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Robots are officially coming!


DoUEvenShift

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Yeah, I don't trust it. It's based exclusively on height and not batting stance? If I'm not mistaken, the official MLB rulebook states that the strike zone is based on batting stance. So how will this system account for batting stance? What if a young player grows during the season? How about if a player has a different stance on a 0-0 count vs an 0-2 count? Can we trust that these cameras are even calibrated accurately? Some guys are gonna have strike zones up to their necks. I don't think they thought this through.

These guys are both 6'0, so they'd have the exact same strike zone?

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https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/strike-zone

"The official strike zone is the area over home plate from the midpoint between a batter's shoulders and the top of the uniform pants -- when the batter is in his stance and prepared to swing at a pitched ball -- and a point just below the kneecap."

How is the ABS strike zone measured?
Like the plate, it is 17 inches wide. The top end of the zone is at 53.5% of the player’s height, while the bottom is at 27% of the player’s height. The depth of the zone is 8.5 inches from both the front and back of the plate.

How does this compare to the human umpire zone?
The umpire-called zone has generally been more rounded and more lenient to pitchers, with a 55.6% max up top and 24.2% minimum at the bottom.

As an example of the impact this can have on a key call, MLB research found that, in 2-2 counts, the umpire-called zone was 449 square inches, while the ABS zone was 443 square inches.

How does the ABS zone account for different player heights?
All position players in Spring Training camps have their heights measured – first by a team of independent testers conducting manual measurements, then by representatives from a research institute using biomechanical analysis to confirm the manual measurements and safeguard against potential manipulation.

Players are measured standing straight up without cleats.

Edited by nrockway
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12 minutes ago, nrockway said:

Yeah, I don't trust it. It's based exclusively on height and not batting stance? If I'm not mistaken, the official MLB rulebook states that the strike zone is based on batting stance. So how will this system account for batting stance? What if a young player grows during the season? How about if a player has a different stance on a 0-0 count vs an 0-2 count? Can we trust that these cameras are even calibrated accurately? Some guys are gonna have strike zones up to their necks. I don't think they thought this through.

These guys are both 6'0, so they'd have the exact same strike zone?

If I remember correctly, a year or two ago the minors updated to a system that uses a rolling average of the batters height/stance over the past 50 ABs to draw the zone rather than height alone. So if two guys have the same measured height but one has a consistently lower stance, the zone adjusts for that:

"Hawk-Eye is now taking a snapshot of the hitter’s body position at the moment the baseball is midway across the plate (the same location used when evaluating umpire performance) and is then utilizing a rolling average of those snapshots across the hitter’s 50 most recent plate appearances to determine the hitter’s zone.

The zone is not dictated or impacted by a batter’s stance prior to the pitch being delivered, so hitters can’t artificially shrink their zone with a wider stance that compresses the gap between their knees and belt, nor are players who use a more upright stance punished with a larger zone for doing so."

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