The Strike Zone

[absintheofmalaise]

In recent articles by Alex Speier and Michael Silverman Mike Napoli and John Farrell complained about how they think the strike zone has grown even larger, among other things, this year. 
 
Napoli from the Speier article:

 
 
“My opinion, on lower runs scored and more of a boring game, I think the strike zone is bigger and pitching is better. That’s a double whammy right there. I’m not saying that’s why I’m hitting .200,” said Napoli. “[But] we’re trying to speed up the game, pace of play. How are you going to get pace of play up? More strikes, faster game. The strike zone is bigger. I know everyone can see it. The pitching is better. They’re throwing 90 mph sliders that are moving like crazy. When you talk about hitting in 1-0 rather than 0-1, when you’re getting called strikes, it’s a lot harder to hit. Everyone wants to say, ‘Oh, the hitting is worse.’ No. The pitching has gotten better, but there has to be a little leeway.

 
Farrell from the Silverman article:

 
 
“There are some nights you feel the strike zone goes from the chalk line of the right-handed batter’s box to the chalk line of the left-handed batter’s box,” he said. “For a group of hitters that have been known to see a lot of pitches to try and get into advantage counts, it’s putting us in a position to make major adjustments. Because the more you push back, there’s really no reaction by the umpires, unless it gets to a point where you get ejected. Whether it’s been an edict or a mandate that’s been handed down from Major League Baseball, we see it consistently, a much wider, much lower strike zone across the board.”

 
iayork thought now would be a good time to look again and see if this was true. Here's what he found. 

 

[geoduck no quahog]

Interesting...I'd like to see an overlay of the "de facto" strike zone with the rule-book strike zone (which should be a rectangle), just for yuks.
 
BB%
 
2015: 7.6%
2014: 7.6%
2013: 7.9%
2012: 8.0%
2011: 8.1%
2010: 8.5%
 
Quite a trend.

 

[Snodgrass'Muff]

Natural selection at work. Adapt or die. There is no indication that the strike zone is going to head back in the direction of the "grind out at bats" heyday, so the comments by Henry about shifting their philosophy are what we should be hoping to hear at this point. They're a little late to the party in that regard, but it's hard to blame the front office for being reluctant to move away from an approach that had them fielding one of the best offenses in the majors for a good decade.

 

[geoduck no quahog]

The guy I feel sorry for is Napoli, mostly because he's who I see on a daily basis. He's always had a good eye and a strategy for making pitchers throw a hitter's pitch. He's just getting some horrendous outside calls these past few games, probably just luck of the draw. It's got to be tough for any hitter who won't really know what today's East-West strike zone is until he's got a couple of strikes on him. Some guys (like Sandoval) seem to rely on h and-eye coordination and quickness. Others seem to predict a type of pitch and location before they swing. Others go up with a plan. It's the latter guys that are getting flumoxed during early at bats.

 

[geoduck no quahog]

Question about the fx Strike Zone for Ian or anyone else that knows.
 
Does fx account for the different heights/shapes of each batter? Top and bottom of strike zone theoretically changes through the lineup. All I ever see is one box and I can't tell if its being adjusted.

 

[Rice4HOF]

Interesting...I'd like to see an overlay of the "de facto" strike zone with the rule-book strike zone (which should be a rectangle), just for yuks.
 
BB%
 
2015: 7.6%
2014: 7.6%
2013: 7.9%
2012: 8.0%
2011: 8.1%
2010: 8.5%
 
Quite a trend.

Not a rectangle. It's 3D. That's my main issue with pitch f/x. Is the height at the front of the plate? Or the back? Cause if the top of the ball is at the bottom of the hollow of the kneecap at the front of the plate, it's a strike as per the rulebook. But if it drops an inch or two as its crossing the plate, it will be lower at the back of the plate. It should still be a strike but might not look like it on a tracker.

 

[iayork]

Not a rectangle. It's 3D. That's my main issue with pitch f/x. Is the height at the front of the plate? Or the back? Cause if the top of the ball is at the bottom of the hollow of the kneecap at the front of the plate, it's a strike as per the rulebook. But if it drops an inch or two as its crossing the plate, it will be lower at the back of the plate. It should still be a strike but might not look like it on a tracker.

PITCHf/x uses the front of the plate as its final point, and yeah, you're right.  The precise location and ball/strike nature of individual pitches aren't super-reliable from PITCHf/x.  Not only the 3D nature of the plate, but PITCHf/x is probably only accurate to within a half inch or so at best, and more importantly there are rare, but not incredibly rare, pitches that are completely misclassified by PITCHf/x.  There aren't many, but they can be ridiculously far off -- There's one where PITCHf/x claims Koji threw a pitch left-handed, for example.  
 
