|
|
| |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Updated: March 28, 11:50 AM ET Searching for answers to great strike-zone debate By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What's a strike?
In baseball, the questions don't get any more basic than that one -- the question around which the whole game revolves:
What's a strike?
"I got asked about it after the first game I worked," said umpire Dan Iassogna. "I said, 'It's not any harder. It's not any easier. It's just different.' And that's all it is -- different." But players and coaching staffs continue to be dubious, in varying degrees, that umpires can really change habits they've had ingrained in them all their umpiring lives.
They've stood at home plate their entire careers. The baseball came roaring their way. After seeing this sight a few billion times, they thought they knew what pitches they were supposed to swing at and what pitches they were supposed to spit at. Not anymore. "You spend your whole life establishing the strike zone," said Astros masher Jeff Bagwell. "You know what's a strike and what's a ball. And now you don't. I can understand what they're trying to do. It's just difficult. That's all. That ball comes by right up (near the shoulders), and what do you do? Is that a strike? "For me, it's kind of weird. It's almost like they're trying to take the human element out of the game. Before, umpires had a different zone, but as long as guys knew what it was, it didn't bother me. Now what? Next, are we going to go to the tennis system, where it beeps if it's a strike?" Well, the good news on that front is that the future still looks beep-proof. Nevertheless, when the umpires who are most diligent about calling those high strikes are behind the plate, the hitters are going to have to take that into account. "I'm used to taking a lot of hanging breaking balls," Bagwell said, "because I see them and I say, 'That's a ball.' Now, with this zone, I may not take that pitch. And my experience is, if you swing at those balls, they usually go a long way." And of course, if they go a long way, we predict you'll hear a lot less grumbling from the guys who sent them there. Can the pitchers adjust? In small pockets of the baseball universe, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez may be salivating over the thought of hitters having to swing at their soaring, 95-mph four-seamers. But for every pitcher celebrating the high strike, there are 20 others just about ignoring it. "I'm not going to throw too many pitches up there on purpose anyway," Glavine said. "Guys like Curt Schilling and Pedro and Randy Johnson can make mistakes up there and get away with them. But those guys are different. Most of us were taught to keep the ball down, and you won't see many pitchers change that mindset. And I'm one of them." Glavine's buddy, Greg Maddux, is reputed to be plotting how to work upstairs for the first time. But the only plotting many other pitchers are doing is how to avoid throwing the ball up there under any circumstances. "I haven't approached one game this spring any different than I have the last 15 spring trainings," Plesac said. "I didn't throw one pitch this spring, thinking, 'They're calling the high strike. I can take advantage of that.' To do that, you'd have to be Roger or Pedro. And I don't even think they'll do that until two strikes." Our survey found that even many smokeballers are leery of an innovation that supposedly is made to order for them. "It takes a special person to still pitch up there," said Astros closer Billy Wagner. "You can have good stuff. You can throw hard. But it's still a fine line. If you get it a little up, you're still in the hitting zone, no matter how hard it is." And what will happen if the average pitcher tries that trick, at 88 mph instead of 98? "If you try to make a practice of throwing that pitch," Plesac said, "you'll suffer a severe case of whiplash." How consistent were umpires this spring? In theory, this spring was supposed to help everyone get a feel for the new zone. In actual life, all it wound up doing was making many players more confused. "There's no such thing as a low strike now," Wagner said. "And I'm not knocking the umpires when I say that. But they say they're going to call the high strike. Then you throw it up there, and they don't call it. So you get the ball back down, and you don't get that. So now you're right back in the hitting zone. And it don't matter how hard you throw if you throw it there. So I don't understand what they're trying to do. "I know they're trying, but I don't know how hard they're trying. Either they won't call the high pitch, or they'll call the high pitch but they won't call the low pitch. Maybe it will be better once everyone gets an idea where it's at. But right now, nobody knows where the strike zone is." However, umpires say, from their perspective, they've seen no evidence this spring that they've been concentrating too hard on the high strike and ignoring the low strike. "We're not giving up on that pitch," Welke insisted. "We can't. We won't." But hitters and managers have had the same observation. And the consensus is also that the diligence with which umpires even called the high strike varied widely. "I've had a few balls that were up there that were called balls," Plesac said. "But I didn't complain about it because I haven't been accustomed to getting strikes in that area. "I did pitch a game the other day where I struck out Henry Rodriguez with a 3-2 slider. Probably, under the new definition, it's a strike. But I didn't expect to get a called strike three. If I throw a ball there 10 times, it's probably a ball nine times. But this time, I got it. And I said, 'Hey, I like this new strike zone.' " Then again, if the umpires haven't gotten this down yet, why should anyone have expected otherwise. Many umps have been feeling their way just as much as the players. "I sense some uncertainty from the umpires," said Phillies catcher Mike Lieberthal. "They're asking me questions because it's hard for them to get used to calling that pitch up there (above the waist). They'll say, 'Damn, I'm not used to calling that one. That's going to be a tough one to call.' "I just tell them I'll help them out," Lieberthal chuckled. "I say, 'Just ask. I'll let you know if it's a strike.' " Has the "wide strike" truly been eliminated? What's in (theoretically): The high strike. What's out (theoretically): The wide strike -- a.k.a., the Glavine-Maddux strike. Yes, that was the plan, all right. If the rule-book strike zone was going to be the rule-book strike zone, that was supposed to mean the end of those "Glavine-Maddux strikes" just beyond the outside corner.
