February 02, 2005
The Quest for the Strikezone
Mike's Baseball Rants publishes an interview with a QuesTec operator. Here's a sample:
Q: Umpire crew chief Randy Marsh once made these comments regarding QuesTec: “In the past, there have been pitches that are a little off the plate that are hittable pitches that we’d call strikes. If we call them strikes now, we’re wrong. You have QuesTec looking over your shoulder every single pitch.” Any comments?
A: If the rule book says those are balls, what difference does it make if they are hittable? Who defines “hittable”? What is hittable to Vlad Guerrero is not hittable to a lot of other players. These pitches (the outside ones especially) are ones that I’ve noticed produce the majority of mistakes as judged by the system. If they were called strikes before, then those calls were wrong. The point of the system is to help umpires call the strike zone as the rule book defines it. We should only judge it on how well it accomplishes that goal.
Posted by David Pinto at
01:47 PM
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They'll never call the strike zone as "the rule book defines it".
An above-the belt strike has not been called since 1969....
that's not true--they called at least 12 above-the-belt strikes the first day of the 2003 season (or whichever season it was following all that hype about the "high strike" coming back)
The problem with Questec is that it makes umpires afraid to call borderline pitches strikes for fear of getting a bad rating on the system (or however it is they are rated).
Essentially what that does is it shrinks the strike zone down even smaller than the one defined in the rule book. The pitch on the black is a ball. Anybody who has ever pitched can tell you what its like when the corners are taken away by the umpire. Why not just put the ball on a tee and let these guys hit the ball 500 feet?
"The problem with Questec is that it makes umpires afraid to call borderline pitches strikes for fear of getting a bad rating on the system (or however it is they are rated).
Essentially what that does is it shrinks the strike zone down even smaller than the one defined in the rule book."
This questec operater seems to imply otherwise when he says "These pitches (the outside ones especially) are ones that I’ve noticed produce the majority of mistakes as judged by the system." To me, this means that most mistakes are balls that are called strikes rather than strikes that are called balls. The strike zone, on average, is still "too big."
If you don't like the properly called strikezone that's another issue, but I would argue that it's one that's best addressed once we've gotten the proper strikezone called with some consistency. Then we can change the strike zone to what we want it to be rather than allowing each umpire his own strike zone that grows and shrinks based on who is pitching and who is hitting...
