Confirming What You Already Know: Different Counts Produce Different Strike Zones

It’s so logical it seems self-evident: 3-0 counts often turn into 3-1 counts because umpires give pitchers a break, and 0-2 counts shrink the strike zone. It’s now also been backed by research.

The Hardball Times’ John Walsh analyzed 200,000 pitches to right-handed batters and found that it’s harder to throw a four-pitch walk -- or get a K with no balls -- than you might expect. His findings, in part:

⇥⇥Wow, the 3-0 zone is nearly 50 percent larger than the 0-2 zone. It’s even more striking if you overlay the two zones.⇥⇥⇥⇥It’s as clear as day: These umpires are a bunch of softies. They see a pitcher struggling to put the ball over and they go all Gandhi on us, giving the pitcher an an extra chunk of strike zone to work with when the count reaches 3-0. ⇥⇥

⇥⇥⇥⇥⇥And when the batter becomes the underdog, when the count goes to 0-2? Why, the hearts of our merciful arbiters simply turn to mush: They can’t help pulling for the poor batter as he chokes up on the bat, hoping to make some kind of contact. Who knew the umps were such empathetic characters?⇥⇥

This isn’t the first time variability in balls and strikes based on the count has been observed with statistics, and it’s also something that the average baseball fan might say is blindingly obvious after a few games. But Walsh uses a wealth of Pitch f/x data, unlike previous attempts to study this phenomenon, and that allows him to put together some impressively detailed graphs, which you really need to see in his post.

Sabermetricians are often hit with a rep as nerds who are trying to destroy an old understanding of baseball and its statistics and replace it with their own, anodyne one. Walsh’s strike zone work is the sort of stuff that flies in the face of that assumption, both reinforcing a widely held logical perspective and enhancing it with hard data.

(HT: Rob Neyer.)↵