An Illustrated Guide of Missed Strike Calls

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Jocephus
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An Illustrated Guide of Missed Strike Calls

Post by Jocephus »

something baseball related to snack on
by Ben Clemens
January 5, 2022
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-illustra ... ike-calls/
I hope you’ll indulge me in a small bit of personal venting as a setup for this article. Over the holidays, my wife and I traveled to see family. This being 2021 (well, at the time), she caught COVID. We’ve been isolating at home ever since – I haven’t tested positive, but given that I’m being exposed every day, what can you do?

Why tell this story? To some extent, I want to complain. I’m only human, after all, and venting is one way to feel a bit better about the week I’ve spent sitting at home reading, cooking, and taking care of a sick person without being in the same room as them. More importantly, though, I’ve had a bit of free time, and I spent it the way that anyone would: watching an absurd number of videos of pitches in the strike zone that were called balls.

What’s that? You’d do something else with your time? I did some cooking and such too, but seriously: plenty of videos of balls called strikes. Why? I wanted to write an article about them, and when your free time stretches out infinitely, you might as well get a firm grasp of the genre first. Anyway! I’ve found what I would consider to be an exhaustive account of the ways that pitches very clearly in the strike zone get called balls. I’m going to use the worst missed calls of the 2021 season to show the ways a perfectly placed pitch can turn into a ball.

Or, I’ll do that shortly. First, we have to exclude one category, namely, edge-case pitches in two-strike counts. Are they strikes? By the letter of the rulebook, absolutely. But I’m okay with strike zones that shrink a bit in this situation, as long as they expand a little bit when the shoe is on the other foot. That’s not a problem of catcher presentation, or one where the umpire misses an obvious one. It’s simply a different view of how the strike zone should work, and slightly-narrowed edges are not the kinds of misses I’m hunting for.

We’re also excluding cross-ups. When the catcher has to turn on full panic mode, umpires miss the call fairly often. When the catcher goes from sitting high fastball to dropping to a blocking position, there’s so much commotion that you can forgive an umpire a slightly altered sense of the strike zone. Finally, I left out anything where the batter was attempting a full-on bunt and obscured the umpire’s view, because those wouldn’t be fun to watch. That leaves us with these archetypes.
The Stab
The Drop
The Stab-and-Drop
Too Much Motion
The Over-Enthusiastic Frame
The Uh, What?

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GeddyWrox
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Re: An Illustrated Guide of Missed Strike Calls

Post by GeddyWrox »

LOL.... the "Uh, What?"

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