Catcher emeritus Ivan Rodriguez is of course on the writers' Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year, and he'll eventually get the plaque he deserves. Part of Pudge's sprawling excellence was his powerful arm behind the plate, and part of it was his strong production at the plate by the standards of his position. Another part of it was his dogged reliability when it comes to putting in time at the most rigorous role in all baseball.

Rodriguez caught 2,427 games in his career, which is the all-time record. Along the way, he spent more than 20,000 defensive innings (!) sweating and grunting within the tools of ignorance. Knees of mighty carbyne, is what all of that requires.

Anyhow, Rodriguez's durability behind the plate calls to mind this rather very urgent query: How many times did Ivan Rodriguez squat during a major-league game, possibly? Because I am of, for, and by the people, I'm here to pull a vaguely reasonable figure out of my baseball-loving rear end. Forthwith? A walking tour of the punctilious #science that led us some #facts regarding how many times Pudge squatted in his big-league career ...

  • Pudge was catcher for 88,904 batters faced in his career. We'll need that total in a moment.
  • While manning catcher, Pudge's pitchers registered assists on strikeouts 14,107 times. Another 178 times he registered a 2-3 putout on a dropped third strike. Another 51 times, the batter made it to first base despite striking out. That comes to 14,336 strikeouts while he was behind the plate.
  • While Pudge was catching, his pitchers issued 7,970 walks.

Those bits of information are essential to get an idea of how many pitches Rodriguez caught in his career (by "caught" we of course mean manned catcher for that pitch). Using a basic pitch count estimator, we arrive at a career pitches caught total of ... 332,421 pitches. That's a lot!

It would be easy enough to say Pudge squatted for each and every one of those pitches and call it a day, but if we're going to be inaccurate about something, we're going to be inaccurate about something at great length. This is where expert video scouting comes into play. First, the author reviewed this brief sequence from very late in Rodriguez's major-league playing career ...

Pudge's routine seems to be to fall to one or both knees for pitches that don't end the at-bat or yield a ball in play or foul that's possibly playable by him. To sort of verify this theory, I spot-checked some his work during Game 3 of the 1999 ALDS more than a decade prior ...

Yes, that seems to be his routine. For instance, here's Pudge after a called strike ...

And here's Pudge getting a new ball from the plate ump after an unplayable foul ball ...

I would call neither of those a squat. To count as a squat -- I'm decreeing this -- you must go from standing position to squatting position, preferably with hips below parallel. We can term what you see above "holding a squat, mostly," which is also physically taxing, but it's not a full squat. Furthermore, I'm going to assume this pattern held for Pudge's entire career -- not rising from his squat until the end of the plate appearance or in the instance of a foul ball deemed playable but not caught, a fielding chance, a passed ball/wild pitch, or a ball in play to another position.

Also, this is Mr. Rodriguez's customary way of extinguishing a base-runner ...

That qualifies as rising up out of squat position. So by counting his career total chances as squats, we'll cover assists, putouts, and errors. Then we'll throw in passed balls and wild pitches, as mentioned. Also, we'll add 46,250 to our running total. That's the rough number of balls in play to other positions over the course of Pudge's catching career. We'll also throw in an extra squat per inning caught to cover things like mound conferences, pitching changes, and departure from the mid-plate appearance routine chronicled above, and unclassified miscellany. So, so much science going on here.

But wait: That's not all! Pudge also played in 40 postseason games in his career. At this point, we'll take our "squats per game" figure and multiply it times 40, since, conveniently enough, Rodriguez manned catcher in all 40 of those postseason games.

So what comes out of the wash? We'll present the final tally in oversized and authoritative font, thus befitting the significance and unswerving accuracy of this exercise ...

107,843

That's right, people: Ivan Rodriguez squatted 107,843 times in his major-league career. This, of course, is merely "defensive squatting" and doesn't account for the many times he may have, say, undertaken a deep stretch in the on-deck circle. As for the reliability of that figure, do not assail the unassailable. Is this research peer-reviewed? Well, an editor looked at it, so, sure, you can call it peer-reviewed.

In conclusion, if you didn't vote for Ivan Rodriguez for the Hall of Fame, your penance is to perform 107,000 squats.