by childsmwc » Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:45 pm
Dean,
You will find that the catchers arms impact the game very similarly to the outfielder arms. I went back and reviewed 30 to 40 plus seasons for each team in the league, and the reason this holds true is that a good catcher can only get finitely better than the average catcher (i.e. if an average catcher (-1) arm, allows a mix of SB/CS that estimates to say 15 runs a season, then the best catcher can only be 15 runs better than your baseline (in fact regardless of the arm in the -4 to -1 range, the sb% is roughly the same, it is the attempts that go down).
However, on the other end of the spectrum, as the arm gets worse, more and more runners steal, and in addition the SB % increases so the combination creates an exponential growth in runs allowed for the worse catchers.
I would assume that this analogy holds true for OF arms as well.
Bbrool