Back in January, I wrote an article called “Strike Zone”. The premise is very simple. As the referees become more accurate, as the edges of the strike zone become clearer and more unique, the strike zone effectively becomes smaller. Both sides left, but there is a big difference between mistakenly calling the ball and a wrong strike. Calling a ball in the area does not reduce the effective size of the area, but scrowing a shot outside the area does make it bigger. As long as the pitcher knows that they can answer the strike calls there, they will see it as part of the area. Little did I know that when I wrote this, Major League Baseball was preparing to test its exact premise.
The strike zone has steadily lifted off fluff over the past 23 seasons, but on Thursday, Jayson Stark and Ken Rosenthal reported that sports The league has decided to break a sweater razor. During the offseason, the Major League Baseball Association reached a new agreement with the MLB. Part of the agreement includes tightening standards for calling to the ball.
The referee once had a two-inch buffer around the edge of the strike zone, meaning that if they missed less than two-inch calls in either direction, the call would still be as correct as possible in the assessment. Having a buffer is necessary because calling the ball and hitting the ball is very difficult. Even in a game, the referee rarely talks. The new border is three quarters of an inch on either side, down 62.5%. The alliance demanded a less vague strike zone.
What do players think about the area in a month? Angel catcher Travis D'Arnaud has published a sentence, which is a fair representation of the emotions expressed throughout the article: “Everyone's area is shrinking. Every (referee) in the entire league.” Stark and Rosenthal also backed up these assertions with numbers, and we'll dig deeper into the numbers tomorrow. For now, I'm just telling you that the accuracy from last season really improved a bit.
The article also expresses major conflicts. The league insisted on briefing the new rules to the team, but at least 28 players, coaches, executives and analysts remembered hearing about this information. We won't get involved in that special swamp. Michael Baumann summed up the situation well on Friday with the Blues. “I’m still confused by the MLB’s tendency to turn harmless development into pure communication and into controversy,” he wrote. “They have tightened the referee’s standards to bring them closer to the rulebook strike zone – what about something outside of a good thing?”
I plan to even check in the strike area for two other reasons sportsArticles are published. April 26, Susan Slusser San Francisco Chronicles The Giants, who have the outstanding stadium frames of the game in Patrick Bailey, reportedly complained that the top of the strike zone, in particular, seemed to be shrinking. “I think at the top of the area, there’s been a lot missing,” Bailey said. “It’s the area where every catcher is struggling, relatively speaking.” The final work is something I’ve always wanted to sign in since May. At the time, I noticed that the accuracy of hitting calls was low, but they might improve. I made this assertion because the data suggest that referees tend to become more accurate as the season progresses. So, here are the three issues we are going to solve:
- Will the referees actually get better last season?
- What do we know about the impact of the new referee standards?
- Are they related to the giant's complaints?
Today, we will solve the first bullet point. Let's start with the big picture. This started in the 2008 stadium tracking era, with the accuracy of all hit calls.
The yellow line shows the overall rate and you will immediately notice that in 2024, the song has not risen. It fell down. The referees do get better as the season progresses, but overall they are worse than they did last season. The referee made the correct call 92.8% of the time in 2023, but dropped to 92.5% in 2024. This is very important! It never happened. Since the moment we started measuring referees, they did nothing and just got better and better. For the first time ever they've gotten so bad in 2024. Before digging deeper, I want to show you the numbers from the shadow area, the term STATCAST is the area, which is a baseball width at the edge of the batting area on both sides.
For very simple reasons, we should be less concerned with overall statistics than shaded areas. The composition of the courts that the referee must call may change year by year. So far this season, 39.49% of the placeholding ratio is the highest we have ever seen. With so many advantages, calling this season is even harder. The referees are so good these days that they almost never miss out on calls outside the shaded area, so it makes sense to focus on a set of courses that actually matter and throw out all the other possible deviation numbers.
This picture makes me think the league has chosen the right time to tighten the referee standards. The effect is much smaller, but again, the yellow line has dropped slightly for the first time in 2024. Accuracy dropped from 81.8% in 2023 to 81.3% in 2024. This is a rounding error, but that doesn't mean it's trivial. The numbers I don't care about are slightly down, rather than progress seems to stagnate. The following figure gives a slightly different view of the same information. It shows an annual increase in the accuracy of shaded areas, but combines three years at a time to smooth out the graphics a little and give you an overview of overall trends.
The graph has some peaks and valleys, but the trend is obvious. The referee is getting better and better, with less meat on his bones than before. Mix our food metaphor, the better you get, the harder it will be to improve as the low-hanging fruit has disappeared. The line is now dangerously close to zero. Over the years, the composition of the referee army has changed. Today, the league is full of young referees whose promotion depends on getting good results from Statcast. They are much more accurate – better adherence in the Statcast area than the older referees they replace. In this sense, improvement is organic. Throughout his career, new referees trying to meet the needs of the Statcast area have replaced older referees who don’t have, and the accuracy rate will naturally increase. But this can only last for so long. This is just a sample of one year, but it seems that in 2023, the referees become as good as they are under the current system. They finally stopped improving, so it seemed very suitable to push them.
Not long ago, I read it Perfectionist Simon Winchester. It records the history of precise engineering from the 18th century to the present day. The most important lesson is about the power of measurement. It's hard to get better at anything unless you're sure what you're looking at, and it's hard to know unless you can measure it accurately. This authenticity applies to almost any effort. For example, I wrote about transit methods for planetary discovery last week. By developing telescopes that are sensitive enough to measure the minimum changes in star brightness, scientists have discovered hundreds of thousands of planets. A whole new world is discovered simply because we can eventually measure light with enough accuracy. Every day from February to November, referees are asked to do a nearly impossible task, and they will be better since the league starts working hard. But after decades of continuous improvement, we are the first to suggest that they may be approaching their limits. As a result, they now measure with higher accuracy. The 2025 season has become an experiment to see if this change forces them to improve their accuracy and make more accurate calls. Tomorrow we will look at the early returns.
