Pitcher-Batter-Catcher Dynamic: Oof.

Injuries just waiting to happen are now happening

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The Mets’ J.D. Martinez isn’t smiling in that photo. It’s an odd look of his that was captured, I grant you. But as Martinez left the batter’s box on Tuesday after being awarded first base due to catcher’s interference, he knew something was seriously wrong.

Martinez’s bat had met the left forearm of Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras, and I mean on the swing, not the backswing. It was full force. The hitter was trying to whip through the strike zone to meet a slider on the outer half of the plate, but the lumber never got there. It got Contreras first, and the catcher’s screams of pain could be heard all over the ballpark.

(Warning: TERRIBLE quote ahead.)

“I hit meat,” Martinez told reporters in St. Louis afterward. “I felt like I hit meat. I didn’t hit a glove where you kind of just point back to catcher (to signal interference). It was just solid. I was like, dude, I hit him good...I felt terrible.”

The swing broke Contreras’s forearm. He’ll need surgery to put it back together. But while Martinez undoubtedly hated the moment, it wasn’t exactly about him — or even Contreras, although it’s his career that was just altered.

No, this was about a dynamic in the game that has been coming on for years — a batch of badness waiting to happen. That time is now.

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The evolution of pitching is never complete and mostly unpredictable, but for the past couple of decades, the emphasis has been on heat. Guys get paid to throw as hard as they can for as long as they can — “max effort,” in the parlance.

We can all see some of the more obvious results of this, such as starting pitchers logging fewer and fewer innings and hitters trending toward a three-true-outcomes response to a steady diet of 95 to 100 mph heaters. (The three are walk, strikeout and home run. Launch angle is king.)

But behind all that, subtle adjustments have been occurring. Hitters who are constantly guarding against blazing two- and four-seam fastballs and sliders — that is, pitches that rise, sink or move inside/outside at extreme velocity — have dug deeper and deeper into the batter’s box.

Deeper, in this case, means farther back, closer to the catcher. The hitters are trying to give themselves a few more nanoseconds to make swing decisions and “see” pitches - buying a little reaction time. Many of them are literally standing on the back chalk of the box. Some occasionally appear to be behind the chalk altogether.

Catchers, meanwhile, have begun creeping closer and closer to these deep-box hitters, then reaching out even farther with their mitts to receive pitches. The reason? Usually, it’s to catch these fastballs and hard sliders a little farther forward — that is, to snag a strike while it still looks like a strike. Wait a few nanoseconds longer, sit deeper in the catcher’s well, and that cut fastball or slider drops to the point that even though it crosses the plate as a strike, it may appear to fall out of the zone by the time it’s caught and be judged a ball by the (still human!) umpire.

So: Batters moving back. Catchers moving forward and reaching forward.

Impact is inevitable.

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By rule, catcher’s interference is called when the catcher gets in the way of a hitter’s ability to strike a baseball. In non-violent impact situations, it usually means that a swing clipped part of the catcher’s mitt, often the top. A free trip to first base is the result.

For reasons that may someday puzzle baseball historians, this tradeoff has been deemed acceptable by teams on behalf of their catchers, who are being asked to work closer to hitters and risk interference calls in order to steal more strikes.

Per the pitcher-improvement site Codify Baseball, here are the number of catcher’s interference calls per year that have been made in MLB over the past decade:

2014 — 23.

2015 — 33.

2016 — 41.

2017 — 43.

2018 — 41.

2019 — 61.

2021 — 62.

2022 — 74.

2023 — 96. (MLB single-season record)

2024 — 33 through May 7, about six weeks’ worth of games.

According to baseball writer Sam Miller, catcher’s interference calls are roughly five times more frequent now that they were over a 50-year period, from the 1960s into the 2010s. That’s insane.

In Willson Contreras’s case, the Cardinals had been coaching him to move closer to hitters. Contreras also worked in the off-season on keeping his mitt near the ground as the pitcher gets ready to deliver, then bringing it up in a sort of sweeping motion in order to deceive the umpire into thinking that a low pitch was actually up in the strike zone.

On Tuesday in St. Louis, this all came together in the most awful way. The hitter was almost out of the back of the box. The catcher was jammed dangerously close to the bat path. And then somebody pitched.

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It’ll be interesting to see whether MLB attempts to start adjudicating everybody’s relative position in the pre-pitch moments. You’d hope so. Those are careers — and teams’ seasons — on the line.

Too, this may ultimately jump-start the conversation about how much effort in baseball should be directed toward trying to fool the human umpires. At a time when balls and strikes may become subject to an automated zone, that is a worthy thought exercise.

But here’s the thing: None of it will make pitchers throw slower. They’ll throw heat until otherwise advised. As long as that’s the first thing that is known, a lot of the rest will continue to follow — including impact.