HAVING VANQUISHED Richie Phillips, Sandy Alderson turned to his next task: comparing the strike zone in practice to the zone in the major league rule book. The traditional zone needed eventual tweaking, but enforcement was an immediate problem. Part of the trouble was the game’s structure itself. The American and National leagues had worked with separate umpiring crews for decades, each having moved away from the standard zone in its own ways. In the National League, it was said, the umpires assumed every pitch to be a strike, and adjusted accordingly. In the American, the umpires assumed each pitch to be a ball. The difference was not insignificant. In the AL, the borderline pitch was often called a ball, while in the National League, pitchers received the benefit of more close calls, and hitters had to be ready to swing the bat. It was believed that National League umpires wanted to keep the game moving, to get on with it.
Despite this perceived fundamental difference, Alderson discovered that the two leagues had one thing in common: Neither called the high strike. Thus, what Alderson found was not a shrunken strike zone as much as it was a misshapen one. Instead of being a practically square vertical rectangle, the strike zone had over the years become abnormally wide horizontally and chopped vertically. League research found that this new rectangular zone cut about a ball and a half off of the top of the strike zone, a significant amount.
To Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame Baltimore pitcher, the zone deserved more discussion than it received. Palmer did not possess the fastball of the super-elite, but his control was so good he could strike hitters out on curveballs using the top part of the zone. In the 1990s, however, a Jim Palmer overhand curve would have missed the top part of the strike zone consistently. To Palmer, the loss of the high strike contributed to skyrocketing offense as much as drug use or anything else. The high fastball was the equalizing pitch, the one that even the best hitters had a tough, if not impossible time catching up to. The beauty of the old strike zone, thought Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, was that there were pitches that were called strikes that could not be hit. That meant there was such a thing as the perfect pitch. Taking away the high strike virtually eliminated that perfect pitch. Now pitchers trying to pitch up in the zone for strikes needed exceptional velocity, for the only high strikes umpires would call would be swinging strikes. Anything else would be so low that instead of a perfect pitch, it would be a fat one. Without the called high strike, there was little reason outside of machismo to throw the high fastball. The pitcher would not be rewarded enough to take the risk.
To Tony Gwynn, the Eric Gregg game was a seminal moment. Gwynn saw the pitchers as a group being pushed further and further toward the edge of a cliff. The Gregg game was not necessarily just an umpire having a bad day, but proof that the zone was clearly horizontal, yet there was no compensation vertically. That meant the hitters could now sit on pitches on the corners without having to worry about a new strike being called high or low. Since few pitchers in the 1990s were willing to throw hard and inside consistently, hitters could do things they never could before. They could stand on top of the plate, lean out over it and sit on pitches from the middle out, an unprecedented amount of plate coverage. To Gwynn, one of the most astute hitters in history, a good hitter might as well have worn a bib when he went to the plate.
“There’s nowhere for them to go,” Gwynn said of pitchers. “As a hitter you don’t want to admit it’s being made a little easier for you. You don’t want to admit the umpires have their own strike zones and they’re all down, a little off the edges, and it’s increasingly more difficult for a pitcher to find a place to go and get you out.”
How the zone became so misshapen in the first place was a question for debate. There were some baseball men who believed that since 1968, when Bob Gibson dominated the game, umpires had been systematically reinterpreting the strike zone on their own. There were others who believed that the zone became more rectangular because managers seated in the dugout could not argue high and low strikes as effectively from their vantage point and thus made the most noise on pitches inside or away based on the batters’ reactions. The result was umpires’ beginning to redefine their zones in part as a response to complaints from both dugouts, by definition transforming a square zone into a rectangular one.
Alderson was disturbed by something else. Umpires seemed to give pitchers calls based on the catcher’s ability to “frame” a pitch, that is, simultaneously catching the ball and shifting the glove into the strike zone, essentially turning balls into strikes. Aiding the practice was the way that, on television, the color commentators would spend segments of games gushing over a particular catcher’s mastery of the art of framing pitches. To Alderson, this was absurd. Where and how the catcher caught a given pitch was irrelevant to whether that ball was a strike. By the time the ball had reached the catcher’s mitt, Alderson reasoned, the action of ball-strike determination was over. The key, he thought, was to find a way to better determine the location of a pitch at the precise time it crossed the plate. For the solution, he turned to technology.