That said, when I'm looking at the strike zone, I use large enough sample sizes that all these things should not be a factor; either they'll average out, or the rare ones will be completely swamped by the tens of thousands of correctly-labelled pitches.  

 

[iayork]

Question about the fx Strike Zone for Ian or anyone else that knows.
 
Does fx account for the different heights/shapes of each batter? Top and bottom of strike zone theoretically changes through the lineup. All I ever see is one box and I can't tell if its being adjusted.

It claims to.  Every at-bat comes with data that are supposed to reference the bottom and top of that individual's strike zone, i.e. personalized:

• sz_top: the distance in feet from the ground to the top of the current batter’s rulebook strike zone as measured from the video by the PITCHf/x operator. The operator sets a line at the batter’s belt as he settles into the hitting position, and the PITCHf/x software adds four inches up for the top of the zone.
• sz_bot: the distance in feet from the ground to the bottom of the current batter’s rulebook strike zone. The PITCHf/x operator sets a line at the hollow of the knee for the bottom of the zone.

 
 However, I don't find those data very believable; I see enough that are bizarrely off (players would have to be 9 feet tall) that I have no faith in them.  And I don't think the umpires use them as much as they're supposed to, either; the strike zone is closer to an average zone than it is adjusted per player.  Someone else found the same thing ... Found it, Baseball Prospectus in 2011: :
 

Another approach is to normalize the heights based upon the strike zone for each batter. The PITCHf/x data from MLB Gameday includes a value for the height of the top and bottom of the zone for each pitch. ... We have already observed that there is a large amount of variation from day to day in the PITCHf/x sz_top and sz_bot values, making their use for judging strike zone heights (or umpires) problematic. ... The average height of all the pitches that a batter sees turns out to be a better indicator of his strike zone top and bottom height than the height of the batter or the average PITCHf/x sz_top and sz_bot values. In fact, a multivariate regression indicates that once the batter’s average pitch height and the height of the batter are known, the PITCHf/x values add almost no useful information.
 

 
And so on; it's an interesting article, and it's almost exactly what I found when I tried the same things.  

 

[iayork]

The guy I feel sorry for is Napoli, mostly because he's who I see on a daily basis. He's always had a good eye and a strategy for making pitchers throw a hitter's pitch. He's just getting some horrendous outside calls these past few games, probably just luck of the draw. It's got to be tough for any hitter who won't really know what today's East-West strike zone is until he's got a couple of strikes on him. Some guys (like Sandoval) seem to rely on h and-eye coordination and quickness. Others seem to predict a type of pitch and location before they swing. Others go up with a plan. It's the latter guys that are getting flumoxed during early at bats.

Napoli is indeed getting screwed, worse than the average right-hander, and this year he's specifically getting screwed on outside pitches.  Objectively, he's only getting screwed on a tiny number of pitches (last year it was about 20 over the season, he's on the same course this year), but of course every one of those will have an additive effect on every at-bat and every swing/take decision.  
 
I started looking at Napoli a couple days ago, when he specifically complained about the strike zone, and it's turning into a longish article so it will probably end up on the .com site later this week, and you can judge the data then.
 
(Other players got about equally screwed last year -- Pedroia -- and have shrugged it off this year, so as Naps himself said you can't entirely blame the zone for his struggles, but I think it must be a factor.)

 

[iayork]

Interesting...I'd like to see an overlay of the "de facto" strike zone with the rule-book strike zone (which should be a rectangle), just for yuks.

Here's a few strike zones you can compare:
 

 
There are several more in this article along with some more explanations as to how I made those, but anyway, these plots also show two different "official" strike zones, the two white rectangles, superimposed over de facto strike zones, i.e. the ones umpires actually called to left- and right-handed batters in 2008 and 2014.  
 
The smaller zone was determined as the de facto zone a few years ago; this is the zone that, for example, Brooks Baseball uses (I think) based on the tops and bottoms that umpires actually called; it placed the bottom and top of the zone at 1.75 and 3.4 feet respectively.  The larger zone is the “official” zone.  It’s based of the measurements in PitchFX that claim to show the official bottom and top of the zone (“sz_bot” and “sz_top”).  Individually, I don't have much faith in these readings, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but they average out to a zone that was too large in 2008, but is closer to the called zone in 2014.  
 
I believe umpires have been revising their strike zone based on feedback and evaluation off PITCHf/x or closely-related systems, so it makes sense that the de facto zone is now closer to the official zone.  I don't know that umpires, or MLB, expected this change to lead to a fairly drastic change in offense, affecting almost all aspects of the game.

 

[Harry Hooper]

Natural selection at work. Adapt or die. There is no indication that the strike zone is going to head back in the direction of the "grind out at bats" heyday, so the comments by Henry about shifting their philosophy are what we should be hoping to hear at this point. They're a little late to the party in that regard, but it's hard to blame the front office for being reluctant to move away from an approach that had them fielding one of the best offenses in the majors for a good decade.

