Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 813: Changing the Strike Zone Responsibly

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about The Good Wife’s Super Bowl spot and discuss some potential unintended consequences of raising/shrinking the strike zone.

You got the whole song You got the whole song Yeah, you got the one I won't wait Good morning and welcome to episode 813 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight.

Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? Okay. Still reeling from that good Wife Super Bowl bombshell. I mean, so I assume like me, most people watch The Good Wife on DVDs checked out from the public library. Sure. Yeah. And so when you're choosing an episode, you see the title, right? Uh-huh. And so it's been very obvious that this was going to be the last season

because are you familiar with the title naming convention of the show? I am not. You can't have seen season seven DVDs from the public library. No, but I knew this was coming the second episode of episode five. Okay, what did it say? We've got two seasons left? No, no, no, no. It's very simple. The first season, all the episodes are one word oh right and then they add a word to every season and then once they got to four they started going

down so five had season five had three word titles uh-huh and then season six had two word titles and season seven has one word titles very clever so i didn't think that they were disguising this at all it seemed pretty obvious but i guess most you know, they don't start an episode with the title. Right. So I guess maybe it was slightly disguised. Yeah. My wife and I have been operating on this assumption, but it's been, you know, it's been my hypothesis. I've been telling her all along what was going to be lies.

So I think she accepted that. But I let her know yesterday about the Super Bowl ad. to be lies. So I think she accepted that. But I let her know yesterday about the Super Bowl ad. And I wasn't sure whether to say that they had announced it or whether it had been confirmed or whether this was nothing. I just mentioned that there are nine episodes left, which is good. I think shows should end much sooner than they do. Seven is probably too long. Yeah, I'm still enjoying it. But sure, you'll enjoy the next thing. Continue to go downhill. do you watch the fargo yes how is it excellent i just watched uh the first episode yesterday the first episode of

season one uh-huh and uh so that's what i'm doing now thanks to the library yeah i heard i hear season one is in and season two is is great is that accurate yeah season one is good season two is great okay so i won't hate season one like there's no need to skip it or anything definitely not all right okay okie doke uh anything to uh baseball banter about baseball now let's keep talking about tv shows all right so i have a couple of uh a couple of things to talk about today uh as topics maybe we'll get to both maybe we'll get to one maybe we'll do both and then we'll have to fill time. I don't know. The first thing, we haven't really talked yet about the strike zone changing. And I think we briefly mentioned it. But I wanted to talk in a little bit more detail

about your feelings about this. Major League Baseball said about a week and a half ago that they were exploring the strike zone that they might bring it from the bottom of the kneecap to the to what to the top of the kneecap or from the hollow of the knee to the whatever the opposite of a hollow is or what what is above the hollow from the hollow of the knee to the to the ceiling of the knee or i don't know i'm trying to like it now i'm thinking of the knee as like a cave right it's like the concave part of the knee to the convex part of the knee. Okay. And so this is just a study issue right now. Major League Baseball has suggested that it would have to be collectively bargained, which would put it in line to be something

that would be enacted in 2017, not 2016. Of course, they can also, they have sort of the executive authority to send memoranda to umpires, for instance, reminding them or pointing out if the strike zone is too low, they can affect umpire behavior in non-collectively bargained ways without changing the rules. And there was what, Rob Arthur found some evidence at the end of 2014 that the strike zone was moving back up. But then remind me, that trend did not continue. 2015 was back to... It seemed to in the playoffs in 2014, and he speculated that maybe it had changed. But last season, it was almost the same as 2014, slightly enlarged,

but less of an enlargement than we had seen in the previous few seasons, but definitely not a reversal of the trend. One way of thinking about this question is, well, would it do things and are those things what you want it to do? And we can get into that. The one that's more interesting to me is the question of how you change rules in baseball in a way that is fair. Because as Dan Brooks wrote in his essay in the 2013 annual, 2014 annual, I should say, one of my favorite essays that I think we've ever run in an annual, he wrote about the metagame of baseball and how much of strategy is based on your understanding of what the rules are, and trying to take advantage of those rules while the league, you know, while any game designer,

