foxsports.com's randy hill has just released a pretty boring piece in which he attacks tantrums in baseball (by managers/players toward umpires) as if they're some massive epidemic that must be stopped at all costs. it's not horrible enough to mock through and through, but i really liked this part about ways to prevent arguments from starting in the first place:
A fine start would be insisting on more strike-zone consistency. Each home-plate umpire seems to have his own interpretation. Sure, it's part of baseball's charm. But with the arguing of balls and strikes listed as baseball's unpardonable sin, wouldn't it be wise to provide less ammunition for debate?
that's a great point. umpires need to start standardizing that thing! it's time for bruce froemming to abandon his ridiculous triangle-shaped zone. and i'm sick and tired of bob davidson only calling a pitch a strike if the pitcher gets it into the zone after bouncing it off the dirt in front of home plate like in cricket. geez, is it really so damn hard to correctly call every single ball and strike on pitches going 75 to 100 mph, with batters' heights and the movement of the ball constantly varying? sarcasm aside, i understand there are certain guys who call high strikes and certain guys who give pitchers a few inches outside the black. not all strike zones are 100% identical. but in general, i don't think there's a whole lot of unfairness taking place in this area of the game. at the very least, when umps have a "bad" zone, they're giving it to both teams throughout a given game. the pitchers and batters just need to adjust to it for the rest of the day and not worry about it. you could have a computer using one of those k-zone things to call pitches and people would still find a way to bitch about it.
you don't really know much about baseball, do you, randy?
Come on Blue!
ReplyDelete-Elliott