[allenciox]

So last year it is well-known that catcher defense had very little effect on Pitcher ERAs --- framing was not a thing.

So I looked at this year, across my three teams, to see what effect catcher defense is having on CERA (i.e. era of pitchers when that catcher is catching).

On all three teams, I have a platton set up: SE Yogi Berra (100, def=86) as catcher against lefties, and SE Mike Piazza (96, def=35) as catcher against righties. On all three teams, I completed the live missions fairly early on, and so have had both catchers in there for at least fourteen seasons for each. On each of the three teams, Berra has had > 11k IP (average season is around 850 to 900 IP) across that time, and Piazza has > 7k IP. So there is no question that this is enough time to evaluate the difference, knowing that I am comparing apples to apples by not doing any cross-team comparisons. Here are the results for career CERA for each with Berra's CERA listed first and Piazza's second:

Weston Pointe Caspers: 3.90/4.32
Cary Southpaws: 3.88/4.33
Perfect Pitch: 4.09/4.67

So the differences range between .42 runs per game and .58 runs per game with an average of about half a run for every nine innings. That is actually a very substantial difference and much larger than in OOTP 19, where there was a difference but it was much smaller.

Another way of looking at this might be to think that each point in DEF difference might correspond to .01 point in CERA, or one run in 100 games.

Note that this is "not" included in WAR statistics, but if you did apply it there, then a 50 point difference for your main catcher would correspond to roughly 50 runs per year, or the equivalent of about 5 WAR per season. That is huge.