Are we sure those strikes don't include swings and misses?
Ummmmmmm.
Are you not aware of the rule against completely destroying the OP before the 500th comment?
Plus one for Judaism in my internal monotheism tracking.
It's a confusing graphic. ESPN says Kershaw threw 95 total pitches today, but by my count there are around 75 total dots. Were there ~20 foul balls or something?
I do great at keeping the ball down.
Ogged is Mark Cuban and/or a random sports talk radio host now?
2: Since the graphic includes "swings and connects" (the green dots), I would assume it also includes "swings and misses". So yeah, those lower strikes out of the strike zone could include a bunch of those rather than a bunch of bum calls by the ump.
I will rescue ogged and say that regardless of the misinterpretation of this particular situation, the first paragraph is exactly right. The arguments against instant replay, electronic calls, and other things to improve accuracy are almost completely bullshit. My favorite is that instant replay slows down the game too much, but manager arguments, NHL fights, 466 timeouts per NBA team in the last 5 minutes, whatever are "part of the game".
They could completely remove the home plate umpire from baseball and have the rest of the game called by one umpire sitting in front of a monitor.
That would have ruined The Naked Gun.
So, first paragraph good, second paragraph almost completely wrong. You can hover over each dot here, and it looks like the umpire only called two pretty close balls as strikes. That's impressive.
So you're batting .500 and should be asking for a contract extension.
I don't know anything about the Reds lineup but want to register my regular complaint that their fireworks are unnerving and annoying.
17: I think the Pirates used to only have fireworks when they won games, but then they became more desperate and started setting them off for home runs. Nice show from the river and downtown, but I could see it be annoying otherwise if you live within earshot.
Because of the river or hills or whatever, I can hear the fireworks pretty clearly from my house. This year, they don't seem to be doing them or I've become inured.
If Moby can hear them they're obviously loud enough to annoy Thorn.
I'm so glad I hit refresh just now.
Not the first time global competition has made things tougher for Pittsburgh.
I bet if they brought in completely computer-called pitches, they'd also establish a more absolute strike zone rather than one tailored to individual player height, which would improve computer accuracy and avoid embarrassing the technocrats with what once would have been termed judgment calls, which would then lead to an incentive to have players within a particular height range, which would likely* lead to a homogenization of baseball teams based on height and body type beyond what you see today.
*Batting is obviously not the only part of the game, so maybe there's enough going on in baseball for the effect to be limited.
18 is what happened here too. Fireworks for home runs, wins, plus every Friday night home game and occasionally other reasons too. Our street would dead end in the stadium if we didn't hit the shared river first, so we're very close. Because there are 17 million baseball games a season, it feels like I spend most of the year being reassuring about what that giant explosion sound just was.
Action to address comparable(?) issues in cricket was brought about by the fact that the software to second guess umpires was sold to broadcasters for use by commentators and to ground owners for use on big screens until public outrage at particularly egregious wrong calls forced the game's authorities to do something. Is this situation not also shaping up in baseball?
The solution arrived at in cricket was to leave the on-field umpires in control, but to give both sides a finite number of appeals to an extra umpire sitting in a room full of screens, who can watch replays until he's satisfied. Everybody seems to be fairly happy with this outcome. The captain of the team wanting to appeal has to make a call on whether to use one of their appeals inside, I think, 15 seconds. If they waste one, it's on them.
15 seconds? I thought the whole point of cricket games was that they took longer than bridge construction.
Small but measurable impact of race on balls and strikes.
Is this situation not also shaping up in baseball?
I think whats shaping up in baseball is that everybody realizes that delaying the game to have technology second guess the umpires is lame and instead of waiting around they should just get on with it and the cost of an occasional blown call is an acceptable price to pay.
29: Yes, it's entertainment it's not about the pursuit of truth and justice.
30 is exactly right. And even within the game's own terms, 29 is right. In baseball, unlike, say, football, you have a real 'the solution to pollution is dilution' kind of situation. Yes, there are calls that are consequential, at the margins, but most bad calls just don't matter enough to get worked up about.
Baseball has a frankly ridiculous number of games. It's been happening for months now and it's still hockey season.
And they may as well let Pete Rose back into the Hall 'o Fame. Trump has destroyed America's moral compass anyway.
24: Computer image analysis in controlled situations is sufficiently good now that it would be eminently possible for a computer to enforce a player-specific strike zone.
I am here to post comment 2.* I believe I have arrived too late.
*(although mine wouldn't have been phrased as a question)
And they may as well let Pete Rose back into the Hall 'o Fame.
I disagree. A lifetime ban should mean something. He can go to the Hall of Fame when he's dead.
most bad calls just don't matter enough to get worked up about.
Also, getting worked up about bad calls is kind-of fun.
Except the Jeffrey Maier thing. That was bullshit.
I mean, I can't be the only one around here still holding a grudge about the 1996 ALCS, right?
32 is truth. Especially tee-ball.
13. Why is that apparently dedicated, stats-obsessed website not adding colors to distinguish foul balls and swinging strikes? IANA web designer but it seems like something easy that their readers would like. At the very least it would free people from wiggling their mice around to look at each pitch, give them more time to post.
