Tuesday, March 02, 1999
Strike zone more like twilight zone
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
SARASOTA, Fla. — Baseball wants to enforce the strike zone. That's like enforcing the flight patterns of flies circling your head, but OK. The commissioner's office has decided the game needs a stricter accounting of balls and strikes. I think the game needs more really rich people to own teams, so every team can have an $88 million payroll, like the New York Yankees. But one step at a time.
“They are?” said Eddie Taubensee, the Reds catcher. I told him of the memo dispatched by commissioner Bud Selig. It called for, among other things, re-establishing the part of the strike zone above the belt. That is, the part of the strike zone that's been called a ball for the last, oh, 20 years.
I asked Taubensee if he knew what the rulebook definition of a strike was.
“According to the rulebook, it's anything, um, depends on the corners. Maybe three or four inches off to um, to um, right at the belt buckle. It's more like a rectangle,” he said. Well sure it is.
The point was not to poke at Taubensee. I asked three other Reds at random the same question. Their answers were similar. “What?” manager Jack McKeon said. “Top of the armpits? Somewhere around there.”
The other catcher, Brian Johnson, did a little better. “From the bottom of the nipple to the top of the knees,” he said.
Ever see it called that way?
“Never,” Johnson said.
Armpits to knees?
Where is the strike zone? Wherever.
Armpits to knees, unless Greg Maddux is pitching, in which case it's eyebrows to ankles. Letters to knees, unless Tony Gwynn or Wade Boggs is hitting. Then it's the top of the navel, all the way to the bottom.
What does the home plate ump do when Maddux pitches to Gwynn?
Determining the strike zone is easier than finding Atlantis. But only when Eric Gregg isn't working. Trying to get every umpire to call the same strikes is like asking all snowflakes to be identical.
The strike zone is what it is. Whatever that is.
“The strike zone is the strike zone,” said Richie Phillips, head of the umps union.
And there you have it.
“Before '97, they said they were going to go back to the more traditional strike zone,” Denny Neagle said. “The umpires were like yeah, OK, whatever. I think it lasted like the first week of the season. Umpires are like players. They're set in their ways.”
An unspoken reason for strike-zone diligence is to speed up the game. That's a great idea. Baseball games last longer than some banana republics. During the World Series, the commercial breaks were about 12 minutes. You could watch half of Seinfeld and not miss a pitch.
But the only meaningful way to hurry the games is to cut back on the advertising between innings. Dropping a minute before the bottom and top half of each inning would save 18 minutes a game. That's not going to happen until Kevin Brown agrees to work for minimum wage. If anything, the time between innings will increase.
Leave it alone
Baseball doesn't need to tinker. Baseball's last great tinker produced the designated hitter. I like the DH, but that only makes me a communist to baseball lovers.
Baseball is quirky. This is good. Baseball has no clock. Baseball has unique stadiums. It has the DH, and it doesn't. It has rich teams and poor.
We have this need now for perfection among our games' arbiters. Instant replay will be back in the NFL next season, because we can't stand the thought of humans who are fallible.
Now, we want every umpire to call the proper strike, every time. Good luck.
For the record, here's how the rulebook defines the strike zone:
“(The) area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap.”
Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.
Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.
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