Memo To Jim Joyce
Dave · May 1, 2009 at 9:44 pm · Filed Under Mariners
This is Shawn Kelley’s pitch f/x plot from the 8th inning. The green squares are pitches that were called balls.
The. Green. Squares. Were. Called. Balls.
I don’t even know what to say.
luckily he got through the inning anyway, but yeah, that is crazy those were called balls!
c’mon Kelley, take us into the bottom of the 9th with the shot at winning it!
GO M’s!
And then balls 3 and 4 that would have won the game were called strikes on Lopez.
Wow-
So it was every bit as bad as it looked… What tha…?!
Joyce was horrible all night. The strike zone was all over the place, starting early. Kelley wasn’t the only one to suffer through it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reason Lopez came up there hacking in the ninth.
That is fucking ridiculous. I know it happens to most everyone at some point, but damn that is horrid.
I’m glad Kelley got a win out of it, as a proverbial last laugh.
Please tell me these metrics are reviewed by league offices in precisely this manner. Is that asking too much?
And its not like he was calling it the same way both ways, M’s pitchers were getting squeezed while the A’s weren’t.
Love that we go the win, anyways.
Balls?
Balls!
Wow, I thought it looked like Kelley was getting squeezed on TV…I guess he did. Joyce’s strike zone was a wee bit inscrutable tonight.
Can he get DFAed?
With a strike “zone” like that, perhaps Joyce should go back to writing epic Irish novels.
Perhaps this was a case of an umpire “breaking a rookie in”?
Of all the conspicuously bad stike zones throughout a game that I can remember in my lifetime, it seesm that a lot of them happen when the guy on the hill has less than a year in the bigs.
Dude throws strikes like a boss.
Jim Joyce, the Carlos Silva of Umpiring.
scott19
Joyce did have notoriously lousy eyesight. Maybe it’s a family trait.
Perhaps Joyce was searching, like Ulysses, for the … GOD WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!
Terrible.
Is there any way we can all pool $200 together to buy Silva a Bus Ticket to the Washington Nationals?
Yeeeeeeesh, that was ugly.
Wow, that’s really bad. This sort of thing needs to be pointed out more often when it happens.
I was so impressed with Kelley tonight. He kept making perfect pitch after perfect pitch in a very high leverage situation only to get screwed over by Joyce. That must have been tough mentally for Kelley knowing that he practically had to throw a batting practice pitch to get a strike call- with a base hit potentially costing his team the game.
Joyce was squeezing Kelley like he had money on the game, yet Kelley still managed 5 crucial outs without allowing a run. That might have been the most heroic 5 outs I’ve seen by a Mariners pitcher this season. Its appropriate that he would get his first major league win with such a tough performance.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Kelley was closing out games by the end of the season. In a bullpen full of guys that love to miss the strike zone, Kelley’s shown almost unreal control in most of his appearances.
According to Niehaus on the radio, Jim Joyce’s famous relative wrote The Iliad.
I kind of got the sense Niehaus was kidding around by saying The Iliad, but maybe I’m just making excuses for Dave. Regardless he called a great game tonight.
To answer a question with a question, I wonder if there’s an indy league team that’s closer? That way, we won’t have to spend so much on the bus ticket.
[Niehaus]
question about the chart: it looks like it has the strike zone going from -1 foot to 1 foot for a total width of 2 feet. Home plate isn’t two feet wide. It looks like it wouldn’t change anything in this case, but am I reading the chart wrong?
OK, but doesn’t the umpiring equivalent of Darth Vader review all this stuff in New York? Don’t they send out score cards on umpires and memos to umpires after performances such as this one? There is SOME kind of oversight (and, presumably, consequences), isn’t there?
I think Johjima was a lot of the problem. He was lunging at most of Kelley’s close pitches and carrying the ball way out of the strike zone. Umpires simply don’t call a lot of close strikes when the catcher fails to frame the ball. I think Johjima is below average at framing (Dan Wilson was really good) but for some reason he was really struggling with Kelley last night, particularly in the 8th inning.
why, yes, in fact.
Was it my imagination, or was Joyce giving the veteran Springer more strike calls on balls?
Any chance we see kelley as a starter next year?
I think Johjima was a lot of the problem.
Nope.
Any chance we see kelley as a starter next year?
Nope.
I bet you could test this, if you wanted to. Over many games, if this was a real effect, you could see an impact on percentage of called strikes by pitchers when throwing to different catchers.
A strike is called if any part of the ball crosses over any part of the plate, so while the plate itself is 17″ wide, the horizontal motion of the ball (as viewed by the umpire) imparted by pitchers means that the rulebook strikezone is about 20″ wide.
However, in actual practice (at least by the data analyzed by John Walsh in ’07) the real horizontal extent of the strikezone (defined as the area in which at least half of all called pitches are called as strikes) is almost exactly 2 feet wide — though it appears to vary a bit between RH and LH batters (it’s -12 to +12 for RH but -14.6 to +9.9 for LH, another reason why it’s good to bat leftie). Walsh added more information in a second article where he found the vertical extent was less than the rulebook strikezone. So even though the horizontal extent was larger than the rulebook (more so for RH than LH), the total area of the strikezone was actually 7% to 10% smaller than the rulebook strikezone area. And Jonathon Hale followed up with an article looking at consistency among different umpires. It’s worth noting that there’s more variance in the vertical zone because the umpires are having to adjust to batters of different heights, so although the zone is larger in the vertical direction the margin of error is greater as well. And the Pitch FX data isn’t 100% perfect either.
I don’t know if anyone has revisited this subject since those articles were written in ’07. Obviously we have another season and a half’s worth of data, and you wouldn’t expect it to change significantly, but it’s probably something worth another look at some point.
Somebody tried something like that last year, and the results are so crazy I don’t know that they can be trusted without further verification. Though Kenji does sit at almost the very bottom of that list, FWIW.
Dave, I know in the past “framing” was judged to be wildly over-valued, but has there been any follow-up to the work above? I can’t find anything with a quick google, but I don’t track the literature closely.