The Ambrosini Critique

On the heals of the racism in basketball study a couple of months ago, a new study shows strike zones have different dimensions depending on the mix of races between umpire and pitcher. This is yet more proof that we live in a deeply biased society and we haven’t yet extracted the stain of racism from our collective conscious… or something.

Except, one thing. The effect is really, really, very small. Those racist umpires call one extra strike every 2.5 or 3 games for pitchers of their own race… That’s right, this effect accounts for 0.34% 1% more strikes called by The Man for The Man. Woopty-doo…

Inspired by Political Calculations, I thought I do some math.

The strike zone is defined as “that area over homeplate 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 kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Home plate is 17 inches across and let’s say the average height is 24 inches (this actually seems high to me… most batters crouch down at the plate). This gives an area of 408 square inches.

The racist strike zone is 0.34% bigger than that, i.e. 409.4 square inches*. I’ll assume that racists are equally racist in all directions. This means the area of the racist strike zone equals 17 inches plus the racist dimension times 24 inches plus the same racist dimension or (17 + kkk)*(24 + kkk) = 409.4. Using the trusty quadratic equation, solve for kkk. I get about kkk=0.14 inches. That is the racist umpire is able to discern, from a couple feet away, a distance less than a tenth the size of a regulation baseball.

This seems very unlikely.

The trouble with my analysis is that it assumes racism manifests itself with each call ball or strike — its an analysis on averages, when all it takes is a couple of outliers to turn the course of a game. The authors point out that Umpires could selectively call strikes in important situations. There’s at least two objections to this, though. First, important situations can’t always be discerned ahead of time. The crucial pitch in the 7th inning was only crucial because the team lost in the bottom of the 9th by not getting the game winning hit, but that would only have been a game winning hit if their star black player didn’t strike out in the 7th and hit in a run instead. How could that racist bastard behind the plate know which pitches and which at-bats he needs to be selective on?

The second possible objection to this selective calls theory stems from the fact that it has an important and testable implication. Do “blown calls,” which fans and telecasters can often identify, occur more often with mixed raced pitcher and umpire combinations? I haven’t noticed that trend… but then again I can’t spot the difference from 3 feet away between two balls thrown 0.14 inches from each other, either.

(h/t Jason)

*Of course, these results would be more strikingly small when you consider the fact that the strike zone is actually three dimensional.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Misc.