Standardized Strike Zone Is Still a Moving Target

The 2001 season has reached the All-Star break with several offensive statistics having declined marginally from a year ago.

It is much too little over too short of a span to suggest a revolution or trend.

Nor does it suggest, most baseball people say, that the off-season emphasis on standardizing the strike zone by having umpires follow the rule book parameters has created a measure of equality for pitchers in an era of explosive scoring.

The general opinion seems to be that hitters are more confused than ever about a strike zone that still varies from umpire to umpire, crew to crew--and it’s that inconsistency that may be aiding pitchers and reducing offense more than the calling of the high strike or any singular strike.

“I don’t want to bad mouth the umpires because they have a difficult job, but it just isn’t working,” Dodger second baseman Mark Grudzielanek said of the literal attempt to put all umpires on the same page.

It certainly wasn’t working at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday night when Marquis Grissom uncharacteristically became enraged after being called out on a third strike by umpire Marvin Hudson and will probably be suspended for making contact with the umpire during the ensuing argument.

There have always been arguments and there will always be arguments because the strike zone, no matter how defined, is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders come in all sizes with differing experience.

The problem, said Dodger Manager Jim Tracy, is that baseball made a concerted effort in the spring to educate everyone involved on the rule-book zone only to have many umpires seem to forget the definition. It’s one thing, Tracy said, to call the high strike and another to continue calling the wide strike, the pitch that doesn’t cover the outside corner.

“If you’re going to elevate the zone and still call the pitch that’s off the plate a strike, there’s no hitter alive that can cover that much area,” Tracy said. “We were told in the spring that, whether it was inside or outside, the ball would have to cover a corner of the plate to be called a strike, but the outside zone seems to be as wide as ever.”

Of course, the whole idea was to restore a degree of balance between pitching and hitting and to end a decades-long pattern in which the strike zone had continued to shrink vertically. The pitch above the belt was seldom called a strike. The new emphasis was on stretching it back to a midpoint between the shoulders and belt as defined in the rule book, approximately the letters.

Statistically, an argument can be made that it’s working, but the statistics are shallow and even misleading, perhaps.

Consider the combined runs per game average of 9.71 through the first three months of 2001 compared to 10.52 last year. That’s a sizable drop and the first since 1997. However, the average for the four years before this one was 9.98. The difference between 9.71 and 9.98 is an insignificant 3%.

Home runs are down about 10%, from 2.56 to 2.30, but then Albert Belle has retired, Mo Vaughn and Nomar Garciaparra have not played, Frank Thomas went out for the year in May and Ken Griffey Jr. and Mark McGwire have been in and out of the lineup with injuries.

Walks are down about 13% a game, strikeouts are up about 3% (continuing an escalation attributed to the swing-for-the-fences mentality) and the number of games in which a team has scored 10 or more runs has dropped almost 30%.

All of that, many say, may be more the result of improved pitching--a description few would have thought possible over the last decade or more--than the high strike.

A partial list of the impressive young starters to emerge in the last few years--or months--includes Seattle’s Freddy Garcia (10-1); Milwaukee’s Ben Sheets (10-5); the Dodgers’ Chan Ho Park (8-5); Florida’s Brad Penny (7-3), Ryan Dempster (10-8) and A.J. Burnett (5-5); St. Louis’ Matt Morris (10-5), Minnesota’s Joe Mays (11-5), Brad Radke (10-4) and Eric Milton (8-3); Oakland’s Tim Hudson (9-5), Mark Mulder (9-6) and Barry Zito (6-6); Houston’s Wade Miller (11-3) and Roy Oswalt (7-1); San Francisco’s Russ Ortiz (9-5); San Diego’s Adam Eaton (8-5); the Angels’ Jarrod Washburn (7-4) and Ramon Oritz (7-6); the Chicago White Sox’s Mark Buehrle (6-4), Kip Wells (5-5) and Jon Garland (3-3); Cleveland’s C.C. Sabathia (7-3); Detroit’s Jeff Weaver (7-8) and Baltimore’s Josh Towers (6-3), Willis Roberts (6-7) and Sidney Ponson (5-5).

