TWILIGHT K-ZONE
Networking ignores strike box fallacy
HOW DO you say, “This makes no sense” in English?
Despite what TV, managers, players and MLB have done to baseball, we remain fans. So, Wednesday night then Thursday afternoon, I watched the Yankees play the Twins from Yankee Stadium on YES.
Wednesday, YES’ new strikezone box, a computer-driven artificial additive that’s nonetheless placed over every live pitch, did what it’s supposed to do. It distracted our attention on every pitch.
The saddest part of such boxes is that there are so many better uses for them. They’d make great virtual doorstops or virtual paperweights. And they could come in the color of your choice. Mother’s Day is just around the corner!
So we’re going to give it one more shot before surrendering to a lifetime of K-zone boxes ostensibly added for our enlightenment but instead exist as intrusive, distracting and misapplied advanced technology — a three-hour matter of thanks, but no thanks.
Wednesday, Sonny Gray threw a 2-1 pitch to the Twins’ Jason Castro, who took it for a strike.
On YES, the ball landed smack on the inside corner of that box, thus confirming the umpire’s call despite Castro’s obvious disagreement.
Then, as if submitting Exhibit A to prove its own strike zone box is inadmissible evidence — easily revealed to be nonsense — YES showed an overhead view of the pitch. It passed the plate well in- side. Despite what the box and ump told us, the pitch wasn’t close to being a strike.
Though Paul O’Neill said such pitches are designed to “run back over the inside corner,” he didn’t say what couldn’t be missed: This pitch didn’t. It clearly missed the plate.
The larger, sustaining issue went unspoken: That K-box was not only misleading, it was wrong! Again, why would TV’s decision-makers choose to emphasize, on every pitch, the irrelevant if not the wrong?
Top of the fifth, more: A pitch thrown to Logan Morrison was shown by the K-box to be outside. It was called a strike.
Reader Scott Fischer makes another point about YES’ box, which also comes with a circle giving the speed of every pitch:
If Gary Sanchez is to continue being a passed-ball specialist, both the box and that circle join to obscure Sanchez’s mitt. Why, Fischer reasonably asks, would producers of live TV determine for us that we can’t see the ball?
Thursday, more lunacide was committed. The Twins were up, 3-1, in the ninth when Minnesota’s Paul Molitor, another by-thebook manager eager to remove ef- fective relievers until he can find one to lose the game, did just that.
So in came Fernando Rodney, a career designated closer of such dependability that he is now closing games — one way or the other — for his ninth team in the past nine seasons. And despite a 3-1 lead and a long playing career during which pitchers who were pitching well weren’t pulled because that would’ve made no sense, Rodney was Molitor’s fourth pitcher of the game.
Hey, you, dozing in the left-field stands! Wake up! They just brought in Rodney! You wanna get hurt?
Wham, bam, Twins lose, 4-3.