On the Shrinking Strike Zone and Lengthening Games
For the last few years, Jon Roegele (among others) has been doing excellent work showing that the strike zone was getting larger with every passing season. Specifically, pitchers and catchers had started getting calls on pitches below the knees that they hadn’t gotten previously, and the rise of the called low strike led a pervasive myth that hitters had`gotten too passive, putting the onus on the batters for the decrease in run scoring, when the reality is that batters were being called out on pitches they couldn’t do anything with anyway.
With strikeout rates again at an all-time high, MLB has apparently decided to take some action after a few years of studying the issue. According to a Jayson Stark report from last weekend, the competition committee approved a tentative plan to “effectively raise the lower part of the strike zone to the top of the hitter’s knees”, beginning as early as next year, assuming the rules committee also approves the plan, and the issue will apparently be raised with the players during CBA negotiations, so they may have a voice in the changes as well.
And you can be sure that some of those players won’t be happy about the proposal. For instance, here was Adam Wainwright’s reaction to the report.
“It’s a horrible, horrible idea,” he said. “One, I’m a pitcher. And I’m a pitcher who likes to keep the ball low. Two, and mainly, all this talk about making the games shorter — what part of raising the strike zone up is going to do that? … They want more offense. I understand that. But taking 45 seconds off for an intentional walk one out of every three games isn’t going to make up for the added balls in the gap by raising the strike zone, in my opinion.”
At least Wainwright is honest and admits his bias right up front. This is a change that could potentially make his job harder, and like most self-interested individuals, he’s against things that have a negative consequence for him personally. But note that Wainwright doesn’t just stop at saying that he’s against it because he’s a pitcher, but he’s against it because he thinks it’s counterproductive to MLB’s other stated goal, which is to reduce the length of games back under three hours. As Wainwright and others would have you believe, instituting a smaller strike zone will lead to even longer games, and so MLB is barking up the wrong tree.
Except that the evidence suggests that this probably isn’t going to be the case.
Using Roegele’s data on the strike zone, here’s a table showing the size of the strike zone every year since 2009, as well as the average time of an MLB game for each of those same seasons.
| Year | Strike Zone Size (sq in) | Time of nine inning game |
| 2009 | 435 | 2:51 |
| 2010 | 436 | 2:50 |
| 2011 | 448 | 2:51 |
| 2012 | 456 | 2:55 |
| 2013 | 459 | 2:58 |
| 2014 | 475 | 3:02 |
| 2015 | 478 | 2:56 |
If Wainwright’s hypothesis that shrinking the strike zone would make games meaningfully longer, then the reverse would also have to be true; expanding the strike zone directly lead to shorter games. Except, during the expanding-strike-zone era, games have gotten much longer, adding nearly 10 minutes to the average game since the zone started getting bigger. I’m not suggesting there’s causation here — the expanding zone isn’t the reason for the lengthening games — but there’s not much evidence that the size of the strike zone is the determining factor in how long games go. It is not nearly as simple as smaller zone = longer games.
Now, that isn’t to say that a smaller strike zone won’t have any effect on the length of the game. As I discussed last week, a percentage of the increase in game length from last year to this year can be accounted for by the extra pitches per at-bat players are seeing this year, and with walk rate spiking up this year as games have gotten longer, it’s certainly possible that moving the zone back to where it was a few years ago will bring another increase in pitches thrown.
After all, players aren’t robots, so even if they know the zone is going to be raised in the rulebook, pitchers are going to have to see the changes for themselves, and you can bet they’ll be testing the bottom of the zone next year until umpires prove that it really has changed. And if pitchers are throwing more pitches in an area that will be called balls, we probably will get even more walks, and more hitters-counts, leading to an uptick in baserunners, which adds time to a game.
But this effect can easily be overstated. At the height of the PED era, the year 2000, when teams were scoring 10.3 runs per game and everyone hit could hit the ball out of the ballpark, the average game featured 78.3 plate appearances, about three more hitters per game than we see these days. Offense was plentiful, the strike zone was smaller, and yet, the average nine inning game only lasted 2 hours and 57 minutes, almost exactly the same as it was last year. Over the last 15 years, through various changes, the league managed to trim two runs per game in offense without actually making the games any shorter.