"If they say they're going to call the strike zone the way the rule book says it is," said Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon, "then it shouldn't matter if Abraham Nunez is at the plate or Mark McGwire. And it shouldn't matter if Greg Maddux is on the mound or Joe Blow. If that's the way it's going to be, then great. It puts everyone on an even playing field." But does McClendon really have faith that that's the way it's going to be? For that matter, does anybody? "No," McClendon said. "I think when Mark McGwire is up, he's going to get the benefit of the doubt. And when Greg Maddux is on the mound, they'll call it a little wider." Why were there so few arguments this spring? Oh, things got touchy once in a while. David Bell got ejected for arguing a called third strike one day. Carlos Delgado got the thumb another day. And as troublemakers go, those two aren't exactly Albert Belle. But in general, it sure was peaceful. Maybe not for long, though. "It's easy to be peaceful down here," Bagwell said. "The back of your bubblegum card never shows what you do in spring training. But when Mark McGwire and some of the big-name guys start having arguments about strikes and balls, it's not going to be so peaceful." So will the umpires stick with it once the screaming starts? "I don't think this will have any impact at all," McClendon said, skeptically. "I really believe that when it's time to call the games for real, these umpires are going to go on what they know. They don't want to be embarrassed -- or bitched at. It will be like that balk deal a few years ago. Two weeks, and it was over." There are plenty of people in uniform who agree with that theory. But if they do, they're not paying attention to the noises coming from the commissioner's office. After all the time, effort and money already put into this campaign, this is not going to disappear in two weeks. And MLB isn't going to the trouble to install futuristic, laser-driven strike-zone evaluating devices in five ballparks just so it can tear them out on Memorial Day. The attention to detail by the commissioner's office, even in spring training, has been more extensive than ever before -- for just about anything. And umpires will attest to that. "Every time I work the plate," Iassogna said, "I have to call and talk to a supervisor. We talk about the strike zone, about how many pitches I called that were high strikes and how many pitches off the plate that I called." Players are aware of the priority being placed on all this. Yet they're still skeptical. "I don't think it's going to be a big deal," said Phillies cleanup man Scott Rolen. "I don't think it's going to be as outrageous as everyone claimed it's going to be. I just think logic comes into it when you're working a game behind the plate. These umpires have had a strike zone for a long time, and it's difficult to ask somebody to see the ball differently." If, in fact, that somehow turns out be true, and everything just reverts to the way it used to be, it means we've sure wasted a whole slew of talk about this topic. But "maybe," Rolen joked, "that was the whole idea: Give everybody something to do all spring." If so, we thank Sandy Alderson for all the space he helped fill up. But we have a hunch he had other goals. And even Dierker, who is admittedly dubious about the long-term prospects for this campaign, is encouraged by what he's hearing. "The best thing that came out of that manager-umpires meeting we had," he said, "is that Sandy Alderson stood there and said, 'This strike zone is now what it says in the rule book, and the commissioner has mandated that it be called this way. We're not going to have any discussions about it. We're going to call it like the rulebook says, and we're going to do it all year long.' I hope he's right." Even if he isn't, Tigers manager Phil Garner says everyone should go into this season assuming the folks from the commish's office are serious -- and proceed accordingly. "My whole position," Garner said, "is, they're committed to making this change. So let's not complain about it. Let's live with it. The quicker you say it's going to happen, the quicker you make the adjustments to it. So let's go." How will this change the game? Now that's a question no one can answer -- yet. But Dierker had as good a guess as anyone: "More strikeouts, fewer walks, more home runs." And spring-training developments seemed to bear that out. The amazing computer whizzes at Diamond Mind Baseball crunched the numbers from the first 15 days of spring training (219 games), compared them to the first 15 days last spring (215 games), and here's what they found: If you poke beyond the debate over the zone itself, you hear another common theme these days. We could sum that one up in one word: Why? "With all the issues out there in the game," grumbled one NL front-office man this spring, "why the hell are we worrying about the strike zone?" "I'm a big believer that you don't reinvent the wheel," said McClendon. "I know they want to make the game faster. Fine, you can make the game faster. Before every player comes into the box, you've gotta listen to some rap song or some futuristic song for 25 seconds before they get into the box. How about cutting down on that?" And then there's the stance espoused by the ever-philosophical Bagwell: "Since '94," he said, "it seems like we're always talking about how something's wrong with the game and we need to change it. I happen to think we've got a pretty good product out here. We've got some great, great players out here today. "If they want to give some advantage back to the pitchers, that's fine. I just don't understand why they have to tinker with the game so much. I'm tired of hearing about what's wrong with the game. Why don't we talk about some of the things that are positive about the game?" And as well-intentioned as this strike-zone campaign may be, let us still add a hearty "amen" to that. What's a strike? So after all this, what have we learned: That Pedro will be even more unhittable. That many pitchers are still terrified of a development that is supposed to help them. And that the commissioner's office is determined to make this change stick. But have we really answered the question that started all this: What's a strike? For the ethereal answer, we turn to Phillies deep thinker Doug Glanville. "It's all perception, anyway," Glanville said. "The strike zone is an illusion. It's a theory, a hypothesis -- like a black-hole sort of thing. It's there, but it isn't there. That's how I see it." And who among us could differ with that? Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
