Otto von Ballpark

Sounds like Palka spent the offseason training with Chris Davis!

You didn't need hindsight to see that this was going to be a prime age season for Berrios, Polanco, Kepler, Rosario, Buxton, Rogers, and even Sano. Plus Gibson looked solid, and they went out and got Cruz... I mean, you don't predict a World Series title and push the chips all in for that squad, but you don't really count them out of contention enough to meaningfully influence a Pressly deal. I think they were betting Pressly would regress, thus we wouldn't miss him that much, and they thought Alcala could be pretty good. The former hasn't happened yet, so they might need the latter to exceed expectations to ultimately make this deal look good.

Looks like Cleveland is back on top on both of those pages now, so maybe their was an error that they fixed. The numbers on each page are a little different, though, so I'd be curious about an official explanation.

Possibly, but that's trying to time things a little too fine. Berrios, Buxton, Kepler, Polanco... no reason to think 2019 was that likely to be another non-competitive year.

Stud horse, like, for breeding more pitchers?

Ryan Pressly to the Twins: "You'll never find... another reliever like me..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QTrCBAqTyM

So you're saying he doesn't belong in Toronto either? *rimshot in the alternate universe where the Twins swept the series this week*

Well, the poster I was responding to had previously said that he didn't like to see arguments, dirt-kicking, etc. at ball games. That was the context under which I made this observation. It was just meant to say, we don't really see that at ball games. Maybe some of you notice a lot of suppressed rage in the dugouts, and you don't like to see that at ballgames. I guess I see some not-so-suppressed rage in the game threads sometimes.

I guess, when you trade a player like this, there's a combination of a few factors. 1. The return -- is it too good to pass up? 2. The player -- is there a significant gap between what we think he can do, versus what other teams think 3. The replacements -- do we think we can replace the player easily I know a poster here has suggested #1 a few times, and Alcala looks interesting, but I am not sure that was the primary motivator. I think #2 and #3 came into play here as well, and the Twins look like they may have made mistakes there. Pressly is still looking good, and no one has really been found to replace him. Some may want to separate that effort, to replace him, but given the Twins position as a solid young team, and the ubiquity of solid bullpens among contenders, I think it should be considered as a factor in this deal. It's not like the Twins were tanking for 2019, or were planning to win in 2019 without a good pen. Still possible that factors 2 and 3 change over this year, and of course factor 1 will develop over a few more years.

All human umpires tend to have consistent blind spots / biases among them. (You can read the study link for more details.) The rule book used to say the top of the zone was the letters, but every player knew that pitches at the letters weren't called strikes very often -- in part because it was an ump blind spot (it's hard to judge varying tops of the zone, with different batter heights/stances), but also because batters didn't like those pitches and, over time, had taken enough of them to communicate that. Eventually the rule book zone was amended to reflect this. Player training and decision making is based on this kind of reality, rather than strictly the rule book. If it wasn't, I agree it would be a serious problem -- there would likely be chaos in the game! But there never really has been, and to the extent that there ever was, the Eric Gregg game was 22 years ago. Tom Glavine retired 10 years ago. I rarely see any ejections over balls and strikes. Most excesses of the umpire-player relationship have been curbed. They don't always agree, of course, and players wouldn't always agree with Statcast/robo-umps either, but the game is stable. I think it helps that players are dealing with the same kind of human limitations as the umpires. Joey Votto has a great eye, but even he probably couldn't call a zone with an error rate significantly less than 9% or whatever, as compared to Statcast. Fortunately, he doesn't have to, to be successful. His eye can provide the 9% zone, his brain can quickly judge the risks/rewards based on factors like the count, and his reflexes and muscle memory regularly allow him to hit the ball well too. I guess he could follow the same basic formula under robo-umps, but at the same time, I don't get the sense that any of that formula is really being compromised under human umps.

Nobody has ever played a game with a Statcast zone before (aside from that Eric Byrnes demonstration mentioned upthread?). No one will play with them before they get to pro ball for a long time either. Again, it's not any kind of disqualifying factor for robo-umps or anything. It was just an observation. Yes, players have been adjusting to strike zones since the dawn of baseball, although in a bit different form. The primary point of the post, from which that stray observation was drawn, was that it's not as if players are being unwittingly cheated out of Statcast strikes right now. They've never had Statcast strikes. They've played their entire careers under the parameters of human umpires, for better or for worse.

