The Disenchantment of Baseball: Rule changes pull the veil from the sport’s high mysteries (Nick Burns, 10/01/25, Hedgehog Review)
But this easy inference rests on unexamined assumptions about the ontology of the strike zone—no, seriously—which, at as it currently exists, is a far more political concept than it appears at first blush. […]
Announcers know the way that the game really works—they will often note, sometimes with an eyebrow slightly raised, that tonight, such-and-such umpire’s strike zone has “a lot of room on the outside,” meaning he is calling pitches on the outside of the plate as strikes. If you take a strictly rationalistic, objective approach to the strike zone, you would say that such an umpire is simply biased. But that would be wrong. The truth is that the strike zone has always been a subjectively constructed thing: it is where the umpire says it is.
Still, there are ground rules. If the umpire gives one team extra “room” on the outside of the zone, he must do the same for the other. If he does, then there’s no problem. It’s only if he gives one team the outside call, and denies the other the same, that players really get mad. The strike zone, therefore, is a political thing that ties the umpire to both teams, a zone measured more by a sense of fairness than by the distance from the top of the shoulders to the hollow beneath the kneecaps.
It’s also something to which pitchers respond. They take note of where the umpire is and isn’t giving them calls. If he’s giving them the call on the outside corner, that’s where he’ll try to throw. If they’re not getting the call, they’ll stop trying. And if a pitcher gets one call on the outside, he might try to push his luck by trying to coax the umpire to give him calls further and further off the plate.
The catcher plays a role, too, “framing” balls just outside the zone by moving his glove into the zone as he catches the ball, in an effort to deceive the umpire. And the catcher is more closely tied to the umpire, more able to influence him, than the pitcher: catcher and umpire, after all, share a common situation, squatting side by side for hours, staring down 100-mile-an-hour fastballs that sometimes ricochet into one or the other of them with painful consequences.
It’s a delicate relational game: the umpire responds to the pitcher and catcher, the batter responds to the umpire—and it can all go wrong, batters and managers howling and swearing and throwing their gear around at a bad call that, in the last instance, may be nothing more than the result of an umpire carried along by the little maneuvers of a pitcher or a catcher who knows how to manipulate.
There’s more politics here: veteran pitchers are believed to sometimes “get” borderline calls from umpires that rookies don’t.
It’s even more political than that, A New Study Shows Umpire Discrimination Against Non-White Players
(Robert Arthur, August 13, 2021, Baseball Prospectus)