I should say, will then try to find ways to close loopholes if it becomes a threat to the game. But anytime you change the rules like that, it often has unintended consequences, it certainly has consequences. And with baseball being a kind of multi-year project, building a team is a multi-year project, you are making decisions right now in anticipation of even the 2018, 2019, 2020 seasons. And if a rule change comes and changes the way that the game is played in those seasons, you are stuck with a team that you built under different rules. And I think that it is arguably not fair. And I think it is arguably not great if the things that you do, the unanticipated changes that you do, that you make to the game affect teams that in good faith

attempted to build a team based on the existing rules. And so I'm not saying that that is the case here. I'm saying that that is what I'm bringing up as a topic of discussion. We know, and you can explain, I think you've written about this. We can explain that some teams have, it seems clearly used the strike zone as it has moved down, as it has changed the way the game is played, as it has changed the offensive environment, have pursued players who they think would thrive with this strike zone. Either hitters who are very good at low ball hitting because more pitches are thrown to a lower strike zone, to the lower part of a lower strike zone,

or pitchers who work in that area where they can steal more strikes, correct? Yeah, I don't know if I've written about it, but I think there were stories last winter about the Red Sox and how the Red Sox seemed to be getting a staff of either ground ball pitchers or pitchers who threw low in the zone. And I don't know if any team has actually come right out and said, we are doing this to take advantage of the strike zone. But there's been some speculation that some teams have done that, including the Red Sox. Not that it helped the Red Sox pitching staff,

particularly last offseason, if that was the plan. But it would certainly, if a team did do this, we would applaud them. We would say, oh, that is good. Way to look for an area of the game in which you have collected and processed information that other teams maybe are ignoring and to use that to your advantage. That would be very clean cut use of an inefficiency to outsmart another team. It would not in any way be morally ambiguous, right? Right.

We would applaud it. We would say, oh, I hope that team gets rewarded for this wise, smart thing. Yeah. Right. So if, let's say that they had, you know, Rick Porcello in mind for this sort of thing, hypothetically, and they signed Rick Porcello

to a five-year deal on the assumption that in this new modern game of baseball, Rick Porcello is an undervalued commodity. To what degree do you think Major League Baseball has an obligation to the Red Sox to not change the rules midstream? I think not to a very great degree. I think even last offseason when that stuff came up about the Red Sox, people mentioned, maybe we even mentioned on the show, that there was some risk to doing that. Because if you build your whole strategy around how the strike zone is currently called, well, we've just seen the strike zone be called differently than it was called several years ago.

So it's somewhat unpredictable. So you're taking a risk there. And we've talked about that before with catcher framing, for instance. What if umpires no longer call balls and strikes and it's a robot strike zone? Then suddenly your great framing catcher prospect might not be worth anything anymore. And so I think you just have to factor that in because it's not like this just happened totally organically either. It's not like it just developed this way. The way the strike zone has dropped and expanded over the last several years is the result of something Major League Baseball did. And Rob Manfred kind of acknowledged that in a recent statement

about how the umpires are calling strikes the way that the league wants them to call strikes. And they've been judged by this zone system based on pitch effects for the last few years. And they're calling balls and strikes more accurately according to that system. But that system is sort of responsible for this enlargement of the strike zone. So they've kind of injected themselves already and disrupted the natural course of events. Yeah, there's sort of three different ways that you could see these new climates kind of be injected though. And so let me give you an example. There's a apartment across the street from me that decided to only put windows on one side of their apartment complex. I don't know why, but they did. They're