RALPH NELSON drove everyone crazy. Out in San Francisco, Nelson was something of a constant presence, holding a series of positions with the
Giants. He was the Giants’ traveling secretary. He worked the public address system for a time. Eventually he worked his way through the organization, becoming an assistant to the Giants’ general manager, Al Rosen. Nelson was a tough character, confrontational, direct, and to many of his adversaries, completely untrustworthy. He was also unpredictable, something of a rogue, and in the early 1990s ran into trouble with the organization. For a variety of reasons, his relationship with Rosen soured. One longtime baseball man recalled Nelson’s name being bandied about for a number of job openings around baseball. “Suddenly, the Giants were telling everybody how great Ralph was,” he said. “That’s how you knew he was in trouble.” Nelson was a candidate for the general manager jobs with the two 1993 expansion teams, Florida and Colorado, and when he received neither, he was asked to resign from the Giants.
Nelson’s real passion was umpiring. Mark Gonzales, a longtime beat writer who covered the Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks, knew Nelson from Northern California back in the mid-1970s. “Ralph Nelson was my Santa Clara Pony League umpire,” he recalled. “And he had a strike zone the size of a postage stamp.” Years later, at a crossroads, he received a serendipitous call from Sandy Alderson, who had just joined baseball’s front office and been assigned to clean up the game’s umpiring problem, offering him a job in the commissioner’s office.
Just about everyone in baseball had had it with the umpiring. There was a running joke that it was possible to pick four random fans from the stands and they couldn’t call a game any worse than the big league umps did. During the endless downtime that exists in baseball, some pitchers wondered aloud if the strike zone could be framed by infrared beams, a beep alerting an umpire when the ball passed through the sensors. Or maybe baseball could insert a microchip inside the ball that would emit a signal when it crossed the strike zone coordinates. In a way, the suggestions were similar to Cyclops, the tennis technology that determined service faults that had been used in major events such as Wimbledon for two and a half decades. Most hated the idea of taking the human element out of the game, but didn’t think it too much to ask that the umpires get a call right.
Alderson asked if Nelson was interested in helping out. Nelson leaped at the opportunity, and was made baseball’s head supervisor of umpiring.
In fall 2000, a year after the Richie Phillips disaster, Nelson took center stage and struck up a relationship with a little-known Long Island, New York, company in Deer Park called QuesTec and its chief official, Ed Plumacher. Three years earlier, the struggling company had scored a coup by signing an exclusive agreement to provide pitch-tracking technology to Fox’s baseball broadcasts. The technology was, if nothing else, intriguing. In between pitches, viewers at home would see a graphic replay of the previous pitch that followed the ball from
the pitcher’s hand to determine if it was a strike. To the television people, such technological gimmicks were “value-adds” that brought each telecast just that much closer to the fan. Both of baseball’s broadcast partners, Fox and ESPN, used similar graphics to frame the strike zone, so the viewers at home - could play umpire. Fox used the QuesTec technology, while ESPN used something called “K-Zone.” To the umpires, it was just more pressure being applied to their jobs. Everybody and his brother thought it was so damned easy to be an umpire.
In the late 1980s, Plumacher worked on Wall Street as a stockbroker for Shearson Lehman Brothers. He also had been an investor in a company known as SZL Sportsight, a high-tech firm that specialized in computer-imaging technology. For the first five years of Plumacher’s association with SZL Sportsight, the company was a failure. The technology did not work quite as promised and internal struggles sank the firm from within. In 1992, with the company in disarray, Plumacher made a power move. He quit Shearson Lehman and agreed to take over the presidency of SZL Sportsight. Within two years, he had successfully taken control of the company’s direction.