Essentially, MLB has traded higher levels of scoring for more time between pitches and more pitching changes. This the league’s version of the Shelby Miller trade, and it should be pretty clear why the commissioner would rather not keeping making that exchange if they don’t have to. The goal isn’t to try and get everyone out of the ballpark as fast as possible; it’s to try and make sure there aren’t overly long lags between entertaining plays, and while Adam Wainwright might find a called strike below the knees exciting, a lot of other people do not.
But the most important thing to remember in this proposal is that MLB is not proposing instituting a new strike zone; they’re proposing the roll back of changes that have already happened. This is an unchange, if that’s a word. The zone expansion has already happened, and the unintended consequences of that change are now being addressed by walking back the expansion that has already occurred. This is the league taking away a benefit that pitchers haven’t had before and don’t need, similar to closing a tax loophole for rich people.
The game, as currently played, skews towards the pitchers. The increases in velocity and specialization make their jobs easier than ever before; they don’t also need a larger strike zone than pitchers before them got. And MLB’s approach to the pace-of-play issue is a multi-prong strategy, focusing on getting the players to reduce the time between pitches, which should more than offset any additional pitches added to the game through a reduction in the strike zone.
With all due respect to Adam Wainwright, it’s not a “horrible, horrible idea”. It’s actually a very good one, and it probably won’t result in a meaningful lengthening of games played. It’s perfectly fine for Wainwright to say that the change will hurt him personally and therefore he’s against it, but his suggestion that it’s bad for the game as a whole is pretty likely to be proven wrong.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
this season, more of a belly itcher
“I, for one, love seeing commercials in between pitching changes and batters arguing about strikes below the knees far more than 8-6 ball games with multiple homers and extra base hits. The strike zone is fine the way it is!” – People I Don’t Want to Watch Baseball With and Shouldn’t Be In Charge of the Game’s Future
Defensive shifts and the increasingly available data on hitter tendencies and weaknesses probably favors pitchers, as well.
I disagree with the analysis in this article. A smaller strike zone will result in longer games. It does not matter than games got longer as the strike zone got bigger in the last few years. This was due to other changes mentioned in the article (e.g. more pitching changes). Now, we will have more pitching changes plus a small strike zone, leading to even longer games.
I’d favour a rule whereby each pitcher has to face a minimum of three batters or finish an inning.
Are we really worried about how long the game is, or about how dull much of the time in the game is? I for one wouldn’t mind adding 10 minutes to the game, if it meant an extra half-dozen or more hits and perhaps a run or two more scored.
Mind you, I think rather than limit the time between substitutions, I think I would limit total substitutions or perhaps limit how many pitchers you could keep on your roster. If a team wants to use a pitcher for one batter, then they should be allowed… but lets make sure theirs relievers are limited enough to make that a real sacrifice.
I heard someone say yesterday that MLB wasn’t so much concerned with the length of games as the length of time between balls in play, which they claimed was far and away the highest it has ever been. That made a lot of sense to me.
It makes sense as the difference in 5 or 10 minutes over a 3 hour time commitment is basically nothing. Some games tend to go on forever though.
If there was more action the game length even if it were similar would at least feel like there was more flow.
Preface (Not bragging): I love baseball, its my religion. I pitched in college. Ive known some people that have made it to MLB. Ive had teammates get drafted. Ive coached kids that have been drafted. My boys are good at baseball. We love it. We play it all the time. We play The Show. We live baseball.
That said, baseball is difficult to watch. There is so much time between meaningful events. I watch baseball and view pitching mechanics and sequencing. I watch the cathers frame pitches, I watch where the batters hands are when their front heel contacts the ground. I watch the aspects Im interested in. No one else in our house can endure it. Its so slow, and you know this is youve ever endured a game on gamecast. Its, literally like watching a marathon, only it takes longer.
when my boys n i watch baseball, we watch mlb network quick pitch where we see the meaningful events of every game in an hours time.
Baseball hasnt changed as much as the pace and varying interests of life has. Baseball is more in line with watching golf than it is anything else. More action makes it more watchable, and I say that as one that advocates place discipline as baseballs most important skill.
Again, just like with the pace of play/length of game issue, this is something that MLB seems to be missing the point on. The location, size and shape of the strike zone is not the problem. Yes, lower strikes skew the game towards the pitcher but there are plenty of hitters who prefer low pitches and plenty of pitchers who prefer to work up in the zone with their fastball.