 
 
Expanding the acreage of the strike zone isn't a uniform phenomenon. The new (2014-15) region that's been added at the bottom is precisely an area that is harder to slug and do damage with. It could be fixed with a simple software adjustment in the evaluation scheme used by MLB. 

 

[Rice4HOF]

PITCHf/x uses the front of the plate as its final point,....
 
That said, when I'm looking at the strike zone, I use large enough sample sizes that all these things should not be a factor; either they'll average out, or the rare ones will be completely swamped by the tens of thousands of correctly-labelled pitches. 

Thank you, I always wondered about that. I completely agree that with a large sample size, this is fine.  But when watching a particular pitch be called one way, and the broadcasters complain that Pitch F/X shows it was a bit high, in those indiviudal cases it could have legitimately dropped into the zone through the plate, and the ump ultimately made the correct call.  (Although at 90 MPH, I'm not sure how much a ball will drop over a distance of 17 inches. A really sharp curve ball may drop measurably the odd time, I suppose)

 

[Rice4HOF]

It claims to.  Every at-bat comes with data that are supposed to reference the bottom and top of that individual's strike zone, i.e. personalized:

• sz_top: the distance in feet from the ground to the top of the current batter’s rulebook strike zone as measured from the video by the PITCHf/x operator. The operator sets a line at the batter’s belt as he settles into the hitting position, and the PITCHf/x software adds four inches up for the top of the zone.
• sz_bot: the distance in feet from the ground to the bottom of the current batter’s rulebook strike zone. The PITCHf/x operator sets a line at the hollow of the knee for the bottom of the zone.

 
 However, I don't find those data very believable; I see enough that are bizarrely off (players would have to be 9 feet tall) that I have no faith in them.  And I don't think the umpires use them as much as they're supposed to, either; the strike zone is closer to an average zone than it is adjusted per player.  Someone else found the same thing ... Found it, Baseball Prospectus in 2011: :
 
 
And so on; it's an interesting article, and it's almost exactly what I found when I tried the same things.  

Interesting.... The rulebook strike zone is NOT defined as 4 inches above the belt.  It is the midpoint between the belt and the shoulder, while in a batting motion. So... it will also change based on not only the batter's height, but his swinging motion. A guy with a Pete Rose like stance will have a much shorter top of the zone than a guy who swings standing straight.
 
As an umpire, the top of the zone is what I have the toughest time being consistent on, as I need to mentally adjust for each batter. 

 

[tims4wins]

But if he is swinging then the strike zone doesn't matter, right? That is confusing.

 

[iayork]

As an umpire, the top of the zone is what I have the toughest time being consistent on, as I need to mentally adjust for each batter. 

It's interesting that the top of the zone has been extraordinarily constant over the years, even while the bottom has dropped and the sides have moved in.

 

[iayork]

 
Expanding the acreage of the strike zone isn't a uniform phenomenon. The new (2014-15) region that's been added at the bottom is precisely an area that is harder to slug and do damage with. It could be fixed with a simple software adjustment in the evaluation scheme used by MLB. 

The problem is that the "new" strike zone is actually much closer to the official strike zone than was the "old" zone (pre-2010).  The old zone was too small, the new zone is big but it's close to what the rules decree.  So adjusting the evaluation would be explicitly saying that the rules are wrong, and should be ignored. That's not going to happen with any kind of official sanction.  
 
The alternative would be changing the rulebook officially and re-defining the strike zone.  That would itself draw a lot of fuss, I think -- the strike zone is a contentious issue, and making official changes would bring the back-in-my-dayers out in droves.  
 
The simplest option for MLB is to ignore this and hope it goes away. I really doubt they expected offense to drop to the extent it has, but they may be willing to tolerate it with the expectation that batters will eventually adjust and offense will start to increase again (or they may be perfectly happy with this level of offense, given that it's leading to faster games, which the powers that be have been obsessed with for the past few years anyway).

 

[Heating up in the bullpen]

All that should matter to Farrell is Red Sox pitchers getting the same strikes called as the other teams' pitchers. As for Napoli, he needs to learn to foul off the close ones, like I'm teaching little leaguers.

 

[iayork]

All that should matter to Farrell is Red Sox pitchers getting the same strikes called as the other teams' pitchers. As for Napoli, he needs to learn to foul off the close ones, like I'm teaching little leaguers.

I strongly support your application for manager of the Red Sox, and encourage you to reward good plays with extra juice boxes and snacks after each game.

 

[Heating up in the bullpen]

I strongly support your application for manager of the Red Sox, and encourage you to reward good plays with extra juice boxes and snacks after each game.

