 11 seasons of his career, along with where that total ranked among all catchers.

The only season in which Martin ranked worse than fourth was 2010, when a hip injury limited him to 97 games. He still finished ninth. Add those numbers up, and he helped add 208 runs for his team just from framing alone. That number grows to 222.7 if you include the final three seasons of his career. To put that in perspective, last season, the Blue Jays scored 218 runs from August on. Through his career, just by framing, Martin added half a season's worth of runs for an entire team throughout. That's awe-inspiring stuff, and for that reason, Baseball Prospectus calculates Martin's career WAR at 55.8, a huge jump from his Baseball Reference mark. Likewise, FanGraphs keeps its own framing runs total, and those numbers go back to 2002. Over that time period, they rate Martin's framing as worth 165.7 runs, the highest total among all catchers. According to FanGraphs, Martin accrued 54.5 WAR over the course of his career, 11th-most among all catchers in AL/NL history, and ahead of several Hall of Famers, including Cochrane, Joe Mauer, and Ted Simmons.

Martin might not get into the Hall of Fame, but he was a catcher with over 1,400 hits, 100 stolen bases, and 190 home runs. He combined his off-the-charts baseball IQ with immaculate leadership skills, and he was a highly productive player throughout his career. He gets overshadowed because he played in an era with Yadier Molina, Brian McCann, and Buster Posey, but don't be mistaken, in an era where catcher framing was finally quantifiable, Martin did everything possible to help win games. Even if he doesn't end up in Cooperstown one day, the mark he left on the game of baseball can't be denied.