Ask any pitching coach what the best pitch in baseball is, and the chances are good he or she will say “Strike 1.”

With that in mind, I am revisiting some research I did a year and a half ago, about called strikes in Japanese professional baseball, and how it looks like there is a team that is good at getting called strikes because its pitchers throw first strikes, and a team that is good at getting called first strikes because it is good at pitch framing and gets lots of called strikes in all counts, and another team, the Yomiuri Giants, that is good at getting called first strikes despite not throwing a lot of first strikes or being good at getting called strikes in most other counts.

Last month, an article post titled “The Edge,” spelled out the facts that Yomiuri Giants pitchers, had for the past 14 years or so, been far more successful than any other team in getting favorable calls on 0-0 and 1-0 pitches. To be precise, this edge was extremely pronounced from 2009 – when the available pitch-by-pitch data begins – until 2019.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a tool at that time to reasonably estimate how likely it was for a team to do what Yomiuri pitchers achieved. I have that now and can tell you it’s improbable and unlikely, but not impossible.

But before Giants fans jump up and down in self-righteous vindication that umpires have given their team no help, one needs to reconcile a paradox, which I will explain shortly.

Osamu Ino, a former CL umpire and NPB’s umpiring technical advisor spoke about this data in an unsurprising fashion from someone who believes in umpires’ ability to be extraordinarily objective.