5/30 GDT: Cubs(Brown) vs Cardinals(Leahy) 6:15 PM CT

[GeddyWrox]

I only caught the last inning and I'm already sick of PeteCrowDouchebag

[dmarx114]

Everyone except JJ and burly:

0-21

[Birds67]

The pbp guy was openly rooting for CrowArmstrong. Gross.

I hate listening to national announcers.

And he was so over joyed when PCA made that catch.

[ghostrunner]

Smoltz doesn't seem to get the strike zone, which I don't understand

He either doesn't understand or is terrible at communicating his thoughts.

I went back and listened just to see if I missed something. He says:

"that's the danger of that, because anything that can touch the top of the zone, even though they lowered it in the system, that's the.. that's the beauty of it"

Touching the zone was always a strike, but surely he knew that.

It's apparently true that it's effectively been lowered a lot for tall hitters especially. I was surprised how much. Fangraphs did a whole writeup on it:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-strike- ... heres-how/

With the advent of the ABS challenge system, the definition of the strike zone has been laid out with new precision. MLB defines the new ABS zone as follows: “The strike zone will be a two-dimensional rectangle that is set in the middle of home plate with the edges of the zone set to the width of home plate (17 inches) and the top and bottom adjusted based on each individual player’s height (53.5% of the batter’s height at the top and 27% at the bottom).” That’s a change from the way that the strike zone had been understood since 1996. Per MLB.com, that zone was “the area over home plate from the midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants – when the batter is in his stance and prepared to swing at a pitched ball – and a point just below the kneecap. In order to get a strike call, part of the ball must cross over part of home plate while in the aforementioned area.” Those two zones are different, clearly, and it’s reasonable to assume that they would have different sizes and shapes. But how different?

Before the season, estimates of how the zone might change ball and strike calls abounded. We’ve heard anecdotally that pitchers think it’s smaller, and that hitters think it’s taller. But I haven’t seen any studies that attempt to measure it empirically, so I set out to do so....


....The upshot is that the strike zone has shrunk by around 14 square inches for a 6-foot tall batter from roughly 454 square inches to 439 square inches. This finding matches the direction of the result that MLB expected to see before the season, if not the precise magnitude. In their ABS explainer, they approximated the strike zone in 2-2 counts as being 449 square inches with the old human-called strike zone and 443 square inches with the new ABS zone.

And it's also narrowed to a 2D plane instead of a box.

But none of that helps me get whatever he was trying to say there.