The problem is the consistency of the strike zone. From series to series, game to game and even inning to inning the strike zone can take on any number of shapes and sizes. Pitchers hate it, batters hate it, managers hate it, fans hate it. You can have one game with a huge zone, the next with a tiny zone, the next with a zone bouncing around like an old Windows screensaver and the next with a zone shaped like a small child doodled it with a crayon. Simply calling one single zone, regardless of any outside factors, would please all parties involved AND increase offense. As an extra bonus, you might speed up the game simply because there would be fewer discussions about the zone.
The problem is that the only way to do that is by using some form of automated strike zone, which is something not that many people around baseball want, even those who consider themselves fairly progressive with the role technology is playing in baseball analytics. Until there is an automated strike zone, it really doesn’t matter what shape and size the rule book says the zone should be. The zone will still be enforced by the “human element(tm)” and either the batter or the pitcher (or both) will probably hate it.
Granted, I am neither a major league pitcher nor major league hitter, but what bothers me more about the strike zone than the height is the width. Even with a robot umpire, there would be some subjectivity with regards to the height. The width is as objective as it gets. Here is the plate. Throw the ball over it.
I wonder if a good middle ground would be to give the umpires some device, be it a Google Glass type thing or a buzzer that buzzes when a pitch crosses the plate, that would eliminate one area of focus for umpires and allow them to focus only on the height of the zone. This might take some of the fun out of the “Worst Called Balls of the Month” articles, but if you throw a pitch across the middle of the plate it should be a strike regardless of what the catcher does.
Isn’t the reason the pitchers “gained” strike zone that umpires got more accurate due to pitch fx? Umpires Didn’t really gift the pitchers anything but they just followed the rule book strike zone (I think actually even the expanded zone is still smaller than the rule book zone).
Making the zone smaller again wouldn’t really giving something back to hitters that belongs to them anyway, it would be giving them back what they were gifted in the steroid era.
You could make the zone smaller but then name it as it is, I.e. That the rule book strike zone is too large to be handled against modern pitching. Actually the whole history of MLB is pitchers running away and MLB doing something to help the hitters:
19th century: mound moved back to 60
1920s: live ball and shorter fences
:1960s: lowering the mound
1990s: shrinking strike zone
The matching of pitch fx with the rule book zone has helped the pitchers but is was basically just one of the many privileges hitters have gotten over time being taken back.
I’m not against it, more offense is good for baseball but don’t act like umpires have stolen a birth right from hitters, the main reason is a machine that has detected that umpires had been helping the batters.
That’s not much of an analysis, Dave. About all it says is that the enlargement of the zone didn’t lower game time so dramatically as to overwhelm the other ongoing changes.
A smaller zone will lead to higher OBP, which will increase PA/game. Would you expect that to be counterbalanced by lower pitches/PA, or lower seconds/pitch?
I agree, for this time assessment to really have value it’d need to be broken into individual components (like time spent in replay review, # of pitching changes per game per year, etc. etc.) to see what other factors may be extending the game in spite of the larger zone. I do appreciate that doing so is likely impossible with the data available, but that doesn’t mean half-information is good either.
As Jetsy points out, from a common sense standpoint a smaller zone HAS to lengthen the game, as it has near-direct relationships to the amount of walks given up, the amount of strikeouts looking, and how deep in a game a given starter on a pitch count can go. It may not add much, but it will add.
All that said I don’t have a problem with the change. Ultimately for me it just comes down to pitches being called strikes that many (most?) hitters can’t actually do anything with, and that is counter-intuitive to what a strike actually is.
For heaven’s sake, why aren’t we just allowing computers to call balls and strikes? The data seem pretty consistent, and we always end up comparing the umpires to the standard.
Why don’t we just use the standard?
The strike zone is too important a thing to be used as a time football, as dumb an idea as making an All Star Game win count in the WS, X162.
And why jump from the bottom of the knee to the top? Aren’t there three or four inches in between?
A competitive game is not a long game, a tedious game is long by before sixth inning. Leave.
All this discussion about the strike zone is making the case for an electronic strike zone . I agree with Markofone . If we can be perfect , why aren’t we ? There is no way the eyes of an ump are better than that of a major league hitter . It has gotten so bad . I watched a game and counted OVER 30 pitches that were out of the strike zone called strikes according to K Zone . When did you see ONE that was in the zone called a ball ? Very very very very rare when that happens . The umps will not lose their jobs. There will be more civility in the game as there will be truly no arguing of balls and strikes . This is a no brainer in my view .