How to Call What You Can't See

Home-plate umpire Tom Hallion maneuvers to get a good view of Stephen Strasburg during his June 8 debut. [MLB Photos via Getty Images]

Strasburg's Otherworldly Pitches Fool Batters—and Umpires; 'Did the Ball Really Do That?'

By DAVID BIDERMAN
WSJ

Since his debut with the Washington Nationals, Stephen Strasburg has displayed the kind of pitching repertoire that makes baseball historians scramble for their notebooks.

His four devastating pitches (fastball, chanegup, curveball and sinker) have such extreme break that it's nearly impossible to predict where they will cross the plate. He has already struck out 22 batters in just over 12 innings.

But here's what separates Mr. Strasburg from the vast majority of precocious arms: He's so good he makes the umpires miss.

Thanks to a system called Pitch f/x, which uses digital cameras to track the trajectory of every pitch in major-league ballparks, it's now possible to measure whether a pitch was a strike or a ball and, more to the point, whether the home-plate umpire made the correct call.

According to a consensus of umpires, a good umpire will make one bad call on a pitch every two innings—or about four or five per game. But in Mr. Strasburg's first start, on June 8, Pitch f/x indicated that the home-plate umpire, Tom Hallion, missed seven calls in only seven innings. By contrast, Mr. Hallion only missed two calls in five-plus innings for the opposing pitcher, Pittsburgh's Jeff Karstens.

(More here.)