how is Mike Lowell still in this game?
 

I have never seen a batter chew out an umpire about a called third strike this vociferously and not get dumped. He must have gone on more than 30 seconds with a "false ending"...took a couple of steps and came back yelling. How is he playing third base now? This was just weird.

Jeff Kellogg is the PU...I know he has been around a long while. I am amazed there was no ejection. Anybody have an idea? Is this Kellogg's common practice?

I too was astonished.

Kellogg reached down and off the plate for the strike, so maybe he sat on his thumb for that reason. It was quite a dose Lowell gave him.

You are assuming that you can tell it was out of the zone on the tv camera...of course, you cannot.

Even if it was the worst call of his career, how could he put up with that kind of crapola?

do we have a video clip of the incident yet?

Nope, because Kellogg did not dump him.

Well, you could tell it was outside, and it sure looked low, too.

I know what you're saying, but that was a reach.

I edited that for you.

Lowell's AB, from the Pitch f/x data, thanks to BrooksBaseball.net. Looks OK to me (#5 called strike three)

http://homepage.mac.com/gerrybil/numlocation.png

I just watched it two more times from both angles, including the ground level view, from which you could judge the height of the pitch, and it was about halfway down Lowell's shin, and off the plate.

The argument lasted 15 seconds almost exactly.

Sorry, wrong at-bat. Or their system is bunk, because the pitch was low and away, not on the inside corner.

Depends on whether the view presented is from the front or rear of the plate.

I saw a TV game a few years back when, with the plate area mic'd, the catcher was called out on strike three. He stood there and said "That pitch was outside. If you're going to call it a strike then I want it for my guys too." He stayed in the game.

Pretty sure that view is from the catcher's and umpire's perspective, not from the pitcher's.

Nope. It's the right at bat. The point of reference is from behind the plate.

Not everyone's knees are 18" from the ground. the hollow of my knee is 19" from the ground. This technology is flawed.

Sigh!!!!!

I've said it before and I will say it again (for our visitor's sake). Only 2 people on the field can call a pitch for what it truly is - the Catcher and The Plate Umpire.

Nothing else, be it human, camera or machine can call a pitch - period!

Argue amongst yourselves with your moronic proof machines but until they put the camera and the machine in the place of the Catcher and the umpire, there is nothing on this Earth that can call a pitch!

Okay, right at-bat, but with a system that's bunk. The low spot is just wrong. Mike Lowell's 6'4''.

I'm just not going to watch games anymore. What's the point?

I don't want machines calling strikes, but this info is out there being used to explain or condemn. The strike zone shown is the "normalized strike zone", that is, a kind of a statistical average of all the batter's zones, IIUC. That does not mean each batter is judged based on this zone, it means that all the zones are plotted on a single plot for simplicity and clarity. The pitches are plotted relative to that.

So what do I take away from the graph? I don't know #5's exact location, but it was pretty close to the strike zone. For me Kellogg got it right. But I didn't see it live, and as I think we all agree we're the ones who know the "true" zone.

Gotcha.

I do think that the actual pitch was more low than off the plate, and Lowell's being so tall and his being a stand-up hitter both make that a low pitch. As far as judging the corner properly ... what Ozzy said.

My first reaction to Kellogg's taking so much crap for so long (15 long seconds) was possibly due to his thinking he reached for the strike.

Yeah, well mine is 20" :p

Braggart!:rolleyes:

Braggart
 

Steve,

Are you saying you are vertically challenged? By the look of the high water pants the other day, I would not have thought it. LOL

Like I said, those were from 1990, before I had access to plate pants. Plate pants were just gaining popularity. These were Sears dress pants. If you had seen me about a month later, you would have seen properly fitted Honig's Plate Pants.