like a four-story apartment complex. They overlook, the windows face the southeast. And so you have this, you know, you get plenty of sunlight because the windows face the sunny side of the earth. And you get a nice view of, you know, downtown. Okay. So it's decent. It's also kind of weird that you don't have any windows on the other side, but it's a choice they made. Now, there are three ways I would say that that strategy of building an apartment there just like that can be affected. One is, well, something like nature happens. Like maybe, you know, there's an earthquake, you decided to build on a fault, fault line, and you know, the place crumbles, or there's a flood flood and the place gets ruined or maybe, you know, for some reason or

another, there's a volcanic eruption that, you know, affects the atmosphere to such a great degree that the world no longer has any sunlight and we're all living under a cloud of ash. So your great sunny view is no longer sunny. It's just dark and gray all the time. Okay. So in those cases, natural events have hurt the value of your apartment. And there's nothing you get. You can't complain about that. The weather's the weather, the climate's the climate. I'm about to say you can't affect the climate and you're going to do that again. So I'm not going to say that, but naturally occurring events, you can't complain. We're all living under the same natural order. Okay. Now, second is that a owner, another real estate developer, could come and build an apartment directly in front of all your windows, which is what is happening.

This stupid apartment has, unfortunately, is about to be blocked by a five-story apartment, the wall of which is going to be like eight feet from the windows. And all these people who had nice views and lots of sunlight are going to be staring into an alley and getting zero sunlight. And that's their only view. So this is, my wife and I are endlessly amused at these people because now they're complaining that this apartment shouldn't be allowed to be there, but it is zoned for apartments that are up to six stories high. And in fact, they took advantage of that some years ago and built a four story high apartment. And if they had any foresight or looked ahead, they would have known, well, somebody else could build a six story apartment right there. It is right there in the zoning.

It is completely allowed. And you kind of gamble when you build that four story apartment. You gamble, but you know that for fair reasons, it might cost you. Okay. So that would be the umpires. The first example is just umpires naturally, for whatever reason, umpires slowly move in directions as a group, naturally start calling low strikes or high strikes or outside strikes or whatever. They start ejecting people for no reason or calling more box or whatever. That's just the weather, right? The second is the major league baseball saying to them, well, hey, the rule is actually this, and we would prefer that you call the rule book strike. And if you're taking advantage of a momentary or a,

you know, for some years, a lapse in the rule book, the calling of the rule book strike, or whatever, but you know that at any point, the league can simply enforce the rules that are on the books. Well, you're, you know, you have to be prepared for that you gamble that they won't, but you're aware of the possibility. The third is after you've built your four-story apartment, the city goes and changes the zoning. And where an apartment was not allowed previously, it all of a sudden now is allowed. And you had no way of knowing that there was going to be a legal right to build an apartment in front of you. That was not in the rules. And so for the league to now come and change the strike zone feels like more of the latter. Now, I'm not saying that they shouldn't do that. I'm not saying that

it's not good for the game to have changes to the strike zone, even codified changes to the strike zone. What I am sort of saying is, if you're going to do that, I feel like you have some obligation to give teams enough lead time that the decisions that they made for 2017, 2018 are not affected by this. And it doesn't seem to me unreasonable to say, fine, change the rules, but they don't kick in for three years because a huge part of roster building is looking, I mean, I don't know what percentage of your moves are planned for this year, for the next year, for the year after, for the year after, for the year after, but it's probably something like, you know, 60 or 50, 30, 10, 5, 2, 1, right? So some fairly large portion of your planning this off season was geared specifically toward 2017, 2018, and maybe 2019.

