Zack Greinke is so much fun to watch. He has an approach to the game that is numerically calculated. He's a data guy's data guy. Below you can watch Greinke perform when the pressure is on. With a 2-0 count on slugger Aaron Judge with a runner on first in the bottom of the 5th and only 1 out, Greinke pitches a beautiful, clutch.....ball? Wait, what? For real? Is that a joke? Was the umpire fighting off a sneeze? What is up with that?
Let's do some digging to see what is really going on. Take a look at pitch number 3 below in Figure 2. The slider coming in at 85 mph was so much a strike according to PitchF/X that it still has a few inches in all directions before it is clearly a ball.
The truth is, I wouldn't want to get behind the catcher and have to decide whether Greinke pitched a ball or a strike. The movement on his slider alone would make me fall backwards and go cross-eyed in confusion. But, the job must be done. I would like to know how many times the home plate umpire missed during this game, and specifically for Greinke alone. Let's take a look:
When slicing the PitchF/X game data to only show Greinke's pitches in which the umpire had to make a call we can see how often the umpire got the call right compared to PitchF/X locations. In other words, missing from this data are balls in play, foul balls, HBP, etc.,. Looking at the confusion matrix, we see that the umpire and the computer system both called strikes 20 times. However, the umpire called 9 strikes that the computer designated as balls. So actually, Greinke received 9 strike calls that would have been designated balls had a robo-umpire been used. How many times did Greinke loose out on a call? Just once. It's at the top of this blog post.
How about on the other end? Masahiro Tanaka pitched a full 5 innings in this game and faced 1 batter in the 6th. Let's look at only Tanaka's pitches.
It looks like Tanaka also benefited from a few calls. 4 times did the umpire call a strike when the computer would have called the pitch a ball and Tanaka did not have any missed strike calls.
Some calls are not hard to make, some are. In the case of the one missed call by the umpire this day, who knows? It seemed like a pretty straight forward call on video. I'm going with the "sneeze fight off" theory. All in all, the umpire did a great job during this game but one does have to think what might have happened had Greinke gotten that 2-0 strike call, making it a 2-1 count. We will never know. What we do know is that had a robo-umpire been behind the plate that day, both pitchers would have pitched less strikes.
References:
https://www.mlb.com/gameday/astros-vs-yankees/2019/10/17/599360#game_state=final,lock_state=final,game_tab=box,game=599360 https://github.com/lucaskelly49/Work-Samples-from-The-Pick-Off---A-Baseball-Blog/blob/master/The%20Day%20Zack%20Greinke%20Needed%20a%20Robo-Umpire%2C%20Or%20Did%20He%3F/Greinke_Judge.ipynb
0 Comments
|
AuthorThis blog is dedicated to baseball analytics and general baseball discussion. Archives
January 2021
Categories |