Something in John Harper’s column about Jorge Posada today caught my eye:

Molina, the Blue Jays’ backup this season, is one of the best in the game at such subtleties. Last season David Cone, the ex-Yankee pitcher and broadcaster, said of Molina, “I think he gets more borderline strikes for his pitchers because he’s so good at framing them than just about any catcher in the game.”

Reading it, I realized that with pitchFX data widely available and the sample of pitches even a backup catcher receives so great, this must be something that might be measured with some reasonable degree of accuracy.

And lo, it has. Two weeks ago, to be specific, by Bill Letson at Beyond the Boxscore.

The Internet rules.

And perhaps the real winner here? David Cone. By Letson’s comprehensive study, Jose Molina ranked first among all catchers who received at least 1000 pitches in framing pitches in 2008 and second in 2009. Good eye, Coney.

What’s more, the data seems to show that the difference between the best and worst catchers at framing pitchers could make a pretty significant impact on a team across the course of a season — as in multiple, perhaps even double-digit wins.

That seems nuts, I realize. Letson admits he has no way to separate the catchers in the study from the set of pitchers they’re receiving, and admits there’s work to be done in the study to see how it holds up over time. But it’s a remarkably thorough piece of analysis, much of which flies way over my head.

As for the guys on the Mets these days? Both Rod Barajas and Henry Blanco ranked out slightly above average in 2008 and 2009. Both Josh Thole and Omir Santos were slightly below in 2009. Thole was a bit worse than Santos, but still not as bad, according to the study, as a good number of more established Major League catchers like Gerald Laird, Kenji Johjima, Rob Johnson and Ryan Doumit.

Brian Schneider, incidentally, ranked ever-so-slightly below average in 2008 and 2009, closer to the middle of the pack than Thole and Santos. It will be interesting to see how he fares compared to the rest of the Phillies’ catchers in 2010 — it could be that he’s actually good at framing pitches but something about the movement of balls thrown by pitchers on the Mets’ staff made them difficult to frame.