North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: What was worst strike call of 2023?

Of all the big story lines and subjects worth penning multiple articles about over the course of a 162-game season, I was surprised how often I wrote about the strike zone in 2023.

There was the game in Tampa where they were called out on strikes five times on pitches outside of the GameDay zone, which ended a series of bickering between the Pirates and umpires. In Los Angeles, Andy Haines had enough and got tossed arguing a called third strike on Jack Suwinski, which Derek Shelton credited to "frustration" on calls which had been building for some time. The Twins were beneficiaries of a very wide zone in August, and the usually reserved Ke'Bryan Hayes called for the implementation of an Automatic Balls and Strikes system after getting cheated out of a walk in Atlanta in September. I wrote about ABS and its viability here.

So yeah. I didn't have much trouble coming up with my annual list of the worst ball and strike calls in a season.

This is the fifth time I've ripped off former FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan and gone into the end-of-season pitch data to see how much bad calls hurt -- or helped -- the Pirates. (If you want to read the first four entries, here's one, two, three and four.) If you read any of those previous articles listed above, you probably already know by now that the Pirates got more than their fair share of bad calls against them, but in a shocking turn of events, they didn't lead the league in called strikes outside of the GameDay strike zone. That title goes to the Rangers, who couldn't catch a break the final weekend of the series and finished the year with 579 bad strikes. The Pirates were second, with 578. In a three-game series, that's an average of about 10 bad strike calls, which stings more considering one of this team's offensive strengths was not chasing out of the zone.

Baseball Savant can break pitch locations into several groupings: Heart of the plate, the shadow, chase and waste. The Pirates took 18 "chase pitches," five more than they took in 2022:

BASEBALL SAVANT

The top and bottom of the zone can be fuzzy because a standardized team-wide strike zone doesn't take a particular batter's height into consideration when pitch mapping, but it's ok because the worst calls were horizontal, not vertical.

I want to take a look at a handful of calls here because I don't know if there is an absolute worst call. If you want to talk about the one that was the furthest away from the plate, that would be Liover Peguero taking a called strike on a Corbin Burnes cutter on Sept. 4 that was in the left-handed batter's box:

But I would argue this A.J. Minter four-seamer to Hayes on Sept. 10 is worse, even if it is a hair closer to the zone:

Why do I believe this is a worse call? Look at catcher Travis d'Arnaud. With most pitches just out of the zone, the catcher will try to rip their arm quickly back into the zone and then hold it to present the pitch. That's part of pitch framing, and d'Arnaud has been one of the game's best pitch framers this past decade. But look where his glove is set up:

The pitch was so far outside that a borderline elite pitch framer can't rip it far enough back into the strike zone. He is presenting a location that should be a ball. Despite that, it was still called a strike.

As for the worst strike three, Hayes is on the short stick again, taking a Justin Topa high and away sinker that actually ended the game:

On the pitching side, Mitch Keller was dinged for the worst ball call of the season on a near middle-middle sinker against the Reds:

This one is a bit understandable, though. Jason Delay was on the move to try to throw out the runner heading for third and dropped the ball. Had he worried solely on receiving and let the runner take the base, it would have been an easy called strike. A clean catch probably would have gotten the call, too.

And for the sake of being fair, how did the Pirates benefit from bad calls? They led the league in framing runs saved (25.9, according to FanGraphs), and while 15.1 of those runs were tied to Austin Hedges, both Jason Delay (8.4 runs) and Endy Rodríguez (2.2 runs) graded out nicely. Assuming ABS is not implemented this winter, the Pirates should remain one of the top framing teams in 2023.

It was actually Rodríguez who was behind the plate for the most generous strike call in favor of a Pirate pitcher this year. Usually the worst calls are outside because a pitch called too far in will just plunk the batter. In this case, however, Angel Perdomo got away with a breaking ball that broke in on Jordan Luplow:

As for the offense, just about everything was right around the black of the bottom part of the zone, so there isn't a clear-cut worst call here. So let's give the nod to this slider to Andrew McCutchen which caught the outside corner but was poorly framed:

All told, the Pirates were one of the least lucky teams at the plate when it came to balls and strikes and one of the best at stealing extra strikes. Ignoring the fact that ABS is probably not ready to be implemented in the majors quite yet, there isn't a clear answer of automatic strikes and balls would help the Pirates. Perhaps it would open up more playing time for someone like Henry Davis, but as Jason Delay joked to me in my ABS story, it could also end his major-league career if one of his greatest strengths is made null.

I would expect calls to be made by umpires in 2024, so expect some human error and angry Angel Hernandez-related posts.