(Accurately) In The Zone

With the Blue Jays as the hottest sports property in Canada all of a sudden, their broadcaster, Sportsnet is trying to take advantage.  Normally at this time of year, the Canadian sports media would be covering the pre-season NHL with all the seriousness and analysis usually reserved for regular season games.  But instead, Sportsnet has been showing more classic (that is, 20+ year old) Blue Jays games. 

I've mentioned in the past some of the strange things I've noticed in these old broadcasts.  But recently I've noticed another couple of things: one is the absence of the pitch-tracker, that radar-or-whatever thing that tracks where the pitch crosses the plate, relative to the strike zone.  I kept looking over to the right side of the screen expecting to see a diagram of where the last pitch was.  Then I look down to see the count, and it's not there either.  How did people even understand baseball then?

But that leads to the other thing I noticed.  It really seems like balls and strikes are called much more accurately now.  Obviously, there are still mistakes, but for the most part, when you look at the pitch tracker, you see that incorrect calls are nearly always so close you can hardly blame the umpire for getting it wrong.  That's in sharp contrast to the wild calls we used to get, like when they first installed that camera in the SkyDome roof that showed the plate from above, and you could see that some strikes were six inches out of the zone.

So I was going to write a post about how it seems like strikes are more accurate, and I wonder if the new technology has anything to do with it, I'm probably the first person to wonder about this, but just in case, I'll Google it to find out.  Sure enough, fans of the most statistically-analysed sport on earth have been discussing this, arguing about it, and going full Chicken Little on the topic.

In short, yes they are better, yes it is because they've been training with technological feedback, and of course, some people have found a reason to believe this is a bad thing.  The problem is that now that the strike zone is being called accurately, it's increased strike-outs, and making it harder for hitters.  (Pause while Blue Jays fans laugh at the idea that modern baseball is too difficult for the batters.)

This is another example of one of the strange aspect of sports: The way officials and players settle into informal understandings of what is and isn't legal, which is often different from what is in the rule book.  Hockey is surely the most extreme example of this, where the rules are only sort-of enforced, yet fans and players have very specific expectations of how they're going to be sort-of enforced.  I've never understood this whole concept; if the rules are not good, surely it makes sense to change them, rather than ignore them.

The new accuracy of the strike zone puts baseball in the position where they may have to be formally changing the rules, rather than informally.  If there are too many strikeouts, they'll have to change the size or position of the strike zone.  That's especially true if they - as some suggest - drop the umpire altogether, and have a machine call balls and strikes.  I think that would be a good thing: if sports officiating could be made completely accurate, it will force leagues to confront aspects of their sports that they've ignored for a long time.  It would be good if basketball had to consider its problem with favouritism to star players, or if football had to actually define "holding."