![]() It is clear from this table that the falling bottom of the strike zone is accounting for the entire growth of the zone as a whole. Average Size of Called Strike Zone Below 21″ (sq. (And like Radiohead said in Fake Plastic Trees, gravity always wins.) I’ve zoomed in on the lower band of the strike zone by considering only those pitches that arrive at home plate less than 21” above the ground. In the previous articles we discussed how the zone has actually been squeezing in at the sides slightly, but is stretching like crazy down from the knees as if it is under the clutches of gravity. The average strike zone size increased by 16 square inches in 2014 over 2013, growing the zone to a robust 40 square inches larger than just five seasons prior. What surprised me was that this season saw the largest single year increase in the size of the strike zone in the PITCHf/x era. What I found was perhaps not surprising – the strike zone did continue to expand, and that expansion was almost entirely due to the bottom of the zone dropping once again. Every cell location that is called a strike more often than a ball is included in the strike zone for a given season. My approach involves splitting up the front plane of home plate into a 1” by 1” grid, and calculating the percentage of called pitches that crossed the plate in each grid cell that were deemed strikes. Jeff Sullivan recently found evidence that the strike zone was continuing to grow in 2014, and I wanted to return to the same approach that I had used earlier to analyze the most recent regular season. All of these results concluded with data from the end of the 2013 season. Brian Mills was concurrently, independently discovering the same phenomenon, which he published in a wonderful academic paper earlier this year. I discovered this for the first time in the middle of last season, then followed up with a much more detailed examination of the topic at the end of 2013. We know by now that the strike zone has been expanding during the PITCHf/x era. One of the most controversial aspects of each game is without a doubt the called strike zone, with seemingly no game passing without at least one team, if not both, unhappy with the performance of the home plate umpire. The playoffs are here, which means games are scrutinized more than at any other time in the season, with millions of extra eyeballs watching and every game crucial to the outcome of such short series. Borderline pitches such as this one are increasingly being called strikes.
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