Winning and Losing the Strike Zone Game: Late-Season Update

Hello and welcome to a relatively easy post to generate on the other side of a week off. You might already be familiar with the idea, so if that’s the case, then once again, you’re invited to just skip ahead to the table and move on from there, after having interpreted it yourself. You are your own boss; you read however many words you choose.

This is the third post in what I guess is a four-post series. The first one came when the regular season was about one-quarter old. At the very beginning of July, I did this again, when the season was about one-half old. Now the season is about three-quarters old, so we can check in one more time. Which teams have benefited the most from favorable strike zones? Which teams have paid the greatest penalty, on the other hand? If you accept that all the information comes with some error bars, this is simple. Increasingly simple, as I run these numbers more and more.

No matter how sick you are of reading about pitch-framing, ignoring articles doesn’t make the reality go away, and it’s a real difference between teams. That’s a difference based mostly on ability. Another factor is pitcher command, since pitchers who locate better more often get the benefit of the doubt. That’s a difference between teams based mostly on ability. Umpire effects? That might be a small difference, based on luck. And then there’s what happens when a team is batting. Or, if you prefer to think of it another way, every pitch framed for a team is a pitch framed against another. Teams get pitching strike zones, and they get hitting strike zones, and this is an attempt to mash those numbers together.

You could do it yourself, using information from FanGraphs. You could probably even automate it. Do that and I’d be obsolete. I’m providing a snapshot of the information at the moment. Three-quarters of the way in, what do we see? We see what’s in the big table.

Four columns. You immediately understand at least one of them. The others are in units of extra strikes, above or below average, where a positive number is a benefit and a negative number is not. The Pitching column shows strikes minus expected strikes. The Batting column shows expected strikes minus strikes. The Total Benefit column is the sum of the two. Any apparent summation errors are just rounding effects because it would be pointless here to show decimals.

Some of this is randomness, but some of this is skill, so the deeper we get in the year, the bigger the observed spread. Last time, the difference between first and last place was just about 250 strikes. Now the difference is just shy of 450 strikes, a difference worth nearly 60 runs at full credit and given current estimates of the run value of a strike call. I’m not saying the Dodgers’ strike zones have actually been worth about six more wins than the Tigers’ strike zones, but it’s not something you can just entirely rule out, based on this. There’s an argument. At least, the difference is big.

Depending on how big your error bars — and I don’t know how big they should be — you might say the Dodgers are alone in first. And you also might say the Tigers are alone in last. The difference between the Pirates and the Braves is almost 100 strikes smaller than the difference between the Dodgers and the Tigers, and you can see some of those familiar framing effects, with Yasmani Grandal and Francisco Cervelli at one end, and James McCann and A.J. Pierzynski at the other. The White Sox, Brewers, Giants — we think they have good receivers. The Twins, the Rockies, the Phillies — we don’t think the same. You can make sense of some of this, just from thinking about framing reputation.

But there is more going on. Look closely at the Dodgers again. The table is sortable. In the Pitching column, the Dodgers rank ninth, which is good. But they’re way out in first in the Batting column, which is weirder. Sorted by batting, you get the Dodgers, then a gap, then the Orioles, then a bigger gap, then third place. All the way at the bottom, the Diamondbacks are by themselves. The Royals rank poorly, but not close.

So on the one hand, the Dodgers score very well in terms of their batting strike zone. On the other hand, the last time I looked at this, it didn’t seem like there was a real batting-strike-zone skill being observed. There was no relationship between the numbers in Quarter 1 and the numbers in Quarter 2. There’s barely any relationship between the numbers from the first half and the numbers in Quarter 3. Comparing Quarter 3 to the first half, the r^2 value for the Pitching statistic is 0.41. For the Batting statistic, it’s 0.06. It doesn’t seem like there should be anything there.

Yet, after the first half, the Dodgers scored well in the Batting column, and the Diamondbacks scored poorly. In Quarter 3, the Dodgers led the way in the Batting column, and the Diamondbacks were at the bottom. Simultaneously, it seems like nothing, and it seems like a real effect for the teams in question. I don’t know how to explain it; I can just point out that it’s there.

It’s interesting to think about, though. No one really considers the batting strike zone. Meanwhile, ever so quietly, the Diamondbacks have crept to within five games of first place in the National League West. At full credit, by estimates, the difference between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks’ batting strike zones is in the vicinity of four wins. Even that out and the teams would be almost tied. You can’t just declare that, definitively, but it does make you wonder. The Dodgers were supposed to be a juggernaut. The Diamondbacks were supposed to be forgettable. They might be almost tied, were it not for getting different zones while at the plate. Make however much of that as you like. (Within reason! Don’t be an idiot.)

Changing topic, a big mover in Quarter 3: the White Sox, with a total team benefit of +117 strikes. After the first two quarters, they were at +34. In Quarter 3, they actually had a negative team Batting benefit, but they led by a lot in the Pitching category. The teams behind them would be hardly surprising. It’s been a good receiving year for Tyler Flowers, but also for Geovany Soto. The worst quarter belonged to the Tigers, but the Rockies and Nationals had pretty big slips. The Nationals lost ground in both the Pitching and Batting categories. The Rockies lost it all in the Pitching category. The Rockies and Nationals have been losing a lot of things. When a team is struggling, it’s not surprising when the underlying numbers are also going down. It’s the little numbers that combine to yield the big ones.

I don’t know what your takeaways are, but there are some of them, and for me, it’s mostly thinking about Los Angeles and Arizona. That’s something that probably demands further investigation. For now, it’s just fun to speculate. It’s been a weird season. With different luck, it could be weirder still.