There's risk in trying that switcheroo, though. Even an honest effort to acquire a couple suitable replacements might not work out in a short time frame.

All I said was "switching to a strict Statcast zone could be an unwelcome adjustment for most players" That seems like a fair observation. Nobody has ever played a baseball game with a Statcast strike zone (well, outside of that Eric Byrnes thing someone mentioned). And as far as I know, there aren't many (any?) players or former players advocating for a switch to robo-umps. I wasn't arguing this adjustment as a reason not to implement robo-umps.

Actually, umpires have ton of overlap in their strike zones, even in their blind spots / biases. So it's really not a whole new zone each night. At worst, maybe you shift the percentage odds on the corner or something for a certain ump, but evidence suggests even that is becoming more consistent. It seems like you have a vision of Eric Greggs all around the league, arbitrarily just deciding to call a really wide zone, or a really tall zone, etc. on random nights or even random innings, thwarting batters and pitchers in their efforts to consistently identify pitches. If that was the case, I'd probably agree that robo-umps were warranted, but I really don't see that kind of egregious variation. Are there a lot of players, or more likely former players, advocating for robo-umps? If not, it seems like it's mostly a solution in search of a problem on the field. Off the field, it would just be a matter of fan preference, and I acknowledge that not everyone would share my preference. And I don't think there is anything contradictory about Statcast and human umps co-existing. It's been that way for awhile now. A pro-human-umpire opinion isn't invalid simply because it acknowledges tools to better train and grade human umps.

Worth noting that players don't learn the game or train based on the Statcast strike zone. So taking a Statcast ball, that the ump calls a strike, isn't really an unexpected or unjust outcome, if they've seen it regularly called a strike their entire lives. If anything, switching to a strict Statcast zone could be an unwelcome adjustment for most players! You'd more be rewarding those players who could adapt to the new Statcast zone, than you would be rewarding any kind of "natural" baseball skill.

Baseball is nowhere near a 100% type game. No batter or pitcher has to be anywhere close to 100% pitch recognition skill to be successful. The best batters can probably recognize pitches early that will likely fall in a small zones (a couple inches, maybe?), and know their percentage odds in each zone, and can make a informed decision whether to swing or risk a take depending on the count.

Again, if those pitches were so close that even the batters themselves would be unable to determine the "correct" call, I am not sure it matters. In those cases, the batter taking the pitch is no more demonstrating his skill than predicting the result of a coin flip. The two-strike bias is interesting and worth looking into further, although the numbers as presented here may overstate the case, if close pitches/takes are more likely to occur in two-strike counts.

I don't think the players can even tell whether the pitches are balls or strikes within an inch, in real time. Much less have a repeatable skill to do it.

It would depend on how MLB implements it, I suppose. It wouldn't be all that surprising if they addressed this issue by adding 3 "strike zone" challenges per team, to be used before the 8th inning...

Despite that call, I don't feel that I saw anything less than a fair competition of baseball skills between the Yankees and my Twins that day (unfortunately ). Pitch framing is nothing new, although we've only recently been able to attempt quantifying it. If Jeff Mathis is taking a job away from Chris Carter, is that objectively a bad thing? I find it interesting, frankly -- it's not like there's a shortage of Chris Carter type hitters being represented in the league. And if it's happening now, it's been happening in similar forms for all of baseball history.

I suspect this tracking/review is already taking place, and increasing. And as I said upthread, I'd love if this kind of analysis factored in the difficulty of calling a pitch accurately, rather than just raw "error rates". A strike 6 inches off the plate isn't the same kind of error, to me, as a fan, as a pitch that's 2 microns from the zone.

Well, it's not a binary good/bad -- the best and worst error rates were ~4% apart. And developments in the game take time. In terms of umpiring, we're ahead of where we were 10 years ago; we're way ahead of where we were 20 years ago. I would expect it to be even better in another 10 years. And again, for me, it's not detracting from my enjoyment in the meantime.

I would agree with you on this, except I generally don't see that at games. Certainly nowhere near any frequency where it would detract from my enjoyment as a fan.

As a fan, I wouldn't say missed calls are a "virtue" -- just not a problem, at the current level. Players might like the current system too, if they see a chance to leverage it to their advantage. As long as it's not egregious, I find that kind of interesting too.

I can see how that would be frustrating! But I think such situations have already become a thing of the past -- the league can monitor umpire performance like never before. So we see virtually zero team/player bias. The remaining bias is relatively small, neutral, and speaking personally, it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the game at all.