The folks from Brooks Baseball published this Pitch F/X data on the strikes called by Dale Scott today and a reader called it to our attention.

The red triangles are the pitches Scott called strikes thrown by the Blue Jays. The red boxes are pitches Scott called strikes that were thrown by the Red Sox.

Um, yeah.

I’m not suggesting Dale Scott had the house on Toronto. But his strike zone was all over the place and it hurt the Red Sox more than it did the Jays.

Here’s David Ortiz’s at-bat in the ninth. It would seem Big Papi had a good reason for his furor:


What struck me is David went nuts and Scott didn’t toss him. That’s usually a sign the umpire knows he screwed up.

In the end, the umpires are people and they make mistakes or have bad days. Over the course of the season there are probably a handful of games when the Sox get the sharp end of the stick and a handful of games when they benefit from bad calls. Over 162, it evens out.

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Thanks to Jordan for hooking us up with the data and make sure you check out Brooks Baseball. Pitch F/X is a fantastic tool for situations like this and to evaluate pitchers when they’re going well or going poorly. There’s a lot of good work being done with this stuff.