For years, Ed Plumacher believed baseball was the perfect vehicle for his nascent technology. The key, he always believed, was to find a way to become a client of either Major League Baseball or the television networks that broadcast the games. There was no more immediate element of baseball than the pitcher-hitter dynamic. It was the game’s central nervous system. Thus, the company’s strategy had rested on the idea that television networks would love the value-add of being able to follow the break of a curveball or the rotation and movement of a fastball into the catcher’s glove.
In 1994, SZL Sportsight made initial contacts with a handful of cable outlets to provide pitch-tracking graphics on local broadcasts. The product was named Sportvision, and it would diagram pitches as they approached the strike zone by using three high-speed digital cameras, one in front and one on each side of the pitcher. The Detroit Tigers were on board. The Cleveland Indians were interested. Then Plumacher’s dream took a punch in the gut when the strike wiped out both the season and most of SZL Sportsight. The infighting continued. Changes and resignations on the firm’s board of directors derailed whatever remaining momentum the strike hadn’t destroyed. Worse was the company’s increasing reputation for using questionable technology.
By 1996, the foundering company had changed its name to QuesTec, Inc., but success still required a salesman’s guile. David Feldman, a technician working for KRON, the San Francisco television station that broadcast Oakland A’s games, recalled a day in Detroit when two QuesTec technicians walked into the KRON broadcast truck to make their pitch. Wouldn’t it be great if your viewers could watch a slider’s motion from the pitcher’s hand through the strike zone? Wouldn’t it be cool for the viewers back home to be able to see exactly how far, in inches, a pitch was out of the strike zone? QuesTec kept track of pitch speed as well, a bonus at a time when most ballparks did not yet have radar guns installed. As a graphic tool, it impressed Feldman, and former A’s catcher and KRON broadcaster Ray Fosse. The techs told Feldman that since the Tigers already used the system, the triangulated camera configuration was in place for the A’s use. Feldman, a walking encyclopedia of Oakland A’s information, had one technical question: How did QuesTec change the dimensions of the strike zone to compensate for the different height and batting stance of each hitter? Were the cameras repositioned each time? The technicians told him no, that the QuesTec technology took an average height of a typical major league hitter and used it as a template. The technology - wasn’t completely accurate, they told him, but it was close. Besides, it was being used as an entertainment tool. It wasn’t actually determining balls and strikes. The A’s loved it, and would soon be on board.
As the baseball season drew to a close in 1996, Ed Plumacher got his big break. The Madison Square Garden Network in New York wanted to use QuesTec. MSG was the rights holder for Yankees telecasts, and the Yankees were in a death struggle with the Baltimore Orioles for the AL East title. Why didn’t Plumacher install his QuesTec technology at Yankee Stadium to provide the MSG broadcasts the same value-add that Tigers fans enjoyed for the final week and a half of the season? Plumacher would later recall that the Yankees exposure saved the company.
It also opened the door to Major League Baseball. The MSG people were so pleased with the value-add on the Yankee games that they invited Plumacher to the winter meetings, the game’s conventionlike networking paradise, in Palm Springs. For three days, Plumacher dazzled baseball’s broadcasting executives with QuesTec. By the time the meetings ended, QuesTec had signed an exclusive and lucrative agreement with the Fox regional networks to install the QuesTec technology in the ballparks where Fox held television contracts. It was the home run Plumacher desperately sought. QuesTec was still losing money, but it had established a beachhead.
Three years later, Ed Plumacher had Ralph Nelson’s ear. At their initial meeting, Plumacher told Nelson the technology was revolutionary. Because of their Fox contract, the QuesTec infrastructure was already in place. The system had been upgraded, Nelson was told. The strategically placed cameras, one from center field and one each along the first- and third-base lines, would cover each angle of the strike zone. The technology would track a pitch as soon as it left the pitcher’s hand. At the end of each game, the QuesTec technicians would compile a DVD of the game, which umpires could view and compare their calls against the accuracy of QuesTec. The league, too, would then have a gauge of both its umpires and its new technology.
