The eye of the umpire
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The Hardball Times found this 7/25/2007 on www.hardballtimes.com [flag] |
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MLB
Comments (8)
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ultxmxpx +1It would be interesting to see if the strike zone is consistent in all the parks with the pitch f/x system. If they're roughly the same in every park then I'd say that's the "actual" strike zone. However, perhaps you might just find individual home plate ump biases.-
walshj58 Well, determining the strike zone on a per-park basis would not tell us anything about umpire bias: umpires are rotated through the schedule, they are not tied to particular parks (thank goodness!)
When more data is availabe, we can look at individual umps.
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studes Just awesome, John. I really enjoyed it. I had to remind myself if the strike zones were drawn from the pitcher's perspective or the batter's perspective. The catcher's, right?-
walshj58 Yes, the view is from the catcher's perspective. I should always remind folks of that, but I forgot this time.
Anyway, glad you liked the piece.
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poludamas I'd be curious as to whether there are differences by handedness of the pitcher, as well as pitch type; even more to the nitty-gritty, is the zone different for an 89 mph fastball and a 97 mph one? -
GuyM John:
A suggestion for future research: we know that a big part of home-field advantage is a better K/BB ratio for home hitters (greater in some parks than others). It would be very interesting to see how much of this, if any, results from umpires calling a tighter strikezone for home hitters than visiting hitters, presumably an unconscious response to fan pressure. If there’s no difference, then we know it’s entirely a function of the home hitters and/or visiting pitchers, such as hitters’ greater familiarity with hitting background, better rest at home, etc.-
walshj58 This is a very good idea and I will look into it. I think it's doable even with the current data set.
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kyleg Great article!
In addition to looking at the home field advantage question, I think it'd also be interesting to see a sensitivity analysis for batters (at least on the horizontal axis). I'd really like to know the degree to which umps get it right (or wrong) on a batter by batter basis. Are there enough data available to answer this question?
I'm sure there are many other good ways to disaggregate the data as well. Ultimately, I think it'd be interesting to get at the "why" question, and use regression techniques which take the ump, pitcher, batter, RHP/LHP, RHB/LHB, pitch type, etc. into consideration.
Links (7)
Not an Article about Pitching at Altitude
Published 7/26/2007 by Joe Sheehan at Baseball Analysts
... Also, I haven't this yet, but it would be interesting to see what these breakdowns look like using the strike-zone as it is actually called. ...
Link Dump: Enhanced Gameday, etc.
Published 7/27/2007 by Justin at On Baseball and the Reds
Did Pitchers Adapt to Alex Rios?
Published 10/6/2007 by halejon at The Mockingbird
... The first thing this tells me is I probably need to tweak my strike zone (based on John Walsh’s measurements of the actual strike zone) up a few inches, or that pitch f/x was set a little low. As you’ll see, it doesn’t look that bad for the second half, but almost all the pitches on the bottom fringe of the zone as I have it were called as balls. It’s also strange that pretty much nothing came in on the inside wall of the strike zone. I’ve checked the data several times though- there were almost no pitches a foot off the middle of the plate, and he swung at all of them. ...
FOX Pitchtracker is Set to Make Umpires Look Bad
Published 10/17/2007 by halejon at The Mockingbird
... classic one any more. No umpire in the world calls a strike as high as dictated by the rulebook, and they give a couple inches off the plate. If you want to see the real strike zone, check out John Walsh’s measurements for a general idea. I’m actually starting to think that Walsh might have calculated a slightly-too-large zone, but regardless it’s not the high, narrow box that is shown on the broadcasts (or even the slightly less high ones that are seen on the gameday program). ...
Old Man River
Published 1/4/2008 by Joe Sheehan at Baseball Analysts
... If you expand the chart above to cover all pitches in all counts, but still only look at that limited region, the old pitcher advantage almost completely disappears. Older pitchers still get more called strikes, which could be the older pitchers throwing more to the strike-zone as it is called, but the SLGBIP and BABIP values get much closer, with younger pitchers doing a little better overall. ...
Framing the Debate
Published 4/5/2008 by Dan Turkenkopf at Beyond the Box Score: Front Page Posts
... over at The Hardball Times. He used the PITCHf/x data and the strike zones figured by John Walsh to determine how many strikes above or below average an umpire called in the course of a game (for his purposes, 150 called pitches). The results ranged from -5.2 strikes for Gerry Davis to +4.81 strikes for Jeff Nelson, where negative numbers implies a smaller strike zone. ...
A Strike Is a Strike, Right?
Published 4/24/2008 by Dan Turkenkopf at Beyond the Box Score: Front Page Posts
... at The Hardball Times. Each called pitch is compared to the strike zones identified by John Walsh to see whether it was "mistakenly" classified. I put "mistakenly" in quotes because Walsh marked the boundaries of the strike zones where 50% of the pitches were called strikes, so it's expected that some calls will not match. Walsh provides values on the height and width of the strike zone for both left and right handed batters and compares them to the rulebook strike zone for the average batter. I used his values for the strike zone widths, but calculated my own for the ...