was geared specifically toward 2017, 2018, and maybe 2019. And it feels weird to pull the rug out from under that when it's fairly easy to not do that, to simply give more lead time to say it'll kick in in five years or three years or 10 years or whatever. Yeah, well, the zoning argument makes sense to me because I went through that same kind of calculation when I moved into my apartment, which is on the western

edge of Manhattan. And there's a nice view north because the 10 blocks or so north of me are a protected low zoning area and you can't build big buildings there. And there's a giant UPS building right in front of my building, but it's very low. It takes up the entire block almost, but it's low and it doesn't block anyone's view. But there are tons of high rises going up in this area. And I acknowledge the risk. I looked at the zoning. I saw that currently you can't build anything high there, but I also know that there's a good risk that someone could change the zoning because people are putting up high rises everywhere and there's only so much real estate in Manhattan. And a hundred years from now, I'm sure there will be big buildings in the blocks north of my current building. So the question is, will it be soon enough that it

will bother me or will it be a long time in the future? And so I took a calculated risk knowing that it could backfire. And I think the same is kind of true for teams. There's also the fact that I think this sort of change would not just be imposed by Rob Manfred with no consultation with owners or anything. I mean, if the league changes it, then I think that means the owners changed it or the owners approved changing it or a majority or two thirds or whatever it is had to agree. It's not something that the league can just come in and say the strike zone is new now. I think because Rob Manfred works for the owners, I think this would be something that they would have to

approve and the players would also have to approve. It has to be collectively bargained and probably the umpires union also has to have some input so it probably can't change overnight even when it was brought up last week in some stories most of them mentioned that it probably couldn't happen until at least 2017 and if it did i think it would require acceptance by everyone or a majority or something so well a majority though isn't really much protection for the teams that might be affected by this. If it had to be unanimous, fine.

But if we're talking about a few teams that benefit from the current state, well, that's exactly, I mean, the rights of the minority are constantly trampled on by democratic institutions for just that reason. Sure. I think you just have to know that going in. I think it just comes with the territory. The strike zone has changed several times throughout baseball history in response to some perceived imbalance between batters and pitchers and the perceived benefit to the game that would come from this.

And if a few teams' roster is suboptimal because of that change, they probably should have, and did know that that was a possibility when they arranged things that way. So I think you're, you're kind of, you know, it's like putting all your pictures in the same basket or whatever. I wouldn't feel too bad for a team that got caught because of this.

And it's not like, you know, I wouldn't feel too bad for a team that got caught because of this. And it's not like you wouldn't be able to compete if the strike zone moved up two inches. It might erase your edge. Maybe it would be coming. I mean, we foresee it right now. We're talking about how it could change. So a team that made bets based on this would also have known that it could change. Well, we know it can change because on January 27th of 2016, it was announced that it could change. Yeah. I mean, there was discussion last year too. And Rob Manfred said he wanted to see another year of data before doing anything.

I mean, I don't know. I don't think it's out of, it wouldn't be, this has happened before when pitchers had the upper hand and the game wanted more offense. They changed the strike zone, so it could happen again. By the way, Ben, I think one thing that the collective bargaining agreement does explicitly prohibit is putting all pitchers in a basket, in one basket. Yeah, I think it specifically says that if you're going to put pitchers in baskets, they each get their own basket and it has to be a first class basket. Actually, I learned one thing. I'm reading the CBA, by the way, right now.

Just casual reading. I'm about halfway through. I expect to be done the next day or two. But one thing in it is if there are no first class tickets available for a player who's traveling somewhere where first class travel is provided for, as an alternative, they can provide three non-first class seats for every two players. So you get one and a half seats in lieu of first class travel.

And you also get the first class meal in this case. Okay. So you either, so if pitchers do have to share a basket, it has to be a three person basket, but only two pitchers are allowed to be put in that basket. Yeah. So just... Okay.

But have I not even convinced you that it is better and not in any way more onerous to simply delay the implementation of this strike zone for a couple of extra years after you've made the change? Have I not even convinced you that that is the least obstructive way of changing the rules of the game? It depends how acute the need for a new strike zone is, I think. If you think that baseball is being materially harmed by the way things are done, then I see the argument for changing it quicker.

I think, yeah, you should give some warning. I think it would be best if you gave at least a year for teams to make whatever adjustments they want to make based on that. It would be bad, I think, if you adjusted it in, say, spring training and suddenly that was the strike zone for that season. That would be disorienting and kind of confusing and possibly bad. So yes, but I don't think you need to wait three years or something. I just, I don't think that many teams have really just built their entire strategy around the two inches at the bottom of the strike zone.