Then Plumacher went for another home run. He told Nelson that the QuesTec technology was so good, so precise, that it could determine a strike within a half inch, a titillating proposition for a league convinced the umpires had long failed to execute proper definition of the strike zone. Nelson was sold. During the Arizona Fall League season, Plumacher demonstrated the technology for baseball, and on Valentine’s Day 2001, fittingly, Nelson announced a shotgun marriage: a five-year deal costing baseball a potential total of $2 million to use QuesTec as a training tool to help umpires. The system would debut later that year.
LARRY GIBSON was born and raised in Baltimore. He went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and came of age during the 1960s, when the Baltimore Orioles were rising to power in the American League. Yet he was never attracted to baseball, freely admitting that he knew very little about the game. While at Columbia Law, he clerked for Maryland state judge Frank Kaufman, where he would become best friends with Ron Shapiro. Shapiro would become a well-known player agent in both baseball and football. For a time, the two friends worked together in Shapiro’s agency. Gibson recalled that, in one of the few baseball games he attended, in one half inning, all nine Orioles players on the field were Shapiro clients.
Gibson was a tenured professor at University of Maryland Law and a veteran of Democratic politics, having been Bill Clinton’s state chairman during the 1992 presidential election and having served as campaign manager for venerable Baltimore mayor Curt Schmoke on three occasions. When Richie Phillips’s strategy began its fatal meltdown in 1999, the group of dissenters led by Joe Brinkman and John Hirschbeck paid a call to Ron Shapiro for the purpose of organizing a new union. From time to time Shapiro had also represented umpires, but, fearing a conflict of interest because he still represented players, he asked Larry Gibson to serve as counsel to the umpires. That is how a man with so little knowledge of baseball that his own clients, the umpires, would constantly make fun of him found himself standing face-to-face with the power players of Major League Baseball.
By the time Ralph Nelson signed the QuesTec deal, Gibson had already negotiated a collective-bargaining agreement between the umpires and baseball with Sandy Alderson and Rob Manfred. When he heard the QuesTec announcement, he was not particularly alarmed; baseball had assured the umpires that the technology was to be used only as a training tool.
In 2001 and 2002, as baseballs flew out of the park, QuesTec’s influenc
e grew at the office of the commissioner. The data retrieved from the handful of parks that had installed QuesTec revealed that umpires missed one of every nine pitches, a fairly high number. To the umpires, it was a preposterous number. These were not borderline calls; QuesTec’s data suggested the calls were dead wrong.
Gibson had immediate reservations. The mood was already darkening with Alderson and Manfred, for by 2002, Alderson had become convinced that the lengthening time of games, now averaging more than three hours, was due to umpires’ not calling enough strikes. Alderson ordered the umpires to call more strikes. Gibson immediately filed suit against baseball.
Gibson was leery of QuesTec. He attended seven Yankees games in the seven different parks where QuesTec was installed, and one Phillies game. As an experiment, he chose to focus on the strike zones of Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Alfonso Soriano, and Jason Giambi. His first immediate fear was realized: The QuesTec strike zone fluctuated. On its face, that seemed only logical. Jason Giambi would naturally have a different strike zone than Alfonso Soriano, who was not only shorter but hit out of a pronounced crouch, and both would have different zones from Bernie Williams’s. Yet what Gibson found was that the strike zone did not just fluctuate from batter to batter, more than he believed it should, but from pitch to pitch within the same at-bat. After reviewing the QuesTec data, he found that the top of the strike zone often changed within a given at-bat some three to four inches, and at the knee some two to three inches. Ed Plumacher’s claim that the QuesTec technology could pinpoint a strike to within one and a half inches was simply not true. QuesTec did not possess that type of accuracy in regard to the strike zone because it could not even establish a consistent enough zone in the first place. In addition, the high-speed digital images of each pitch were grainy and, the umpires thought, difficult to ascertain clearly, and the technicians running the equipment were not seasoned professionals, but freelance kids, happy to make a few dollars and get a free pass to a ballgame. That a kid making $50 a game was determining whether a seasoned umpire was competent convinced Larry Gibson: QuesTec could not be allowed to have an important role in baseball. It was technology on the cheap, a TV gimmick in way over its head.
Juicing the Game Page 29