October 17, 2016

Mind Games

Jose Bautista appears to be playing mind games with the umpires:

This was not a happenstance news conference. He spoke to reporters because he had something to say.

Including:

“All you gotta do is look at video and count how many times [Indians pitchers have] thrown pitches over the heart of the plate. It hasn’t been many. They’ve been able to do that because of circumstances — that I’m not trying to talk about because I can’t.

“That’s for you guys to do, but you guys don’t really want to talk about that, either. Sometimes the elements and the circumstances that we have to deal with as hitters don’t go our way.”

Reading between the lines, Jose is saying that the umpires are calling strikes against the Blue Jays that should be strikes.

Besides shifting the spotlight away from all the struggling Toronto hitters, Bautista may have been doing the kind of thing NBA coaches have done forever: Work the refs.

Maybe they’ll wonder if they’ve been fair to the Blue Jays even though the video shows they have. Maybe they’ll compensate.

The strike-zone data for the first two games finds that the home-plate umpires “missed” 11 calls for the Blue Jays, 10 for the Indians.

Bautista has morphed into a very disliked player. I understand it can work to the advantage of a player to be disliked by the opposition. Barry Bonds wanted opposing pitchers thinking about how much they hated him rather than how to get him out. Crossing the umpires is a different story. I suspect Bautista’s strike zone is about to get bigger.*

*I remember Jack Clark at the end of his career. He always complained about calls, but he swung at strikes. He could no longer hit that well, so he started taking everything, and still complaining. The umps decide that if he wasn’t going to swing, they were going to call anything over the plate a strike. Suddenly, Clark was being called out on very low pitches, and his career was over.

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