But as a general principle, as a general, as a general principle though, why, why risk? I mean, who knows what rule change might affect what team in what way? I mean, maybe in this particular instance, you don't think that it is an issue, but there might be another rule changes are implemented slowly enough that teams can play the meta game, can play the multi-year game without fear of having things kind of flipped on them in a way that might be unfair or harmful. It feels like it gives clubs more freedom and more confidence to make more imaginative decisions if they don't have to worry about what abrupt change might be coming to take away that advantage. Yeah, I'd be okay with a rule that said, if you're going to change the strike zone, it has to be announced a year or even two years i i guess the problem is that you just think you're you're on my side thank you sort of i don't know these things can change very quickly though and what if you know what if the strike zone is suddenly enormous and baseball is bad because strikeouts are way up mich Michael Bauman wrote for Baseball Perspectives last week about how the game is getting more boring in a sense because strikeouts are up and

it's optimal for teams to go after high strikeout pitchers and also high strikeout hitters. And so that's combined to make the game less entertaining. We've talked about that before. So what if things get out of hand really quickly and then you're locked in to that system for a couple of years and you can't change anything? I don't thing. I mean, there was a lot of confusion about that. I don't know whether that was because it was implemented so quickly or because it just wasn't implemented very well. It wasn't written very well or very clearly, but there's some confusion. But on the other hand, if you're responding to an actual problem, you don't want to have a dangerous way of doing things on the books for extra years just because you don't want to have a dangerous way of doing things on the books for extra years, just because you don't want to change things too quickly. So I don't mind some responsiveness too.

I could, I could go for a year, but I don't think any more than that is necessary. All right. Now I'm glad that you brought up Michael Bauman's piece because it transitions into the second aspect, which is, do you think that raising the strike zone is the appropriate way of dealing with whatever problem MLB is trying to solve? And I'm going to just jump ahead of your answer and give you some facts, some things, okay? So after the study was announced, August Fagerstrom wrote on Fangraphs about the biggest hypothetical losers of a raised strike zone, which basically means pitchers who most work in this area of the strike zone, as well as pitchers who get the most people that you would expect, but guys like Dallas Keuchel, for instance, is a huge beneficiary of this. And, you know, Kyle Gibson, who is kind of like 70% of Dallas Keuchel, similar style, just not as good, and John Lester, and Mike Leak, and John Neese are all

on this leaderboard. Jay Happ is on this leaderboard. Kyle Hendricks is on this leaderboard. These are not guys who are strikeout pitchers. These are guys who are kind of on the less strikeout skewed side of the game. Some of them are good pitchers. Some of them have been successful pitchers. I don't think the goal is to take away success from pitchers. Isn't the goal to put more baseballs in play, increase the need for good defense, increase the need for batters who can run and increase the amount of time that the ball is actually in play isn't taking this strike zone away, really taking away the pitch to contact ground ball pitcher? Well, I don't know. Those guys may have benefited the most from it, but I think the only possible result of shrinking

the strike zone is that there will be fewer strikeouts. Oh no, clearly shrinking the zone is going to mean fewer strikeouts. But is that the part that you shrink? That seems to be the least helpful place to shrink it. I mean, it's obviously very tricky to shrink the size of the plate. Now, it has been done turn of the previous century in an effort to squash offensive stats so that they wouldn't have to pay hitters as much. The baseball owners agreed to reshape the plate so that umpires would find it easier to call strikes. And so I guess if you really wanted to tamper with history, you could do something like that and you could actually shrink the strike zone by a half

