Zack Greinke Ejection - Was the Strike Zone Different for Kansas City Compared to Boston?

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Sep 26, 2009 2:31 AM EDT Comment 11 comments

On Thursday night the Royals were facing the Boston Red Sox and Zack Greinke got tossed by home plate umpire Greg Gibson for arguing balls and strikes from the dugout. Pitching for the Royals at the time was Anthony Lerew, a recent AA callup. Zack wasn't arguing about a single pitch, more of the general nature of the umpire's calls, as the pitch he got thrown out on was a foul ball. It is hard to hear the exchange clearly from the video, but here is the exchange according to several accounts:

Zack said, "Let's stick to the strike zone Greg."

Greg asked, "What?"

Zack said, "What are you calling strikes?"

Greg yelled, "You know what, get out of here."

I love the Zack, a Cy Young candidate, was sticking up for the new pitcher. Now let's see if Zack's eyesight from the dugout was a little better than Shane Victorino's when he was arguing balls and strikes from the outfield.

Here are the calls from Greg Gibson on Thursday night (thanks to BrooksBaseball.net for the graphics):

All pitches

vs LHH

vs RHH

via brooksbaseball.net

For clarification on the graphs, here is the explanation from BrooksBaseball.net. "These graphs only plot calls made by the home plate umpire. These teams represent the pitching team, not the batting team. As is indicated on the graphs, these are from the Umpire's perspective, not the Pitcher's perspective."

Just looking over the graphs, it doesn't seem that the zone for Kansas City and Boston was much different. What does stick out was how far Greg Gibson's strike zone is adjusted to the left with 1/3^rd of the called strikes past the -1 horizontal edge of the strike zone. Zack did have something to complain about, but at least Greg was consistent between teams.

I went ahead and looked at Gibson's called strikes and balls available from the last 3 seasons. The data is combined for left and right handed hitters. I used -1.2 to 1.2 for the horizontal component of the zone in which the umpires are graded on instead of the -1 to 1 that are used in the previous graphics.

Gg_medium

Greg's strike zone is historically small and shifted a little to the left. The called strike zone called last Thursday night in Kansas City was consistent with his history. It seemed that the Boston personnel knew this information while the Kansas City personel did not. I just can't believe Boston had more information for its players than Kansas City did. Say it ain't so Dayton, say it ain't so.

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Were you able to separate his calls based on which team was pitching?

"What we do in life, echoes in eternity!"

by Justin Bopp on Sep 26, 2009 2:40 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

They are separated in the first 3 charts

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Sep 26, 2009 2:45 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Oh man, I didn't even notice the teeny squares and triangles!

Looks like a wash, to me. He favored KC low and favored BOS on the left side.

"What we do in life, echoes in eternity!"

by Justin Bopp on Sep 26, 2009 3:04 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I count

Boston: 13 pitches outside the strikezone called for strikes
K.C.: 7 pitches outside the zone called for strikes

Of course Jeff you are right that the zone was fairly consistent and that Boston just pitched to the zone better. One thing I wonder is whether the strikezone changed at all after the ejection or if most of the errors were prior to the ejection

Don't believe the lies Bill!!!! look at the sparkly ERA!!! Sparkly, Sparkly!!! - McCovey Chronicles

by Trenchtown on Sep 26, 2009 2:55 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Gibson was squeezing some.

Here are the pitches before Greinke was tossed:

Lerew was throwing pitches where Gibson calls border line strikes (umps right and lower left), but Gibson’s strike zone is ridiculous.

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Sep 26, 2009 3:17 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

That is terrible.

There are seven pitches in that sequence that should be strikes, and two borderline ones. The fact that this one graph alone could account for three strikeouts is unbelievable.

by jwiscarson on Sep 26, 2009 12:27 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Kansas City pitch f/x off?

Looking at a lot of the BrooksBaseball.net data this week I saw that the strike-zone was consistently off to the left like this one.

by TroyPatterson on Sep 26, 2009 9:02 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I will look to see if it is off. It might be a few days on this because I am going to try to enjoy the weekend and say away from a computer.

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Sep 26, 2009 10:18 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

How can one do both?

/what people would expect a sabermetrician to say

@bs_uf15bosox9be The Original Gameday; Learn to use SB Nation

by bs.uf15bosox9bears23 on Sep 26, 2009 11:27 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

It looks like it may have shifted to the left by about one inch

Starting with the June 29 homestand. But it’s tough to say for sure without a deeper investigation and perhaps more data than the forty or so games since then. There is game-to-game variation of several inches depending on the umpire and where the pitchers for that night happen to locate their pitches, so it’s hard to know if a shift of about an inch is real or just noise.

You also need to realize that many umpires tend to call the outside strike, an inch or two outside the zone for right-handed batters and 3-4 inches outside the zone for left-handed batters. They call the inside edge better because they set up there, and they have to guess more at the outside edge. I’m not sure why there’s a lefty/righty difference, though.

by Mike Fast on Sep 26, 2009 10:48 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

After looking at it in a bit more detail, I think there's probably nothing going on with the KC PITCHf/x system.

It looks like it’s just noise, i.e., dependent on the interaction between a particular umpire’s zone and where the pitchers happened to throw pitches on a given night.

Here is the count of balls – strikes in a box from -0.9 to -1.4 feet horizontal and 1.7 to 3.1 feet vertical, i.e., just off the left edge of the plate, over every game at Kauffman Stadium this year.

You can see a bit of a downward trend across the season, which corresponds to the strike zone shifting leftward, but it’s far from uniform. There are still plenty of games in the second half of the season that show up with more balls than strikes in that area off the left edge of the plate. Thus, I don’t see any good evidence of an overall shift in the PITCHf/x system.

by Mike Fast on Sep 27, 2009 1:50 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs