Question: What is the strike zone in a Major League Baseball game?
If you said the plate horizontally and shoulders to kneecaps vertically, you are wrong.
Answer: Whatever the home plate umpire in that game decides it to be.
MLB has created a world where there is little consistency in the rules for each game. Every ump has complete control of what they want to call. If a manager or player disagrees, they are immediately ejected from the game. If they say anything to the media after the game, they are fined.
MLB has allowed the stance to exist that as long as the calls are consistent for each team, the strike zone shouldn’t matter. That’s ridiculous if you really think about it. How about they have defined rules and they should do their best to follow them. The strike zone is a pretty important part of the game.
Making the situation even worse and what allows it to continue is the lack of accountability on the umps. Their union backs them on everything and while they do keep track of accuracy, very little is done to fire or remove umps that do a poor job. Some of the worst offenders are not only allowed to stay on but even get post season assignments due to tenure (I’m looking at you Laz Diaz).
I was glad to see the robo ump experiment in spring training. It worked much quicker than most people expected and was a big success. Yet in typical MLB fashion, they didn’t implement this season for fear of upsetting that big, bad umpires union. Typical Rob Manfred leadership.