i’m sure everybody is familiar with the skycam showing the bird’s eye view of home plate, and pitches going 2-4 inches off to the side and still being called a strike. this is the norm, but how long has it been like this? has it been a slow progression?
is it to maintain the balance as hitters get better than pitchers, with pitchers needing the outside zone to keep scores reasonable?
is tradition the only reason we don’t widen home plate?
It actually has a name.
It’s called…
The umpire blew the call. But remember, the black is part of the plate too. Any part of the ball crossing the black is a strike.
Since a strike is almost entirely subjective, if even a small part of the ball passes over any part of the plate, its most likely a strike.
Also, those skycams are generally attached to a part of the stadium behind and above the plate. Thus, you get a distorted view of the ball as it crosses the plate. The ball may still be over the plate but appear off the plate from that view. This wouldn’t happen if the ball was thrown completely straight, but it isn’t. When you hit the corners, the ball passes over the front corner and ends up entirely off the plate.
Actually, the black part of the plate is not supposed to be considered part of the plate for calling strikes. There is no mention of the “black” in the rules of baseball.
Nevertheless, it exists and umpires use the black as a reference point for calling balls and strikes.
Baseball’s strike zone can kindly be described as “amorphous.”
If you widened home plate, umpires would probably still give outside strikes.
The strike zone in baseball is a chancy thing, and changing it has had huge consequences. The 1963 adjustments to the strike zone killed offense for years; calling a few more high strikes in 2001 reduced scoring by about seven percent. IF you expanded the plate you might really change the dynamics of the game and the level of offense.
The amorphous strike zone, as BobT put it (what a great term) has been developing for years, as umpires slowly abandoned the rule book and adopted their own unofficial standard. Calling balls and strikes at the major league level is really hard to start with, so there’s always a subjective element. There have been three gradual changes to the way balls and strikes are called that has gotten away from the rule book:
1. The outside strike. One element that had a large effect on whether a pitch is called a strike is how well the pitcher hits what he’s aiming at. If the catcher set his glove six inches outside and the pitcher hits it dead center, umpires will be inclined to call that a strike; if the catcher is set up inside and has to move his glove out to catch a pitch six inches outside, that very likely will be called a ball.
Since pitchers are ALWAYS trying to nibble around the outside part of the plate, you’ll get a lot of guys deliberately hitting the target a bit outside - and those will often be called strikes. Eventually it became so common it just became convention, and all umpires called pitches six inches outside as strikes, and sometimes even further outside; few will forget the ludicrously bad job umpire Eric Gregg did in the 1997 NLCS, when he called many strikes on pitches that were one or two FEET outside strikes, and could not possibly be hit with a regulation length bat, in Florida pitcher Livan Hernandez’s Game 5 win over Atlanta. In fact, it was that game, which I will generously call a goddamned travesty (and I don’t even like the Braves) that started the move towards a re-examination of the strike zone.
2. The inside strike. While umpires started calling outside strikes a-plenty, there was no similar allowance for inside strikes. This can be attributed, at least in part, to Major League Baseball’s efforts to eliminate beanball wars, which in the 1980s had gotten some players hurt. There’s less allowance now for outright intimidation and brushback pitches, so hitters tend to stand right on top of the plate, since they’re less afraid now and have to try to hit all those outside pitches anyway. No umpire’s going to call a pitch six inches INSIDE a strike, because that pitch is close enough to the batter to make him have to bail out.
3. The high non-strike. I can’t explain how this happened, but starting in the mid-80s and getting worse up until 2000, umpires just stopped calling anything in the upper part of the strike zone a strike. I can’t explain why, really; they just arbitrarily decided that anything at the belt or higher was a ball. Some umpires wouldn’t even call it a strike if it was above mid-thigh.
The result of the changes in the strike zone have been, up until now, to help hitters. Absence of the high strike is a huge advantage for hitters. From 1994-2000 we had one of the highest sustained levels of offense in major league history; it declined a little in 2001, but there was still plenty of scoring.
The most important thing is not the “zone,” however it is described. The most important thing is the consistency of the umpire’s calls during the course of a game.
As I understand it (and correct me if I’m wrong) a pitch is nothing until the umpire calls it. Thus, he can call a pitch that bounces three inches in front of the plate a strike. He can call a pitch that is belt high and surgically bisects the plate a ball. They never do, of course, it’s always the high, low, inside or outside pitches that are questioned.
But if an umpire calls a clavicle-high pitch a strike, he’s not necessarily wrong. But he’d better call that pitch a strike every time it’s thrown in that particular game.
well ideally i think you’d want all strike zones to be the same, from umpire to umpire. in a sport as statistically scrutinized as baseball, you’d want to be fair to all hitters. and why do broadcasts even bother using the sky cam anymore anyways? just to show ~how~ much a ball can go outside and still be called a strike? i guess it can be used to see consistency (“in the first inning, the ball was 5 inches outside and it was a strike, now it’s 3 inches outside and it’s a ball”).
I don’t know if you can get human beings, all with varying levels of visual acuity to accurately describe where a 90+ mph baseball is located at any one time.
A machine of some type would probably be needed, but will likely never be accepted by the baseball establishment.
BobT speaks the truth, and if I might toss in another couple of cents, it’s the catcher’s job to try to influence the umpire’s calls as a result.
Broadcasters Tim McCarver and, IIRC, Fran Healey (both former MLB catchers) frequently point out how much the catcher moves his mitt on a certain pitch. If the situation calls for a strike (a 3 - 1 pitch, say), and the catcher sets up and doesn’t move the mitt in catching the ball, then even if he’s set up outside whatever nebulous area is referred to as the strike zone, often he’ll get the strike called.
On another note, it’s fairly common, I’ve observed, for batters in their first at-bats of a game to turn to the ump after a called strike and have a short conversation. Not arguing the call, but verifying the umpire’s strike zone. “The high stuff is a strike, then?” Once the batter knows that the high strike is in effect, he’ll be aware of it in subsequent trips to the plate, and will be less inclined to take those pitches, preferring to foul them off until he gets a pitch he can hit.
I’m going to mirror a few things that have already been said, and maybe add a few of my own.
No, the black part of the plate is not part of the strike zone.
ANY part of the ball over ANY part of the plate is a strike (assuming the height is where it needs to be).
In my experience, both batters and the pitcher/catcher expect that the corners will be called. When I say corners I mean 2-3 inches outside and inside of the plate.
ANY part of the ball crossing the TOP of the knee cap is lowest a pitch should be called.
just my .02
E3