Cute.
Maybe Napoli is suffering bad calls more than other players. But from looking at your charts, the gray area where umps may call a ball or strike is just a couple inches on either side of the black. If Napoli is getting rung up on pitches a foot outside like Eric Gregg used to give Glavine, sure, nothing you can do about it and yes, every right to complain. But if he's taking pitches two inches outside - and they've been called strikes all year - he needs to adapt. And I will absolutely reward that with an adult juice box.

 

[iayork]

The guy I feel sorry for is Napoli, mostly because he's who I see on a daily basis. He's always had a good eye and a strategy for making pitchers throw a hitter's pitch. He's just getting some horrendous outside calls these past few games, probably just luck of the draw. It's got to be tough for any hitter who won't really know what today's East-West strike zone is until he's got a couple of strikes on him. Some guys (like Sandoval) seem to rely on h and-eye coordination and quickness. Others seem to predict a type of pitch and location before they swing. Others go up with a plan. It's the latter guys that are getting flumoxed during early at bats.

 
I looked at Napoli's called strikes and agree that Mike Napoli is Being Shafted by the New Strike Zone.  
 

He's getting called strikes in regions that, a year earlier, would not have been strikes, and he's getting them at a higher rate than the average right-hander.  This year in particular, he's had at least 10 called strikes that were close to, but outside, the outer edge of the zone as it was called last year.  
 
That said, an extra ten called strikes is not remotely enough to account for his numbers this year, and other batters with similar numbers have not shown a similar decline, so this is just one part of his problems.

 

[barbed wire Bob]

I looked at Napoli's called strikes and agree that Mike Napoli is Being Shafted by the New Strike Zone.  
 

He's getting called strikes in regions that, a year earlier, would not have been strikes, and he's getting them at a higher rate than the average right-hander.  This year in particular, he's had at least 10 called strikes that were close to, but outside, the outer edge of the zone as it was called last year.  
 
That said, an extra ten called strikes is not remotely enough to account for his numbers this year, and other batters with similar numbers have not shown a similar decline, so this is just one part of his problems.

Umm, can you check the dates on your graph?

 

[barbed wire Bob]

Umm, can you check the dates on your graph?

Edit: just read the article and it's great. Thanks.

 

[iayork]

Umm, can you check the dates on your graph?

Oh, yeah the second 2013 should be 2014, of course. I can't fix it until I get home tonight.

 

[absintheofmalaise]

Here's the corrected graphic.
 

 

[barbed wire Bob]

 I went to Baseball Reference  and pulled up Napoli's stats for the years you referenced.  I assumed 2011 would be one of his worst years but, based on OPS, it was his best.  Go figure.
 
Year     Tm         BB            SO          BA        OBP         SLG         OPS
2011     TX        58              85           .320     .414           .631        1.046
2012     TX        56              125         .227      .343          .469        .812
2013      RS       73              187        .259      .360          .482         .842
2014     RS        78              133         .248     .370          .419         .789
 
 
Edited because I'm not very good with tables.

 

[The Tax Man]

Ian York has continued to look at the effects of the expanded strike zone to determine if certain player profiles are most impacted by the changes. He recently looked at Napoli but this time he looked across all MLB players. 

 

[Sampo Gida]

But if he is swinging then the strike zone doesn't matter, right? That is confusing.

 
 

Ian York has continued to look at the effects of the expanded strike zone to determine if certain player profiles are most impacted by the changes. He recently looked at Napoli but this time he looked across all MLB players. 

 
I think while the number of OOZ calls may be small in relation to the total number of pitches, its impact is much greater. Batters have to deal with the reality of the umpires strike zone, and this affects their decision to swing at pitches out of the zone or not.   Swinging at pitches out of the zone results in more strikeouts, weaker contact and fewer XBH, not to mention fewer walks.   It may even result in weaker contact on balls in the zone since the batter has to worry about covering more of the plate with 2 strikes.
 
There is a clear correlation of strike zone expansion with K rate and reduced offense.  While correlation does not necessarily prove causation and there may be other factors at play, it makes sense the strike zone is a major factor in overall offense  reduction.
 
Why MLB finds this desirable, I have no idea and can only speculate (which I won't do here).  Lets face it, umpires are reviewed by MLB officials after each game and are getting more consistent, so its clear that MLB is driving this change. Since they can interpret the strike zone anyway they want,  this must be what they want.
 
Like someone said upthread, players and teams must adjust to the strike zone.   Maybe use longer bats (or have the rules changed to allow longer bats), especially with 2 strikes,  move around in the box more, be more defensive with 2 strikes, whatever. 

 

[Darnell's Son]

Today Iayork looked at the strike zone for the 2015 season to see if there were any changes.