Inside Edge 2025 MLB Catcher Blocking Report

Knee-down catching is the new norm across Major League Baseball now. It works, not just for pitch framing, but for pitch blocking as well.

The 2025 MLB season was the culmination of a gradual increase in knee-down catching over the last decade. Only 5% of pitches caught during the 2015 MLB season were in a knee-down stance. 2019 marked the beginning of the shift towards this new trend, showing a 10% increase from 2018. By 2025, over 97% of pitches were caught from the knee-down stance.

27,933 block attempts were taken by catchers in the knee-down stance during the 2025 season, compared to the 782 attempts taken in the traditional squatting stance. And despite the disparity in sample size, the knee-down stance graded out 0.65 percentage points better, with a 94.38% block rate compared to 93.73% for the traditional stance.

While this may be considered a marginal difference to some, this validates the efficacy of knee-down catching for not only pitch framing, but pitch blocking as well. Many critics of the stance believed that the overemphasis on framing would result in more passed balls and wild pitches, yet this has also been debunked by recent data findings.

In 2025, 326,610 pitches were thrown with runners on base. Of those pitches, 1,699 resulted in wild pitches or passed balls, for a rate of 0.52%. This was the lowest rate of the StatCast era, beginning in 2015.

Overall (all pitches with runners on base)

Catchers posted a 2.78% wild pitch and passed ball rate in the 2025 season, allowing 1,074 wild pitches and passed balls among 38,594 balls in the dirt with runners on base. This was the second-lowest rate of the StatCast era, trailing only the 2024 season.

Balls in dirt with runners on base

It would be disingenuous to say that the decrease in wild pitches and passed balls is entirely attributed to the knee-down stance. However, the argument that teams have prioritized pitch framing at the expense of blocking doesn’t have much credence when blocking, passed balls, and wild pitches are at the best rates they’ve been over the last decade. Marginal improvements are all it takes for trends to become the norm in baseball, and the one-knee stance is here to stay.

Who were the best blocking catchers in 2025? Yohel Pozo (98.45% block percentage), Hayden Senger (98.22%), and Sandy Leon (97.57%) were the three best blocking catchers in the Majors in 2025. Pozo and Senger were particularly excellent, as they were the only two in the top six with at least 100 block attempts.

Top 20 Catchers (Shrunk Block %)

* Shrunken % uses a Bayesian prior of 15 attempts at league average. 95% confidence intervals shown on catcher rankings.

Endy Rodriguez (84.67%), Gary Sanchez (87.44%), and Samuel Basallo (88.55%) were the three biggest underperformers in blocking during the 2025 season. Sanchez and Basallo’s performances were particularly underwhelming, as both logged in at least 100 block attempts. Micky Gasper was not far behind them either, with an 88.85 shrunk-block% across 100 block attempts.

Bottom 20 Catchers (Shrunk Block %)

* Shrunken % uses a Bayesian prior of 15 attempts at league average. 95% confidence intervals shown on catcher rankings.