Contracting the Zone: Three Shocking Called Balls From This Season

In the offseason, there’s no live major league baseball to watch. I’m a lazy consumer, so I don’t watch much LIDOM action; I catch bits and pieces here and there, but for the most part, the winter is when I recharge my baseball batteries and do a little film study.

I can hear what you’re saying: film study? I don’t play, and I don’t coach. I can’t develop some secret sauce that will help me win next year by grinding in the film room in December. For me, though, it’s just fun. Other than the fact that I’m nothing like Roger Federer, I completely identify with what he said about studying tape: “I used to do a lot of video analysis early on, but more for pleasure and looking at my own technique.”

Fine, I’m not watching my own technique, but I do like rewatching games from this year for my own enjoyment. I’m not so much trying to fix something for 2024 as trying to look back at 2023 and smile. Oh, you’d like an example? I’m glad you asked. Here’s the video I’ve been watching most recently: three delightfully ridiculous umpiring calls.

Let’s start chronologically. By May 26, the A’s were already dead in the water. They were a shocking 10–42, and the biggest thing going on in Oakland baseball was preparations for the upcoming reverse boycott. To make matters worse, the visiting Astros jumped out to a 5–0 lead and chased James Kaprielian from the game. Lucas Erceg came on in relief. He was sharp right away, firing two straight sinkers to go ahead 0–2 against Jake Meyers. Then he went for the trifecta:

That’s objectively a bad place to put a pitch when you’re so far ahead in the count. Erceg left it absolutely dead red. This wasn’t even a case of missed location, really; Carlos Perez had his target in the zone before the pitch, and he caught it cleanly. Perhaps the ball had less tail on it than expected, but why throw a fastball there in such a good count?

Erceg caught a huge break when Meyers, clearly fooled, watched the most hittable strike three he’ll ever get fly by. Just one problem:

I love Perez’s reaction here. He was ready to start the ball around the horn, with his eyes and shoulders tilted towards third base. Then he hears “ball” and freezes just in time. That would have been a particularly egregious case of showing up umpire Brian Knight, but in Perez’s defense, he probably hasn’t caught many pipe shots that have been called balls. Dallas Braden, the A’s analyst, speculated that Knight must have somehow had his eyes closed — a poorly timed sneeze, perhaps.

Regardless, that reprieve turned Meyers’ at-bat around. Instead of striking out, he looped a broken-bat single to right field two pitches later. Erceg was up to the task, though. He kept pouring in sinkers, and even though he got squeezed again on a close call, he induced a double play and then struck Jose Altuve out to end the inning. No harm, no foul, but I just love Perez’s body language double take.

Moving on: there were no similarly egregious calls for several months. But the next one I found was perhaps even funnier. Nick Pivetta was cruising early in a Red Sox-Yankees tilt and found himself up 0–2 on Harrison Bader. He decided to climb the ladder for a strikeout:

It’s just pitch and catch. Pivetta throws with a ton of backspin; swings at unhittable fastballs are his specialty. He didn’t execute this one very well, though:

If you miss with a four-seamer in an 0–2 count, you’re supposed to miss high. That’s why so many of them end up at eye level or otherwise wasted; the only thing the pitcher must avoid is leaving one right in a hitter’s wheelhouse. Pivetta goofed. Bader goofed too, though, by laying off a cookie. Then he goofed again, though not in the way you’d expect:

He was so sure that was strike three that he walked off! I don’t blame him; hitters have a great sense of the strike zone, and they understand when to hang around for a close call and when to pack it in. This wasn’t one of those pitches where the pitcher clips a corner with a missed target; Pivetta missed in the meatiest area available. Umpire Junior Valentine just outright missed it. If you’re being kind, you could say that Reese McGuire’s movement caused him to misjudge where the bottom of the zone was, but that ball wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of the zone. We’re all programmed to expect a little fuzziness around the edges; this was at the white hot center, though.

Let’s get more specific: if you ignore the upper third of the plate, there were five pitches thrown higher than that one and down the middle that were called balls this year. You’ve already seen one, and there’s another one coming later. One was a crossup so bad that the catcher had to move from off the plate inside across his body to the outer third. One involved the catcher blocking the umpire’s vision in an attempted back-pick. The last involved a crossup, an attempted throw, and the catcher dropping the ball. You need extenuating circumstances for pitches like these to be called balls.

