I almost never listen to any of Wilners pregame, but happened to be in my car today during a conversation with Will Carroll on biomechanical analysis and the Jays complete disinterest in having their pitchers tested.

Is this disinterest in biomechanical analysis as a concept, or merely in having their pitchers tested by Will Carroll and his firm?

The best place for this sort of thing would be the minors anyway, I think - changing a major league pitcher's mechanics would probably throw him off.

What is the story with Rogers?  Is this a smoke mirror or is he actually turning out to be this good?

The John Farrell for Esmil Rogers trade is looking really good now...

The Mop-Up duty study is not a full framing study (I should say that I haven't gone back to look at the methodology used by others who have studied this).  It looks at pitches in and out of the strike zone that are called differently from what the tracking software calls them and gives all of the credit to the catcher.  But the pitcher plays a role too.  We have seen pitchers who consistently hit their spot, even if it is off the plate, get a strike called.  If you believe Sportsnet's pitch trax then Casey Janssen gets a lot of outside pitches called a strike.  This is not a framing issue it is a pitcher hitting his spot issue.  I have not seen enough games to see whether Buehrle, Morrow, Johnson or Rogers contribute to this too.

The Mop-Up duty study does provide some information but it cannot be considered the answer to the question.

I know in these issues data is more reliable than the eye.  But you rarely see JPA catch a low pitch and bring it up an inch like Jose Molina would do.  Too often he catches those balls with his glove going down.  Maybe he is better on the edges, I don't know.

There is a couple of other factors to consider.  First, what methodology was used by the studies that concluded that JPA was not the top framing catcher in the AL and which methodology do you think should deliver a more accurate assessment?  Secondly we are over-exposed to JPA compared to other catchers.  Maybe most catchers have an issue with framing and as Blue Jay fans we compare JPA to Jose Molina, rather than to the other 12 catchers who catch similarly to JPA. 

I'm of the thought now catcher framing numbers are a lot more dependant on pitchers and umps than many people realize, and simply aren't even close to being accurately measurable with current technology.

Some of the studies that have been done have accounted for pitching staff by looking at catchers on the same team - lots of cases where teams have catchers that differ greatly in framing results despite catching the same pitchers. Some umps are going to be more susceptible, but teams aren't matching catchers to umpires (which would make evaluation hard, actually, since it would confound the catchers and umpires) as far as I know. So the umpires come out in the wash of the analysis.

And the best studies have done it based on expected value of pitches - that is, if an outside pitch is a ball 70% of the time, and it's called a strike, the catcher gets .7 of a strike "credit". The mop-up duty study is a rougher version of that, but I don't see an issue with it. Like anything in baseball, you'll get some unusual streaks. People tend to be very, very resistant to the idea that defensive play can be streaky, but it really does happen. Sometimes, Arencibia, a completely average framer of pitches, might, through a weird combination of ump calls and pitch opportunities (can only steal/lose strikes in certain places), might end up looking great for a while. Same way he looks like a 40 HR hitter for a month or two each year. Same way that Trout got to "steal" 4HR last year - you might go all year and never get a chance to do that again.