Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
November 28, 2007
The Umpire Zone

John Hale presents an excellent piece of research at The Hardball Times on the strike zones of individual umpires.

Roger Clemens was well known for taking rigorous notes and studying umpires--when they can differ as much as this, you'd think that every pitcher would. Umpires don't just have big or small zones, they have very specific preferences for the four edges of the strike zone and are rarely simply "big" or "small". Often an ump expands the zone one way but plays it by the book in the other directions.

As I was watching the playoffs and tinkering with this data, I was amazed at how consistent each umpire's tendencies were. Remember when Victor Martinez started yelling at the home plate umpire over calls to Fausto Carmona? No wonder: Dana Demuth has the fourth smallest zone in the league where those pitches were called, on the left side of the plate.

The whole article is well worth the read, and he includes a database for download.


Posted by David Pinto at 11:48 AM | Umpires | TrackBack (0)
Comments

I thought the umpries calls on balls & strikes were horrible during the playoffs. I'm glad someone's done some research on this...I'll e plowing through it. I imagine/hope a lot of major league hitters and pitchers comb through this data too.

Posted by: Devon Young at November 28, 2007 02:09 PM
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