from Amazon
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
The umpires’ strike zone, by count
John Walsh bathes in the PITCHf/x umpire pool, and comes away with this:
the 3-0 zone is nearly 50 percent larger than the 0-2 zone...These umpires are a bunch of softies. They see a pitcher struggling to put the ball over and they go all Gandhi on us, giving the pitcher an an extra chunk of strike zone to work with when the count reaches 3-0.
And when the batter becomes the underdog, when the count goes to 0-2? Why, the hearts of our merciful arbiters simply turn to mush: They can’t help pulling for the poor batter as he chokes up on the bat, hoping to make some kind of contact. Who knew the umps were such empathetic characters?
I presume the umpires are also practicing… something, I’m sure there’s a term for it… whereby they don’t want to be the decider of fates. And so, rather than be the one that ends the at bat, will extend it so that the players are the ones that ultimately decide. I kinda like that actually. It’s an understanding that it’s not black and white (at least, it’s not black and white in terms of being able to use human eyes to call a pitch), and so, they have to err on the side of caution, and will give the tie-breaker calls to whoever needs it more.
And then John plots the size of the strike zone against the run value of the count:
A wonderful article.
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 344 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date