A Strike is a Strike

Jessica Mendoza said something during the Sunday night broadcast that I thought was extremely wrong. At some point, Stephen Strasburg threw a fastball for a high strike. ESPN’s pitch tracking showed the ball was as high in the strike zone as it could be but clearly a strike. The batter took the pitch, and the umpire called it a strike. Mendoza said that she didn’t think that pitch should be called a strike. Aaron Boone pointed out that the pitch was clearly a strike. Mendoza’s reply was along the lines of, “It’s a 95 MPH pitch at the top of the zone, no one can hit that.” After some more back and forth, Mendoza asks Boone why that should be called a strike, and Boone, a little miffed, says because it’s a STRIKE. At that point, ESPN is going to break and Dan Schulman tells them to play nice and they would discuss this more. I don’t remember them actually picking up the conversation later.

My generous take on this is that Mendoza was really talking about redefining the strike zone to eliminate areas where batters don’t get hits. This pretty much happened organically in the 1990s, as batters stopped swinging at high pitches (pitches that according to the rule book should be strikes) and umpires stopped calling them strikes. Eventually, MLB codified the new strike zone, then enforced it with PITCHf/x reviews of the umpires. During the 1990s I thought this was bad, but now I see that there was value in keeping the game balanced. The point of the strike zone is to force the pitcher to throw where the batter has a chance of making contact. If that zone naturally changes over time, I no longer have a problem with the umpires adjusting to it. They are just updating their pattern recognizer. If this is what Mendoza meant, she explained it poorly.

My ungenerous take is that she’s a Dodgers fan and she didn’t like seeing her team carved up by Strasburg. Given that the Dodgers batters lead the NL in walks, she likely saw that pitch called a ball more often than not. If you’re calling the game for a Dodgers broadcast, fine, but when you’re in the booth for a national broadcast it’s good not to take sides.

My belief is that it is probably 80% the ungenerous side. In the time she manned the Sunday Night Baseball booth, I don’t really remember her complaining about the shape of the strike zone. She made a mistake, then dug in. I’ve done that, and learned the best thing is to admit the mistake and try to exit gracefully from the conversation.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2ykNQYL