QuesTec Out, Zone Evaluation In
Major League Baseball continues its never ending quest to standardize the strike zone with yet another camera system to grade umpires.
This time it’s called Zone Evaluation, and it is the replacement system for QuesTec. QuesTec was the system in place since 2001 that received much scrutiny, in part because the cameras were not installed in all of the ballparks, leaving players to conclude that umpires changed their strike zones from park to park to please the cameras.
The new system is already in place in all 30 ballparks and works off of a similar idea.
According to The New York Times:
The new system, called Zone Evaluation, relies on pitch-tracking data already collected by cameras in all 30 parks and distributed through applications on MLB.com and iTunes. Zone Evaluation software will rate umpire performance more quickly and accurately than QuesTec, according to Mike Port, baseball’s vice president for umpiring.
The goal of the system, like the QuesTec system, seems to be to oversee the jobs that umpires are doing calling balls and strikes, and make them more uniform throughout the game.
Mike Port, MLB’s vice-president of umpiring, told The Times,
“It’s an upgrade from where we were. The umpires, they don’t want to miss a pitch any more than a batter wants to strike out. Where the Z.E. system will give us a lot of help is more data to help identify any trends: ‘The last three plate jobs, you missed seven pitches that were down and in. Here’s how one of the supervisors can help you adjust your head angle or your stance to have a better chance of getting those pitches.’”
While the current crop of umpires might not be happy about MLB’s big brother keeping an even closer eye on them, there appears to be no sign of a strike anytime soon.
I think Deadspin summed it up pretty well:
“So basically, this is just another tool that serves no function other than to piss off a union and make everyone who works for Major League Baseball trust the ownership a little bit less. Oh, and probably make some computer software company stupid rich.”
Well said.
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