inch on each side or something like that. But yes, raising the strike zone, uh, will mean fewer strikes and therefore fewer strikeouts, but it's simply going to skew the distribution of pitchers more toward the ones who throw hard, throw high and throw for strikeout pitch for strikeouts, right? I mean, you're going to have fewer guys like Keichel and more guys like, I don't know, whoever you want to say, Matt Harvey or whatever, guys who throw pitches that get swings and misses, right? I mean, you want contact. So I'm not sure that there's a way to adjust the strike zone other than moving it up. That is probably the way that you can move it up without it being quite so disruptive to people's expectations of what a strike is. But it's also, in a way, the only thing

saving us from all the good pitchers being strikeout pitchers. Yeah, I see what you mean. I guess, I don't know, the problem with, I guess it's not just though that you get more called strikes in that two inch region that that's part of it, but it's also just that the zone is bigger. And so a hitter has to, you know, protect a larger area. And so a ball that's say diving down into the dirt or something, the batter is more likely to swing at that pitch just because it looks like a strike longer. And probably even more so when pitchers are

throwing really hard and there's less time to judge the trajectory of the ball. And that was another thing August wrote about recently, which I've mentioned on the podcast, was that the swing rate outside the strike zone has gone up. Hitters are swinging at more and more pitches that are not strikes, and they're missing them more and more as well. And he mentioned Francisco Liriano as the example of a guy who just keeps throwing fewer and fewer strikes and keeps getting more and more swings and misses.

And he's not the pitch-to-contact type, although there was a point in his career where he tried to be, or his team told him to be, but he's a throw out of the strike zone, make people chase type of pitcher. And I think it benefits that type as well. So, so you're saying that, and I accept this answer, but just so I'm clear, you're saying that my premise that guys who pitch in the strike zone most like Dallas Keuchel and Kyle Gibson are not actually necessarily the ones that benefit most, that that's a too simplistic way of thinking about it. And in fact, it might be, but it's not necessarily the case that Dallas Keuchels are going to be endangered by this,

but that every pitcher benefits from the strike zone to some degree. And it might in fact be the guys with the splitters in the dirt or, you know, the back foot sliders, uh, who are getting swinging strikes well below the strike zone, not in that disputed area, but well below it, uh, that are actually benefiting just as much or, or maybe even more in that that's a way of, uh, getting, uh, strike threes, swinging strike threes out of the game. I think so. Yeah. That seems possible. The power pitchers who throw even harder and give hitters less time to react, I think maybe are more likely to be the guys with the nasty sliders in the dirt who get swings and misses.

So yeah, it's not just the called strikes, although those matter. It's also the threat of called strikes. So yeah, I think there are multiple layers to the strike zones effect. Okie doke. We're going to end it there. Okay. All right. So you can send us emails for Wednesday at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. You can join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe

to the podcast on itunes one other quick thing i i would say i found and john rogel the hardball times writer has found in the past that the strike zone accounts for something like a third of the offensive decline over the last several years and presumably if you just rolled back the change in the strike zone you'd also roll back the decrease in scoring. And maybe that would be a good thing if baseball fans like more scoring. Yeah. Although I just want to interrupt real quick. And I think that it's not clear that more scoring is in itself the goal. I specifically don't think that more scoring in itself is the goal or is most people's goals. It's a style of play that is more active, I think. Yeah, right. Which, you know, those two things might go together. But if you're simply increasing the number of strikeouts and the

number of home runs, and the result of those two things is an extra half run, I don't think you've accomplished your goal. Yeah. And that'll be interesting to see because that's essentially what happened in the second half of last season for mysterious reasons that I just wrote about and you can read about soon. Home runs were way up, but strikeouts were not down. So scoring was up, home runs were up, but strikeouts were still up. And so, yeah, I don't know if that is a better, more entertaining game. I don't know whether that fixes the problem or not. better, more entertaining game.

I don't know whether that fixes the problem or not. So it's hard to say why that happened or whether it will continue, but maybe that will affect what we think should happen with the strike zone. So stay tuned. All right. And you can support our sponsor, the Play Index, at baseballreference.com. Use the coupon code BP. Get the discounted price of $30 on one year subscription. We'll be back tomorrow.