Louise posted:Maybe some of you can answer this question that I was thinking about as I was watching my son's team last week....why is the number of passed balls a catcher allows in a season not a statistic people seem to be interested in? Why is it all about pop time? The catcher on the team we were playing allowed many passed balls and every time our players moved up a base (even stole home one time). I was thinking that it did not matter what this catcher's pop time was if our team was getting so many free bases on passed balls. My son who catches has only had one passed ball all season yet nobody seems to be impressed (other than me, his mom).
Passed balls for a catcher are like errors for a SS or wild pitches for a pitcher... not that important of a stat unless they're really bad. They can distinguish you on the negative side, but not so much on the positive side. I think the definition includes the phase "ordinary effort". Are you sure the opposing catcher was giving up passed balls, or was he just not very good at corralling wild pitches?