About 20 years ago during a rain delay at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, AL umpire Ken Kaiser consented to don a headset and take some listener phone calls on the Orioles’ flagship radio station. Kaiser, whose big league career spanned 23 years, was never timid when a microphone was around. He loved the attention, good or bad, which may have stemmed from his earlier career as a “heel” in pro wrestling.
Anyway, a caller asked Kaiser why major league umpires don’t call balls and strikes based on what it says in the rule book, to wit: “The strike zone is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap. The strike zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Now I don’t know about you, but the upper limit description sounds like the proverbial “letter-high” pitch to me. Up until about 30 years ago we frequently watched pitchers like Bob Gibson, Jim Palmer and Don Drysdale attack the upper part of the zone with great success; remember the expression “high, hard one?”
I’ll never forget Kaiser’s response: “Well, the rule book strike zone is just a suggestion. It’s up to the umpire to determine what his own personal strike zone is.” I think the word he used that surprised me the most was “suggestion.” If the rule book strike zone is just a suggestion, maybe a base on four balls is too. Who knows what else on those pages is merely “a suggestion?”
Last week I had the occasion to speak with “Cowboy” Joe West, a 30-year umpiring veteran who’s also the inventor of the “West Vest,” the most popular inside chest protector used by umpires throughout professional baseball. (West is also a singer-songwriter of the country western genre. His new CD is a spoken word compilation called “Diamond Dreams.”) I asked West about the rule book strike zone vs. the actual strike zone, and about Kaiser’s comments in particular. His response was pretty straightforward.
“I think I understand what he meant,” he said. “A batter can’t hit a pitch above his hands, so how can that be a strike? The rule book zone isn’t that well understood.” Really?
I’ve seen many pitches on televised games that from the center-field camera looked unhittable, but they’ve mostly been pitches that dived out of the zone and were swungat and missed. The better splitters, for example. Those sliders in the dirt that to the hitter must simply disappear the split second they decide to swing. But a letter-high pitch? I’m sorry, those pitches seem pretty hittable to me, but then I’m not the one up there with a stick in my hand.
In 2001 then-MLB executive VP Sandy Alderson undertook a campaign to get umps to call the rule book strike zone. Seven years later it seems little has changed, at least in the vertical sense. If an umpire working close to the catcher’s eye level has to raise his eyes, he’s going to call it a ball, letters be damned. It’s as simple as that.
