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Sep 14, 2015 · When it comes to the strike zone, you need to think three dimensionally. Editor’s Note: This piece was initially given as a presentation at the marvelous 2015 Saber Seminar. The strike zone has come under heavy fire lately from the analytics community, as the zone has expanded greatly in recent years — particularly here at The Hardball ...
- Eric Lang
- What The Data Say
- Proposed Strike Zone Model
- Metrics For Heart/Control/Command
- Adding in Some Nuance
- Summing Up Horizontal and Vertical Nuance
- Pizza Slice Model
- Concluding Thoughts
- References and Resources
Pitchers, when they choose the location of the pitch are optimizing for three outcomes: 1. Limiting quality of contact (we’ll measure this with wOBAContact) 2. Maximizing called strikes (we’ll measure this with Called Strike % on pitches taken) 3. Maximizing swings and misses (we’ll measure this with Swing & Miss %) Let’s look at a chart from the p...
We start with a superellipse, with a height that is 90 percent of its width. This is the probabilistic strike zone we explored in part one. The innermost circle, which can be larger or smaller depending on your own analysis, should be considered the “heart” of the plate. The size of the circle is entirely arbitrary and depends on what you want to c...
Let’s look at some high level metrics for our three zones, for all pitches thrown within the probabilistic strike zone outlined in the first article of this series, excluding bunts and bunt attempts. Pitches to the heart of the zone have a greater than 99 percent chance of being called a strike. The control zone sacrifices a little called strike ce...
Let’s sprinkle in a little nuance that doesn’t conform perfectly to our model. Let’s begin by looking at swing and miss percentage by horizontal location. Negative values are always inside; positive values farther away from the hitter. Swing & Miss Location by Horizontal Location Four-seam fastballs get more swings and misses the farther they are f...
Generally speaking, as we move away from the true center of strike zone, we experience predictable changes in outcomes. The large exception relates to swings and misses with respect to horizontal location. If a pitcher is optimizing for a specific outcome (such as a swing and miss), horizontal and vertical location become much bigger factors as opp...
If you believe the model above is overly simplistic, a simple modification would be to convert each zone into pizza slices. This would look something like this: One could then capture the distance (Heart/Control/Command) as well as nuance (up and in/up and away/down and in/down and away). This would give us 12 distinct zones to classify pitches tha...
The strike zone is a beautiful, constantly shifting puzzle; the pitcher has to decide, based on a host of variables, where he should aim his pitch. In part one, “It’s Not a Square,” we argued that the strike zone is better represented as a superellipse, rather than a rectangle. Today, we pushed the envelope one step farther, suggesting that we shou...
Rob Arthur, FiveThirtyEight, “Baseball’s New Pitch-Tracking System Is Just A Bit Outside”Wayne Boyle, Baseball Prospectus, “Prospectus Feature: The Universal Strike Zone“Wayne Boyle, Sean O’Rourke, Jeff Long, and Harry Pavlidis, Baseball Prospectus, “Robo Strike Zone: It’s Not as Simple as You Think“Feb 19, 2019 · This is the formula we’ll be using to define the strike zone: x = Adjusted px, shifted +0.125 for right-handed batters and -0.15 for left-handed batters. This is considered to go from +1 to -1. z = Centered around 2.5, going from 1.6 to 3.4 for an implied range of -0.9 to 0.9.
Nov 5, 2009 · Basics. When looking at the strike zone home plate umpires call, we must remember the following points: 1. Umpires are humans. 2. Humans produce inconsistent work and make mistakes. 3. For the ...
Mar 21, 2024 · The college strike zone is much wider and larger than the traditional box that most people envision. In addition to visualizing the actual strike zone, our called strike probability model can be ...
Strike Zone Sizes Crouching Batters. By Jeremy Greenhouse. We consider the strike zone a static area, although, in reality, it is a moving target. "As the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball," an umpire has to guess the height of the batter's letters and his knees. This moment is imprecise, yet PITCHf/x analysts must try to capture ...
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Jul 10, 2023 · The education of robot umpires has been complicated by an open secret in baseball for the past 150 years: The strike zone called on the field doesn’t match the one mapped out in the rule book
