RJM posted:The article says umpires are wrong 20% of the time. Most questionable calls are around the edge of the plate. Tracking devices are only accurate to within an inch. How many wrong calls were outside the one inch margin of error?
Yawn... Another study to replace the human element with technology. Again, be careful for what you wish.
BTW, I saw no where in that linked article where it said anything about "around the edge of the plate". One had to read the linked study from the article to draw that correlation for the missed calls from top/bottom and left/right - shocking really, never could believe that ;-). How many down the middle calls were missed? How many pitches were swung at outsize the zone? Does that make batters blind too? May have been interesting to know what percentage for each count - that is how many 'missed' at 0-0, 1-0, 2-0... How many times on a 3-0 count do you see a ball "just miss" technically, but is called a strike - mostly as a mechanism to keep flow to the game. The questions asked in the comments in the study actually are quite interesting to read as well... Showing that anyone can generate stats to agree with a hypothesis made.
"...A team from Boston University got its hands on the data, tracking more than four million pitches and superimposing them onto a normalized version of the standard strike zone map — the same one, roughly, you see on every TV broadcast. ..."
What is standard between the strike zone of a 6'5" and 5'8" man? There's a bit of room for error with accuracy to within one inch when “Home plate is a 17-inch square of whitened rubber with two of the corners removed so that one edge is 17 inches long, two adjacent sides are 8 1/2 inches each and the remaining two sides are 12 inches each and set at an angle to make a point.". So does the study only measure 16 of the 17 inches? Or 11 of the 12? or 7 1/2 of the 8 1/2? or does it go in the other direction? Someone smarter than me can do a volume assessment on what percentage 1" is of the volume of the plate for a "standard" zone, but if we discount the 3rd dimension if 17*12 = 204 and 16*11 = 176 and 176/204 = 0.86 - what does that say about accuracy of the study? Something not mentioned in the study - if they're so smart that could have put in there to indicate that the margin of error would be XX% because of the accuracy concern, but that didn't fit the hypothesis and would certain skew their numbers, so it's left out.
I'm not against technology - it's my profession. Car guys will say, give me a car without computers, right? How many distrust the check engine light that causes you to fail annual inspection merely because some other mechanical part is failing. A part that costs maybe $10, but takes 3 hours to get to within the exhaust system. In some ways technology has helped our lives, but in others - not so sure. In the long run baseball is a game, enjoy the game and stop nickle and diming one particularly frustrating aspect of it.