One of the side effects of baseball’s new pitch challenge system is that it creates a mechanism by which a catcher who doesn’t rate well at pitch framing can make up for this by making his pitch challenges at the right time.

This intuitively makes sense, as a catcher who doesn’t rate well at pitch framing is going to lose out on a lot of borderline strikes. If he realizes he’s losing out on those strikes, he can potentially help his team by tapping his helmet for a challenge.

We’re seeing this with a couple of catchers this season in particular, Tyler Stephenson of the Reds and Salvador Perez of the Royals. Here’s where they rank in our pitch framing metric, Strike Zone Runs Saved, since the start of 2022.

Fewest Strike Zone Runs Saved – Since Start of 2022

>> -4 Strike Zone Runs Saved in 2026, tied for fewest in MLB

Stephenson is 32-of-42 on pitch challenges as a catcher and just had a streak snapped of 9 consecutive challenged calls overturned.

A closer look at each of those pitches shows that each of those 9 pitches clipped an edge of the strike zone (none of them were fully in the zone), meaning they were all borderline pitches to some degree.

In Tuesday night’s game between the Reds and the Mets, Emil Jiménez was the home plate umpire. To that point in the season Jiménez had been challenged 26 times and had 19 calls upheld. Stephenson went 3-for-3 on challenges behind the plate Tuesday, including one that netted a strikeout instead of a walk in a game the Reds won.

Perez is also riding a hot streak, as he has gotten 7 of his last 8 challenges as a catcher correct.

One thing to note about how SIS is handling pitch call challenges this year: If a pitch gets challenged, we exclude the pitch from any sort of pitch-framing evaluation. That’s because the call of the pitch as a strike or ball is determined by technology, rather than skill in how the catcher framed it. Thus Perez and Stephenson are not receiving any sort of positive value bump for their challenges but are getting a pitch excluded that probably would have hurt their Strike Zone Runs Saved.

As for the other catchers on this list, Shea Langeliers and Logan O’Hoppe are each 25-of-42 in challenging pitches. Elias Díaz, who happens to be one of Perez’s backups catchers on the Royals, is 3-of-9.

The best catcher by percentage at challenging pitches is Carson Kelly, who has successfully challenged 24 of 28. By our measures Kelly has an up-and-down history as a pitch framer in his career. This year he’s been below-average, -2 Strike Zone Runs Saved, so those overturns have come in handy.

That’s not to say that all of the catchers having the most success at challenging are bad framers.

Here are the top catchers at getting pitch calls overturned this season, along with their Strike Zone Runs Saved totals.

Highest Challenge Success Rate – 2026 Season