If you thought homeplate umpire Paul Schrieber was working a tight zone on Friday night, you were right — especially when it came to the low outside corner against right-handed hitters. For Yovani Gallardo, that’s a big deal. Every pitcher will fare better when they’re getting that spot, but Gallardo likes to throw a ton of pitches there, especially early in the count. If you take a look at his strikezone plot (drawn from the perspective of the catcher), you can see just how many 1s and 2s are located there.
It’s not just that Schreiber wasn’t expanding the zone, though — he was flat-out missing pitches that were clearly strikes. Take a look at Schrieber’s normalized strikezone on Brooks Baseball (adjusted for batter height and average strikezone width) from Friday’s game…red spots are strikes, green spots are balls:
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The non-normalized plot (naturally) looks even worse:
(Click to enlarge)
Considering the fact that this is Joe West’s staff, I’m going to go out on a rather sturdy limb and say last night wasn’t the last game of this series in which someone will get thrown out for arguing.
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