Curse of the Pharaoh’s Strike Zone
– by Mario Crescibene
“You gotta be kidding me!”
I couldn’t help but let my head flop back on the couch, and stared at the ceiling in disbelief. Another challenge that was decided by a tenth of an inch.
“This ABS really is BS.” I mumbled to myself.
Earlier in the fifth inning, Fry had a ball overturned that changed a 3-1 count to a 2-2 count. It was determined by a sliver of a hair. He had ended up grounding out later in the at-bat. Then in the 8th inning Hedges was up and finally — a challenge went
our way with the call of a ball being confirmed… but just barely. He had then lined out. But strike three for me, and what made me flop back in disgust, was in the ninth when the first pitch to Hoskins was overturned from a ball to a strike… once again because the seams of the ball barely grazed the zone.
“Why even challenge the first pitch?” I called out to the TV. “I can’t take it anymore. I need someone to vent to.”
And I knew just the person to go to.
When I got to Professor Saber’s door at Case the outside was different. Last time, her office had a nautical theme with the Lake County Captains and fishing, using nets to represent confidence intervals. But her door had never looked different from the outside before. It was normally only when I opened the door that I was greeted by the surprise of the theme that awaited me on the other side.
But this time, even the door to her office was different. It appeared like it was made of ancient stone and carved into it were all these hieroglyphs. Even the knob had changed. What used to be a brass knob was now a golden ankh — a crux ansata. I twisted the ankh and the door opened with the heavy sound of stone grinding on stone.
And on the other side of the door was an ancient Egyptian landscape! Professor Saber’s office walls were decorated with scenes of ancient Egypt, with pyramids and sphinxes populating the vast Nubian desert. And as usual, right in the middle of it all was Professor Saber, seated at her desk, decked out in an Egyptian dress, and a headdress that Cleopatra herself would have been jealous of.
“Mario!” She called out in her usual sing-song salutation, lifting her arms high above her head excitedly. She got up from her desk and came up to me.
“What’s bothering you, Mario? You look like you just saw a mummy!”
“It’s this ABS that Major League Baseball is using this year.” I said all in a huff. “I like that we are trying to get strikes and balls called correctly, but there is so much about ABS that I don’t like!”
She gave me a big hug that felt like she was wrapping her arms around me twice. I let out a squeak like a mouse caught in the tight embrace of a boa. That made her laugh. She released me and I collapsed into the beanbag chair in front of her desk.
She sat down and took off the headdress she was wearing, setting it to the side.
“Talk to me, Mario,” she said warmly.
I could already feel myself sinking into the beanbag like quick sand, but I continued, “I mean the whole point of reviewing a call is to get it right. But there is so much that ABS gets wrong. For one, there are all these calls that get overturned by a tenth of an inch. And then there is this part where the strike zone isn’t really even what I thought it was because if a ball just grazes it, then it technically went through the zone… but it makes me feel icky on the inside when I see it on replays. And then there is this whole mess about the strategy of when to challenge, or not challenge!”
I was nearly panting as this point.
“Whoa slow down, Mario,” Professor Saber coaxed. “You covered a lot in one breath there! Let’s break it down. And what better place to start than ancient Egypt!”
“Professor I love the new outfit, but I don’t follow your analogy.”
“The first issue to cover, Mario, is an issue of area! And there was no civilization better at calculating area than the ancient Egyptians. One of the best examples is the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus — an ancient Egyptian scroll written by the the scribe Ahmose. It had all kinds of geometric problems written in it. Let’s take a look!”
She flew up out of her chair and over to the wall on the right side of her office. Last time with her nautical them she had a rope that hung from the ceiling on a pulley system, but now there was a large stone lever that came right out of the wall. She pulled on it with some considerable force and a screen — that I swear was made out of stone — slid down from the ceiling. And on it appeared an image of a batter with the strike zone.
“Take a look here, Mario,” she said, pointing to the stone display. “This is what you normally see on MLB Gameday.”
“Usually we think about the strike zone being this red box here,” as she continued another image flashed on the enchanted stone tablet.
“The width of the plate is 17 inches and the vertical length varies player to player, but for the sake of this example, we will say that it is 20 inches.”
I squinted at the screen. “Ok, I’m with you so far, professor,” I said as I nodded my head confidently in agreement.
She continued, “But look at where pitches 1 and 4 landed in the zone. They barely scraped the edge… but they’re strikes none the less. Now a standard baseball is roughly 3 inches in diameter. Which means for a pitch to be called a strike, it can be anywhere inside this box here!”
And she swung her arm towards the screen as the third image flashed on the display.
“You see, Mario, what that means is we have a three-inch ring all around the box you usually think of when we talk about the strike zone. Because if a ball falls anywhere within the larger red box to the right, it will be called a strike. Just like pitches 1 and 4 were.”
I scratched my head. “Ok… so then how much of a difference is there between the red box on the left and the red box on the right?”
“A fantastic question, Mario!” the professor said proudly. “Let’s turn to the Egyptians to see how the area increases from the red box on the left, to the box on the right.”
At that she whipped out a smaller stone tablet seemingly out from behind her back — where she was storing it I have no idea — and she began writing out some equations:
“Now check my math, Mario because I get so excited sometimes that I make mistakes. But if the strike zone has a width of 17 inches and a height of 20 inches then we have 17 x 20 = 340 square inches.”