Maybe their javascript template only has three colors.
OT: They don't say if they sterilized the dolphin.
I legitimately don't understand whatever joke 42 is making.
Also OT: about a week ago I searched on google for a wifi-enabled mattress, purely to see whether such an absurd thing exists. (Spoiler: it does.) I laughed. But the joke's on me, because now my ads on Google/Facebook/everywhere are all wifi-mattresses, all the time.
I thought the only reason for a water birth was so you could have a dolphin there.
We are all puppets, playing tennis for slolernr.
34: Actually, it's already been shown that human umps are better than rob-umps at the top and bottom of the zone. I don't know if you know the definitions of the top & bottom of the zone, but count me as extremely skeptical that computer vision can find them without being gamed.
Anyway, 29-31 get it exactly right. 11 is egregiously wrong, especially since it imagines that the rules are simple and can be simply applied, resulting in fairness and justice all around. The NFL has been on a 20 year extended project to demonstrate just how utterly false this is. Anyone here care to tell the class exactly what a "catch" is?
That's a rule problem. Replay has worked well in the NBA from what I can tell (in general reffing seems to be a lot better in the NBA recently. I guess they really were all on the take).
As for the top and bottom of the strike zone, just put electronic patches on the players. That seems like an easy technical fix.
I should have known that there would be a constituency for bad calls.
For the record, if/when computers are able to call a perfect strike zone, I wouldn't object. However--and this is an issue that's come up in numerous instances in many, if not all sports that add replay--if you do that, you need to change the SZ definition. Because the rulebook definition is a much larger zone than what actually gets called*. 11 and OP.2 want to pretend that this means baseball has somehow been wrong or immoral all these years, but that's the kind of detached-from-reality logic that leads to people driving 55 on the freeway, cursing all of the maniacs driving past on all sides.
The goal of robotics-umps, and all replay systems, should be to enshrine consistent calling of the rules-as-they're-called, not to introduce novelty to the game by making Amelia Bedelia High Queen of Sport.
*because the written SZ says that any pitch that passes, by a molecule, through any part of the 3-dimensional zone is a strike. However, most pitches that only enter the zone by a molecule don't get called right now, or ever. If you start calling it that way, you add something between 10-20% to the size of the zone, all in the name of brain-dead adherence to "rules". If replay fundamentalists incorporated this reality into their arguments, I'd be on board, but they're so high on self-righteousness ("just get the call right" would go great on a red ball cap) that they can't accept that replay can allow outcomes that are foreign to the game.
As for the top and bottom of the strike zone, just put electronic patches on the players. That seems like an easy technical fix.
Yeah, because players totally wouldn't adjust their pants and shirts to get more favorable zones.
One clunky idea I've heard is having the home plate ump somehow mark the zone for individual players when they come up to bat, and let the computer take over from there.
I should have known that there would be a constituency for bad calls.
As I say, the computer makes bad calls high and low, but somehow favoring the computer isn't favoring "bad calls". Techno-optimism will be the death of us all.
You are confusing consistency (or precision) with accuracy. I have no problem if human umpires called the same strike zone player to player and game to game even if it was totally different from the written rule, they can always change the rule if the calls are consistent. That is not the world we live in. Everyone knows star players get more favorable calls. The commentators say it all the time- oh, he's a rookie, has to pay his dues before he'll get the close call. That's a stupid way to play a game supposedly based on rules and skill, but hey maybe you prefer the WWE.
For the record I also think "playing the game the right way," retaliatory beanballs, and NHL fights are stupid too.
29-31 are correct. Just as baseball has attained a certain level of perfection with regard to field dimensions, speed and style of pitches &c, it also has to deal with the messiness on the margins. Not unrelatedly, MLB should stop trying to speed up the game. Some things are best when protracted, like certain novels and movies as well as meals and sex. What are people supposed to do with that extra five minutes? Work? Fuck that.
because players totally wouldn't adjust their pants and shirts to get more favorable zones
On the players, not their uniforms. Hell, implant them for all I care. As for the strike-zone, that seems like a non-issue. Test the system, adjust the rules to make them like current conditions, or not, as people like.
Put 'em in those polka dotted motion capture leotards Andy Serkis is always wearing.
Can we just mention that it was established years ago that you don't really like baseball?
Anyway, I get to go to both Safeco and Fenway (at the very least) this summer, so life is worth living.
I do dislike baseball. I have no dog in this fight, but baseball is the largest reservoir of the-suckiness-is-integral-to-the-game thinking.
("just get the call right" would go great on a red ball cap)
I would buy this.
58: For some value of suckiness equivalent to "giving a pass on bad calls," I'm not sure that's even true anymore in the review era. We're basically talking balls and strikes. Are football and football really less so?
John Roberts wasn't saying he'd be unbiased, he was saying umpires are just as crooked as he is.
Further to 54, if I had the option to see the Gollums playing the Damn Dirty Apes instead of the Red Sox playing the Yankees, I might watch baseball.
Sometimes bars have cheap Labatt's during baseball games where the Pirates are on the TV.
Drinking said beer does not require you to watch the game, but it does make it more likely since that's what nearly everybody else there is doing.
65: Possibly! July 14, though we'll also be in town the next day.