To err is human.To err in a baseball game and cry for robo umps is divine.
At some point the robots will take over the game, not that they’re perfect either. The league instituted full replay earlier this decade, and a universal designated hitter seems guaranteed for next year. An automatic strike zone doesn’t seem too far off in the future. The umpire union has even already agreed to it, though there are no plans to implement it yet.
Pitch framing has taken off as one of the most valuable skills for a catcher this decade, to the point that Jacob Stallings is very likely going to win his first Gold Glove next month largely due to his receiving skills, and 10 years from now it might be obsolete.
But until the day that automated zone comes, we’ll have to deal with the occasional missed call. And with the Pirates’ season officially in the books, I get to do one of my favorite -- and dumbest -- Mound Visits of the year: What were the worst ball and strike calls this year?
I’ve done this feature a couple times now, and every time I’ve been upfront that I’m ripping off Jeff Sullivan, who has left the baseball writing world for the Rays. I have different criteria to determine each one of these calls. For the worst strike call, I’m looking for how close the pitch was to any part of the zone. For the worst ball call, I’m measuring based on how close it was to the center of the zone.
We’ll start with the offense.
This year, Pirate hitters had 628 strike calls on pitches outside of the zone, the seventh-most in baseball. The offense had enough trouble trying to get started without getting, on average, 3.9 calls against them a game.
Here’s how they look on a pitch chart:
In case you're wondering why there are so many dots that look like good strike calls, that's a very generic, catch-all strike zone. It's based on where the pitch came in, not where it was compared to the respective hitter's zone.
The one that was the furthest away from the zone came back in April with Todd Frazier up at bat. (Yeah, remember when he was on the team? It was a long season.) Facing the Twins on April 25, right-hander Matt Shoemaker delivered a fastball that was in the lefty batter’s box, but was still called a strike:
Frazier knew that was a bad call, and it’s hard to blame him. But give credit to catcher Mitch Garver, he really stole that strike. His target was set low and away, right on the corner, so when Shoemaker missed, it didn’t look like an egregious miss to home plate umpire Scott Barry. And give more credit to Garver, who, like Stallings, was not a naturally-gifted framer but turned himself into one. In 2018, he got calls low and away only 15.5% of the time. In 2021, it was 26.2%, which is league average.
But hey, what about Stallings? Missed calls are a two-way street after all, and Stallings excels at getting those calls. Which was the furthest away strike a Pirate pitcher got this year?
There's always a bit of subjectiveness with what's the "best" stolen strike because it could just be completely an umpire's mistake, but with Chris Stratton on the mound on July 1, Stallings is able to bring an outside pitch back into the zone for the strike:
He catches that right at the edge of the webbing and is able to pull it back enough to get the call, even after Stratton missed the original low-and-away target. Little plays like that are why this guy is going to win a Gold Glove.
On the pitching side, Pirate pitchers had 387 pitches called balls even though they were in the GameDay strike zone. That’s a fairly average amount, tying for 15th.
Here’s another pitch chart to map them all out:
The worst ball call is a very late entry, coming during the final series of the season against the Reds. With Stratton facing Jonathan India in the top of the eighth, catcher Michael Pérez called for a high fastball. Stratton delivered something center-cut over the plate, but missed low:
It’s hard to blame either Pérez, home plate umpire Jeff Nelson or even Stratton in this scenario. Pérez had to snap his glove down to catch the fastball, and the momentum resulted in a bad frame. Nelson saw Pérez snagging a baseball around his ankles. Stratton missed the glove and is the most at fault in this scenario, but he did deliver a pitch down the center of the plate and well within the strike zone. That should have been strike three.
But it wasn’t really the worst ball call on a pitch in the zone this season for the Pirates. No, they were the beneficiaries in that case. Back on April 15, Dustin Fowler didn’t swing at this Tim Hill four-seamer:
And somehow got away with it. Gameday has that pitch as middle-middle, making it just one of seven balls all season that were located in the most center part of the zone. Not that the call did Fowler much good. He grounded out and shortly after fizzled out with the Pirates.
One day the robo umps will come and take away some of the error that makes this game human. Until then, let’s sit back, watch the games and retweet the Umpire Scorecards account whenever it is deemed fit.
