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Originally Posted by GarthB
I never said I would call a pitch that I idenitfy as a strike, a ball. Nope, just re-read my post. Never said that. Pleae refrain from putting words in my mouth.
I said I identify that pitch as a ball.
RIF
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I’m sorry if I misunderstood, but
… A deuce that takes the knee at the front of the zone… sure sounds like it had to at least touch some part of “your zone”.
Semantics and picking nits aside, and “assuming” you’re not so silly as to believe you can call the zone to such an infinitely close degree that we’d have to get into calculating infinitesimally small numbers, I’ll accept that you don’t identify any pitch you think just touches the zone as a strike. Heck, even QuesTec claims only to be able to be accurate to within ½ inch, so expecting anything more from a human being would be absurd.
All I can say in my defense is, I took “catching the knee to mean the ball was at least an inch or so into the zone. That would mean it had to go through some part of the zone, and then it would follow that you’d be calling the pitch based on something other than what happened “over the plate”.
That does bring up another question though, based on what that QuesTec operator said.
Setting the lines at the top of the belt and at the hollow of the back knee…
The top of the belt was perfectly understandable since the computer automatically raises the line about 2.5 balls. But that bottom line is different.
I always assumed the “bottom” of the zone was determined by an imaginary line parallel to the plate and drawn touching the “hollow between BOTH knee caps. But after I read what he’d written, it struck me that trying to do that would be almost impossible with many batters, since their knees are seldom the same height off the ground.
It would even make it more impossible with guys who take their stance with one of those ridiculously “open” stances, where an ump wouldn’t even see that front knee until the pitch was already on the way, and that would be a very bad time to start trying to figure out a strike zone.
Then, when I looked closer at the rule,
the lower level is a line at the hallow beneath the knee cap, it became apparent that it wasn’t saying “KNEES”, it was saying “KNEE”, so what the operator was doing, really made a lot of sense.
What I’m wondering is, how do guys like yourself define it? I can see a computer using only one point maybe 20-25” behind the back part of the plate to draw the line, but that’s one brutal task for a human being!
I know good umps are pretty darn good at that stuff, but thinking about it, an ump’s head is 4-5’ from the front of the plate, and at least a foot or two above it, assuming he’s “locking in” at the top of the inside of the plate. Heck, I have trouble guessing how far from the urinal I am, let alone trying to do the mental match to compute the strike zone.
How do you determine that bottom line, and when do you do it?