I took out my phone and punched the numbers in. I was never good at mental math. “That checks out, professor,” I confirmed.
She continued writing out more math. “And if we add a 3-inch ring around the strike zone, that is the same as adding 3 inches to the left and to the right, which means we have… 17 + 3 + 3 = 23. And then 3 inches above and below which is… 20 + 3 + 3 = 26. That means that the new area is 23 x 26 = 598 square inches.”
I checked again on my phone. “That’s a big increase!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, it is Mario! But just how big is it? Let’s find out!” She then wrote some new hieroglyphs:
I sat up in the beanbag the best I could. “What? You’re telling me that it’s a 76% increase?! That can’t be right.”
“Well let’s check my math, Mario. It’s certainly possible I made a mistake. If there is a 76% increase, then that means that if we start with 340 square inches and increase that by 76%, what we are really doing is: 340 + (0.76 x 340) = 340 + 258.4 = 598.4.”
I stared at her blankly. “That can’t be right. It doesn’t look like the area increases by that much,” I insisted.
“I know! Area is a concept that is hard to master… even for the Egyptians. But let’s break the ring around the strike zone into boxes, and then move them around to see how much covers the original zone.”
At that, the screen began to move as if it was possessed. I let out a scream like it was the pharaoh’s curse, as blue boxes appeared and then floated around, rearranging themselves:
“You see, Mario. 76% of the original strike zone is covered. And that means that by placing those blue boxes around the zone, the zone increases by 76%.”
I nodded my head slowly as my eyes began to prove to me what my mind was still doubting. “Ok, I buy it now. But that’s crazy! I would have never thought that there was such a huge difference.”
“So now you understand the area where a pitch can land and be called a strike… and how much bigger it is compared to what we normally think,” she continued as she haphazardly threw the stone tablet behind her desk. “Let’s take a look at the other points you raised about balls that just barely hit or miss the zone.”
The original image flashed on the stone screen again:
“Look at the first and fourth pitches in the middle image, Mario,” she said.
“I know! I hate it!”
She laughed. “Well, you understand that no matter how we define things, there will always be calls that are decided by fractions of an inch. There is no way around that.”
I crossed my arms. “Yeah, I get it professor, but I still don’t like it.”
“Well, what if instead of allowing a pitch to be a strike when it just grazes the zone… we say that the majority of the ball has to be in the zone? That looks very different and reduces the area of the zone a bit, too.”
At that, the image changed:
My eyes widened. “That… looks way better,” I said almost to myself.
“Now of course Mario, we will still have pitches that are 49% in the zone, and are therefore are balls. There will always be a cutoff no matter what. But you can see that it does look nicer when it has to be at least half the ball landing in the zone rather than a sphinx’s whisker crossing through it.”
I puckered my face as I continued looking at the screen. “So what’s the area now?”
“Very good! Mario, you might be a pharaoh’s scribe yet! So now the additional width around the original strike zone increases by… 3 inches /2 = 1.5 inches on all sides. So that gives us… 17 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 20 for the width, and 20 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 23 for the height, which means the new area would be… 20 x 23 = 460 square inches. And the percent increase from the original 340 square inches would now just be…”
The screen updated:
I took a deep exhale. “Wow. Not only does it look better when the majority of the ball has to be in the zone, but it also makes me feel better knowing it’s just a 35% increase in area instead of a whole 76%!”
“It’s a big difference, isn’t it, Mario?”
“It sure is. But then there’s the last part of the BS in ABS, and that’s this level of gamesmanship with all the challenges. I mean, do we really want a World Series decided by an ABS challenge? Or a team not being able to challenge in game 7 because they already challenged two calls that barely got confirmed?”
Professor Saber flopped down in her chair and kicked her feet up on the desk. Of course she was wearing Egyptian sandals. I don’t know how I didn’t notice them before.
“That’s really the… crux of the matter.” She let out a thrilled laugh at her own Egyptian-themed pun. “We can define balls and strikes a number of different ways, but the real issue can be solved easily.”
I slumped deeper into the beanbag, turning it over in my head. “How, professor?”
“We do away with the ABS challenge system and just call all balls and strikes automatically! The point is to get the call right, isn’t it? The whole reason two teams play is to see who is the best team on any given day… not to see who used their challenges best. So get rid of the challenges, get rid of the replay on the big screen, and just call everything automatically so there isn’t any more guessing. Define the zone how you want, but take the guesswork out of the equation.”
“Yeah… that does make the most sense, doesn’t it?” I agreed. Then an idea occurred to me. “And I bet the umps wouldn’t mind being able to set-up in a different spot so they don’t get all those foul balls ricocheting off of them!”
That put a big smile on Professor Saber’s face. “Oh, for sure, Mario! No more whacks to the face, no more concussions, and they would have a better vantage point at the start of each play no matter what happened.”
I tried my own shot at a pun. “Well I guess I really de-scribed that well didn’t I, professor?”
She just stared at me blankly.
“B-because you said I could be a pharaoh’s scribe…de-scribe?”
She reached over and put the headdress back on. “Leave the puns to me, Mario?”