That pitch crossed the plate two feet off the ground — 1.99 feet, to be precise. Bader has a very low strike zone thanks to his stance; he’s in the bottom five percent of all hitters in terms of measured bottom of the zone. But that wouldn’t have been a ball to anyone; Jo Adell and Aaron Judge had the highest strike zone bottoms, and that pitch would have been a clear rulebook strike even to them.

Pivetta must have been extremely confused. His first pitch crossed the plate six inches lower than that one, and it was called a strike. His second pitch was three inches lower than the two-strike pitch, and it was also called a strike. There was no question about where the bottom of the zone was; it was clearly much lower than that pitch. In slow motion, it appeared to cross home plate around Bader’s upper thighs.

One of my favorite parts of these is hearing the booth reactions. In the Yankees booth, Michael Kay was appalled — by Bader showing up the umpire with his disrespectful assumption that he was out. He didn’t mention the call at all; he merely stated that Bader should probably swing at the next close one since he’d made Valentine look bad. Meanwhile, the Boston booth couldn’t stop laughing. It was an absurd call, and they treated it that way. Both of those are generally in line with how announcers handle these situations. The beneficiaries pipe down and completely avoid discussing their good fortune. The aggrieved party laughs it off. Rarely does anyone get mad; that’s just how it goes.

That’s all I have for truly egregious calls that could have affected the outcome of a game. Neither of them did, to be clear. Erceg cleaned up his extra baserunner efficiently, and Pivetta struck Bader out two pitches later. The way baseball works, calls that hurt pitchers usually get cleaned up uneventfully, because pitchers win most confrontations. That doesn’t make them okay, but luckily, we can make like the Boston announcers and laugh about these now.

What if we could laugh about them as they happened, though? The Angels kindly provided us with a chance. As their disastrous season ground to a close, they were reduced to a shell of their ideal team. Shohei Ohtani stopped pitching after hurting his elbow, then stopped hitting after hurting his oblique. Mike Trout tapped out for the season, as did Anthony Rendon. The team waived all of its deadline acquisitions in an attempt to get under the competitive balance tax cap. But the games rolled on.

On September 15, the Angels got well and truly demolished. The Tigers hung seven runs on Jhonathan Diaz in the eighth inning to take an 11–1 lead; he left with two runners on base. His replacement? Third baseman Eduardo Escobar, who walked to the mound to save a few relievers in what was already a lost season. He was up to the task! He retired the first two batters he faced without incident, and so naturally he came back out to start the ninth inning. His opponent? The avatar of greedy swings himself, Javier Báez. But Báez was up there taking:

Honestly, I completely get this one. Look at where Logan O’Hoppe caught this ball:

That’s not a strike! Umpires see tens of thousands of pitches a year, and they rely on the catcher’s glove for an idea of where the ball crossed home plate. That’s why framing generally works, and it makes sense. It’s hard to imagine a three-dimensional path when you’re seeing something head on, but when the catcher’s mitt and the ball connect, that gives you a reference for depth.

In this particular case, the fact that Escobar threw the pitch 39 mph broke that relationship. Generally, baseballs don’t fall much between the time they cross the plate and the time they get to the catcher. But when you throw one with this high of an arc, and this slowly — Mike Fast estimated that the slowest it’s even possible to throw a pitch that reaches the plate is 27 mph — the normal rules don’t apply. He threw the ball up to give it enough arc to get over, so it was falling at an absurd rate by the time it got home:

I’m not sure that Statcast’s Pitch 3D tool does that trajectory justice. But just so you can compare, here’s the trajectory of a 90-mph pitch thrown to roughly the same location earlier in that game:

I can’t really blame anyone for this one. The two teams were already done with the game. Báez didn’t seem to notice that might have been a strike, Escobar didn’t do anything other than keep throwing, and O’Hoppe was well past trying to frame anything or argue calls. It was silly season, and everyone agreed to treat it that way.

No one’s going to remember any of these plays next year. Quite frankly, they shouldn’t. None of them mattered at the end of the day. None of them required great athletic feats. None of them produced an iconic moment, or even a ball in play. I just like weird stuff — and hopefully you do too.