“Frankly, I haven’t seen a dramatic change in the strike zone,” Houston Astro Manager Larry Dierker said from Enron Field, “but I have seen a significant increase in the number of good young pitchers who can throw 93 to 95 [mph]. Even if they don’t always have terrific control, the abundance of raw stuff is a significant improvement.

“Baseball is cyclical. They put in the designated hitter at a time when there was probably 20 pitchers headed to the Hall of Fame. Now they can’t get rid of it, but pitching is coming back. There’s never been anything wrong with the game that talent can’t take care of.”

In Dierker’s view, it was unrealistic to think there would be a major change in the strike zone given the human factor. Some umpires have called the same zone for 15 years or more. Now, he said, you have some calling the high strike, some the low, and “almost no one calling the inside corner, which is where a pitcher really has to live. All you can do is try to see what they’re calling early and adjust.”

It’s generally agreed, for the most part, that the sweeping motion of the high curveball is being called a strike with greater regularity than the fastball. Only hard throwers of the Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling caliber can afford to pitch consistently above the belt, but even they’re reluctant to make it a habit.

Johnson said he wearied of the strike-zone speculation in the spring “and it hasn’t affected me at all. I wasn’t going to change my approach. If I elevate a pitch and it’s called a strike, it’s a bonus.”

A hot topic in the spring, it now seems to take an incident of the Grissom type to revive strike zone conversation.

Sandy Alderson, the commissioner’s executive vice president for baseball operations, calls it a work in progress. In contrast to the general opinion regarding the still wide zone, he insists umpires have done a good job reining in the outside strike but are not calling enough high, low and inside strikes.

“We didn’t expect to accomplish this overnight,” he said, “but we’re providing a lot of feedback [for the umpires] and the resources are in place to get it done. We’re satisfied with the progress and I think you’ll see more evidence of it in the second half.”

Officials conduct a daily conference call to discuss what transpired in the previous night’s game, and monitoring cameras, already operational at Fenway Park, should be in use at five other facilities before the end of the season. Big Brother is watching. No one is trying to hide it, Alderson said.

“The umpires know they’re being critiqued and should be more focused and better prepared because of it,” he said. “We went too long without that kind of overview.”

Many umpires may have more on their mind than the high strike. They have gone through a traumatic period in which their American and National League identity was dissolved, their union was shattered through a misguided labor strategy that resulted in baseball’s eager management accepting the resignation of 22 (a decision still being fought in court) and now there’s the emphasis on standardizing the zone and calling the high strike.

Through it all, there has been a major turnover that thinned out the veteran ranks and brought up dozens of minor league umpires intent on establishing their credentials and control and not apt to take much questioning of their strike zone.

“There’s a lot of inconsistency, but we’re trying to be patient,” Angel Manager Mike Scioscia said. “It’s just that when you’re trying to get your players in the mind-set of what the new zone is supposed to be, and some crews are calling it that way and some aren’t, it’s frustrating for everyone involved. I mean, you can’t turn the light switch off, rearrange the furniture in the dark, and expect everything to be fine when the light is on again. This is going to take time.”

In the meantime, if hitters are in the dark and the offense is down a little because of it, that’s a bit of balance recently missing.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Pitchers Strike Back

With a new strike zone in place, among other factors, offense has declined in major league baseball. A look at the batting and earned-run averages, and the average runs, home runs and strikeouts per team in a game in both leagues this season at the All-Star break compared to the full season numbers from 1997-2000:

NATIONAL LEAGUE

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Year Avg. Runs HR SO ERA 2001 .263 4.79 1.17 6.96 4.46 2000 .266 5.00 1.16 6.68 4.63 1999 .268 5.00 1.12 6.64 4.56 1998 .262 4.59 1.00 6.76 4.24 1997 .263 4.60 0.96 6.83 4.21

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AMERICAN LEAGUE

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Year Avg. Runs HR SO ERA 2001 .267 4.93 1.11 6.38 4.52 2000 .276 5.30 1.19 6.20 4.91 1999 .275 5.18 1.16 6.14 4.86 1998 .271 5.00 1.09 6.31 4.65 1997 .271 4.93 1.09 6.38 4.57

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Houston Mitchell