Let me set the scene:
It’s Tuesday night. Bottom of the ninth. Two outs. Blue Jays trail 4-3.
Melky Cabrera is up and in the hole, 0-2. He’s been on fire at the plate lately, but all he needs right now is a doink hit off a scuffling Fernando Rodney to tie things up and go to extras.
Rodney winds, delivers, aaaaaaaaaaaannnd… strike three. Called. Four inches off the plate.
Replays show it as a missed call.
Melky, despite knowing the futility of arguing balls and strikes, spins and argues. But it’s over. The Rays high five, the Blue Jays collect their bats and helmets and the pens and keyboards go to work yielding a verdict of their own: home plate umpire Dale Scott is a pitcher’s umpire.
But is he really?
A statement like that might make a batter feel better about getting screwed at the plate – and Melky was, at least if you’re going by the rules on what the strike zone is.
But statements like that also make it seem like Dale Scott did something outside the norm. The fact of the matter is, most umpires are pitchers’ umpires, and all batters are getting screwed. It’s a trend that’s been going up for quite a few years.
Strikeouts have been trending up for several seasons now. The question is, why?
The fine folks over at Fangraphs have an answer.
By compiling information from at-bats from 1988 to the present, they found that while swing rates and contact rates stayed nearly the same over that span, the amount of strikeouts has still increased. More specifically, called strikeouts.
That led them to speculate on one of two possible conclusions: either the game is experiencing a uniquely effective crop of pitchers, or the zone has gotten bigger.
My money is on the latter.
In that same article, by examining PITCHF/x data over the last five years, Fangraphs discovered that pitches called for strikes inside the zone had decreased, reaching an all-time low in 2012. But since the total number of Ks has increased, and contact and swing rates are the same, that means more strikes are called out of the zone.
Let’s go back to the Blue Jays-Rays game. Specifically, let’s zero in on Jose Molina, who wasn’t in the game, but still had an impact.
Jose Molina is one of the best catching framers in all of baseball. By framing, I mean he takes fringe pitches and cleans them up to look like strikes.
Mind you, an umpire does not rely on a replay or a PITCHF/x tracker to dictate his zone. He relies on his perception as shaped by a number of moving variables: the batter’s dimensions and relationship with the plate, the timing and action on the ball, the consistency of the pitcher and the catcher’s ability to receive.
That last part is key.
Jose Molina is one of the best receivers in baseball. In fact, according to data presented in a recent Grantland article, Molina has saved about 111 runs between 2008 and 2013. He saves about 35 in every 120 games – purely based on his ability to receive and frame pitches for his staff.
Molina is a master framer; one of the main reasons the Rays brought him in. The Rays don’t have an incredibly potent offence, but they do have amazing pitching. It’s their edge, and to further press the advantage it gives them, they try to couple it with amazing catching.
Jose Lobaton, the catcher who caught Melky’s nail in the coffin on Tuesday, is not yet at the level of framing mastery that Molina is. He’s in a great mentoring situation to be sure, but even if he doesn’t become the next Jose Molina, there’s a good chance that he’ll still get calls other catchers don’t – a product of the combined strength of the Rays pitching prowess and the ‘Molina’s Legacy’ factor.
Of course, you can’t discount great coaching and all of the incredible prospects, but the Rays reputation for both the aforementioned, plus the league-wide trend in strikeouts, means that a called strike off the plate isn’t that inconceivable.
But that’s the Rays, an example of a team that exploits every possible league trend for pitching. It may explain why Melky got rung up, but it doesn’t explain why umpires are expanding the zone.
To explain that, one might choose to cite the upward trend in velocity. Since 2008 to the present, velocity on all pitches across the board is up, roughly two M.P.H. on average. I can only speculate that the speed at which pitches are thrown factors into the difficulty umpires have making correct calls. But if this were so, I would expect hitters to also have a difficult time putting the bat on the ball, which, as we know from the stabilized contact rates, is not the case.
Instead, I offer this hypothesis: baseball has a tendency to go on trends.
The ‘Dead Ball’ era. The increase of hitter passivity in the ‘Money Ball’ era. The decline of the bunt. Shunning homers and Ks in favour of high batting average, then deciding strikeouts are just another component of power production.
Now you face power arms attacking the corners where receivers wait like Bob Ross with a catcher’s mitt.
When’s the last time a letter-high fastball was called a strike? Hell, when’s the last time a fastball at the catcher’s mask was considered a strike?
Both fall within the bounds of the rule book’s definition of the strike zone – the horizontal line between the batter’s letters and knees, with respect to the width of the plate.
The strike zone of today is more like the batters waist to shins, plus an inch off the plate both ways – if you can prove you can work there with consistency.
The strike zone is probably the most malleable set of guidelines in baseball. It can be shaped by reputation, frustration and even exhaustion. But hitters will adjust. And if the balance skews too far from the mean, the league will take action.
Then it will be pitchers screaming about how their zone is being taken from them and the mindset of the defeated will be that umpires are too hitter friendly.