Oakland Gets Married For 23 Strikes In Two Days In Boston

1. it did seem like the ump made more bad calls to our left handed hitters on outside pitches, consistent with what you’ve pointed out.

2. sheets’ pitches are generally very straight (fastball) or on a fairly regular trajectory (curve) while dice-k gets more late movement. i wonder if this too contributed to dice-k getting more bad calls than sheets.

very cool post btw. thanks!

but I did watch most of these last two, and your analysis totally confirms what my eyes were telling me. I can remember groaning on several pitches that were called balls to Boston hitters and other pitches that were called strikes against the A’s. I’m not suggesting that we didn’t lose those games fair and square, but this stuff still really bugs me.

Learning new things about baseball and Croatian colloquialisms. I love it!

and I will welcome robot umpires. Especially if they look like Wall-E.

Informative and fun to read. My next question is, are these differences more egregious at Fenway vs. in a normal game? Clearly this would take a lot of data analysis, but luckily all I need is some pseudo-random sampling and anecdotal evidence.

The SF Giants vs. Oakland A’s games looked like they had much more consistent umpiring (click on plots for larger plots), but it also looks like the A’s opponents are consistently getting more strikes called on pitches outside of the left hand side of the box (the 5/21 game looks about even in that regard).

5/21:

5/22:

5/23:

Great, great work, elcroata.

For the record, the normalized strike zone height comes from a manual setting. Before every plate appearance, a Gameday operator will manually key in the appropriate top and bottom mark for the strike zone, and then PitchFX goes to town.

and plate umpires can sit behind the catcher and drink tea while the sensors and hardware get the job done right.

the title threw me off a little though.

And, unsurprisingly, found that Umps call a zone different from the formal strike zone.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2010/6/2/1497196/umpire-bias-and-what-can-be-done

and so very timely. You have confirmed what we were all seeing, that Boston (and Yankees) have an automatic bias in their favor, whether it is national TV or news coverage or umpiring (lack of) coverage.

I doubt he reads email, so everyone: print this out and mail it to:

Bud Selig
c/o ESPN
Bristol CT 06010

we’ve gotten to the real business of discussing idioms in foreign languages, I note with interest that the Croatian phrase here takes the male point of view, relying on the possibly erroneous assumption that any man was just hoping to get laid and didn’t want to end up married, whereas the nearest English equivalent — ie, “got fucked” — takes the female point of view, relying on the possibly erroneous assumption that any women was just hoping to get a free dinner and didn’t want to end up having sex.

Marvelous post and I even learned what “married” means in Croatia, who could ask for more? “Completely Blind” Bucknor made me crack up too, well played.

So is there a conspiracy? What’s the term for “OMG they are f*ckin’ us!” in Croatian?

Proof

I imagine we get “married” even worse when we play the Yankees.