Do some teams get more favorable strike calls than others? Do the Yomiuri Giants, who have a long organizational history of writing the official rules to favor their business model, and then bending or ignoring those rules when it suits them, get the same kind of favoritism on the field?
A legion of anti-Giants fans want to believe Yomiuri catches the bulk of the breaks, and there are tons of examples where the Giants did get obviously favorable calls, but focusing on individual calls without a broader context leads to little clarity.
So I did a study of how often pitches taken are called balls, and how that differed from team to team and from batters to pitchers. Without pitch-tracking data, it’s difficult to compile objective league-wide contexts, but we do have the record of pitches that require an umpire’s judgement to call a ball or a strike.
While there will obviously be noise in such a rough sample, the study supports two conclusions: that some teams have routinely tended to get better calls than others, and that batters are responsible for the largest amount of variability in the results of plate appearances.
Continue reading Getting the calls